Winter is coming

“When you play the game of Thrones, either you win or you die”.

Can an appetizing soup be made from a heated soup? The answer is yes, in the case of “Game of Thrones”, the fantasy novel by George R.R. Martin.

If already in the author’s initials we hear the name of the greatest exponent of the genre echo, in other words Tolkien, we can say that the whole novel is the saga of what has already been seen. Never as in this case, to every image, to every description, to every environment, to every battle fought and weapon wielded, something already felt and already observed is connected, something that is part of the cultural background of anyone who is familiar with the imagination and with the imaginary. Associations of all kinds come to mind, seen and heard not only in books, but on television, in the cinema, everywhere.

The tournaments, the armor, the shiny chain mail, recall Sir Lacillotto in films such as John Boorman’s “Excalibur” (1981), but also Jerry Zucker’s “The First Knight” (1995). Young Sansa looks so much like Meg that she goes to the “vanity fair” in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. The half-giant Hodor is similar, even in the name, to Hagrid from Harry Potter (which however is from 1997 and is therefore a little later). The various houses fighting for the throne are close to the inhabitants of the planet Cottman IV in the “Darkover Cycle”, or the historic War of the Roses. The bloody, erotic and barbaric atmospheres of the vein dedicated to Daenerys and her husband Drogo remind us of television dramas inspired by the figure of Attila and Genghis Khan.

In short, it’s all a succession of déjà vu. So one might think that the genre has nothing more to offer, that Martin’s novel is only for aficionados influenced by the success of the homonymous television series. Instead it is not so, instead it was a long time since I immersed myself in a reading of eight hundred pages with the feeling of having really plunged into a fantastic secondary world, with attention to the smallest details and coherent. Those who write genre fiction, in fact, know that, whatever the topic is, they must never lose the reader’s confidence with gross errors. An eye cannot be glassy, ​​to understand, nor an iron will exhist, in a universe where glass and iron have not yet been invented. And it had been a long time since I had seen Tolkien’s sub-creation taking place with such force that I immediately rushed to the bookstore to buy the second of the series and then the third and so on. Within elements already known and attributable to a wealth of common knowledge, Martin is recognized as having the ability to have developed some figures and some situations in a very personal way.

Among the characters stand out the two girls with the opposite character, the meek Sansa and the tomboy Arya — really attributable to the archetypes Meg and Jo — and Tyrion, an obvious and at the same time brilliant reworking of the fantasy dwarf. Tyrion is in fact a true human dwarf, the unwelcome son of a warlord, with all the psychological consequences that his deformity entails. We are also struck by little Bran, who remains paralyzed at the hands of the enemy and bravely faces his misfortune, or Jon Stark, the bastard son who would die in order to be loved by his father as much as his other children. The characters are described “a tutto tondo”, have a past, a present and a future, have deep families and psychological motivations, such as the mysterious illegitimate birth of Jon, or the unhappy relationship with the father of the obese, cowardly and clumsy Sam (many of the characters have conflicting relationships with their parents). The author knows all of his creatures, he knows what they would say in all circumstances, he knows how they act, what place they occupy in space and what their movements are.

Beyond the characters, there are some elements that characterize the saga. One is the direwolves — the non-extinct canis dirus, poorly translated in Italian as meta-wolves — each accompanying the offspring of the Stark household. We perceive them, large and powerful, agile and ruthless but faithful and affectionate with their owners. The other image that remains engraved in our minds is that of the Wall, the immense wall of ice that for centuries has divided the lands of men from the wild and desolate lands of the north, a hiding place for mysterious things, ready to snatch and kill in the dark. You see it, the immense translucent wall, with its walkways strewn with gravel that creaks under the soles of the Guardians, with the cracks and rivulets of melting, in a world where the seasons are not those we know, but great glaciations alternate with long springs.

Compared to other fantasy chronicles, great space is given to sexuality, a matter that is usually removed and sublimated. Here intercourse and rapes are frequent and explicit, the universe is wild and bloodied, to the point that the television series based on the novel was considered “uneducational” for young people. You don’t it pull back even in the face of incest or pedophilia. Jaime and Cersei are twins, like Cathy and Heathcliff (without having their dark power) they complement each other and the sexual act for them is a sort of reunion with the lost half. Daenerys marries her warrior prince at the age of thirteen. Sansa and Arya are very young girls but already arouse desire in adult males.

Religion too finds a place, forgotten in atheistic Middle-earth and in other fantastic universes. The cult of septons and septas, which is supplanting that of the ancient gods, recalls the conflict between Christianity and Druidism, so well represented not only by Merlin and Morgana in “Excalibur” (which, let’s not forget, is based on “La Morte d’Arthur” by Thomas Malory) but also in Bradley’s novels and, in particular, in “The Mists of Avalon” and in its prequel, “The Forest House”, built on the story told in Vincenzo Bellini’s “Norma”.

The narrative techniques applied in the text are the most common and proven of the genre. The characters follow the POV, that is the circumscribed point of view alternated in chapters, a practice refined by Tolkien — who almost never loses the hobbit focus — and then carried on by Terry Brooks in the “Shannara Cycle”. The narrative capacity is expressed with what we can define “the circular gaze”. While narrating, the author never loses sight of the general scene, has an eye capable of grasping the surrounding details, wonders what the other characters around are doing, who is moving in the environment, and makes each figure act and express according to its peculiarities.

To conclude, we can say that Martin, within a known and exploited genre, has been able to find a personal interpretation, capable of making sense of what he writes, so that it is not useless, superfluous or, worse, ridiculous.