For the sake of brevity - and sanity - this piece presupposes a reasonable working knowledge of George R R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and/or HBO’s Game of Thrones (either will do). I’d need to write as long a piece again to outline even just the key players in Westeros and Esssos, let alone their respective histories and relationships.
By its nature it also includes extensive spoilers for the first seven seasons of Game of Thrones, the first five books in A Song of Ice and Fire and the sample chapters of The Winds of Winter released by its author ahead of its expected 2037 release.
“Unique” is a word generally thrown about with reckless abandon, invariably subject to qualifications and gradations that render its usage nonsensical - which is just as well, really, as most of the time its use is without merit. To be unique, something must be the only one of its kind; unlike anything else. Something like
George R R Martin’s peerless fantasy epic,
A Song of Ice and Fire. Something such as David Benioff and D B Weiss’s luxuriant TV adaptation of it,
Game of Thrones. Even this contest, which for the first time sees unfinished prose competing against still-being-prepared pictures.
I had never heard of George R R Martin or his
magnum opus when I first heard about
Game of Thrones, which by that time must have been well into its third or fourth season. As everybody was raving about it and pleading with me to watch it, naturally I refused, until one of my colleagues vividly described to me the climactic first-season scene in which Daenerys Targaryen emerges naked and unburnt from a conflagration cradling three newly-hatched dragons. So at the risk of £2.49, I tried the first episode. And then the second. Then the third. Within a few short months I’d caught up to the sixth-season finale, “The Winds of Winter”, just in time for the seventh season dropping on iTunes. I’d even managed to stay spoiler-free throughout, save of course for Dany’s blazing “tits and dragons” rebirth.
Having watched the entire show to date with no book knowledge, and with its eighth and final season at least eighteen months away, I turned to Martin’s source material to satiate my newfound appetite for all things Westeros. I thought that five - or seven, depending on how you tackle them - hefty tomes would keep me going until Season 8 is released, but it speaks volumes about the quality of Martin’s works that I tore through the lot in less than nine months, and now find myself mining old Blu-ray commentaries and recap podcasts for any little gems that I might have missed. Following an armed-with-book-knowledge rewatch of all seven seasons and forays into the spectacular
Fire & Blood and intriguing
World of Ice & Fire, I now, at last, feel equipped to embark upon my largest
Prose vs Pictures journey yet.
The first entry in Martin’s literary series was published in 1996. Entitled
A Game of Thrones, its events would form the basis of the first season of HBO’s TV series some fifteen years later. There are few adaptations that a man is familiar with that adhere to their source material as faithfully as Season 1 of
Game of Thrones does
A Game of Thrones. The similarity is so stark that after a few chapters of the book, a man began to question how worthwhile this endeavour would be; all that seemed to be missing from the show was the indefinite article in its title. Yet the more a man read, the more the first season resonated with him. As shown on screen, the depth and complexity of Martin’s world is astonishing, but when reading the book it quickly becomes apparent how much has - necessarily - been rushed through or omitted on TV. Histories, lore and various complicated belief systems can only really be outlined on screen, but in the text they each have every bit as much depth and detail as anything from our own world. Martin’s prose doesn’t even limit itself to one interpretation of something; each of his narrators has their own impression of the world around them and the backdrop to it. For this reason alone,
A Game of Thrones is well worth reading.
Martin’s presentation does take some getting used to, though. Each of his chapters is presented from the viewpoint of just one character, with a red-shirt traditionally opening each novel before dying horribly and then passing the baton to the saga’s more significant characters. As a general rule, a man is a big believer in viewpoint storytelling, and takes the view that its limitations are dwarfed by its benefits. However, there is a real sense of disconnection when reading
A Song of Ice and Fire as a single, third-person authorial voice speaks for all of its characters. Whilst this makes for more vivid and consistent prose throughout, allowing for a level of world-building that would drive Tolkien to tears, it makes it difficult to form the same sort of intimate connection with a character that you would reading a piece written in the first person. Martin’s device must have also made it difficult for Weiss and Benioff to dramatise events that fell between viewpoints, though admittedly it’s hard to point to many such scenes in the first season, where in fact it’s the show that pushes some of the book’s largest set pieces off stage rather than
vice-versa.
Nonetheless, beyond compression and cost-cutting battle blackouts, the differences between
A Game of Thrones and the first season of its near-namesake show are slight, and the showrunners do a wonderful job of perpetuating the poetry of the book through some wonderfully evocative episode titles, “Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things” and “The Pointy End” being particularly redolent. Some C-list characters, however, are cut from the narrative, usually with more important existing characters soaking up their roles in the plot. King Robert’s legions of bastards are a case in point - Edric Storm and his many half-siblings, who don’t really do anything of note in the books published to date, are all folded into the one bastard armourer who does: Gendry, who’s wonderfully played by
Skins alumnus Joe Dempsie. The show also invents its own supporting characters to better establish Martin’s principal protagonists and their world in the absence of the insight offered by the text. The King’s Landing-bound Winterfell whore, Ros, is an interesting example of a character created chiefly to fulfil a narrow role - in this case, offering a window into the Westerosi sex trade and providing much of the show’s trademark “sexposition” in the earlygoing - but who would grow with the show, ultimately becoming such an important part of its fabric that the novels retrospectively feel like they have a great big hole in them (pun intended).
The modest reimagining of certain characters is more notable still, though the show is careful to preserve each character’s...
character, even if their physical appearances sometimes diverge from the images conjured by Martin’s prose. The Stark children and their bastard half-brother, Jon Snow, are all aged up by several years, as is exiled Targaryen princess Daenerys Stormborn, whose eyes are switched from awkward-for-Emilia book purple to natural-Clarke green. The towering King Robert of the book becomes... well, Mark Addy (
Doctor Who). Jon’s direwolf, Ghost, finds his voice, as the idea of a mute beast doesn’t seem half so imposing on screen as it does on the page. But most strikingly of all, Tyrion Lannister - the Imp, the Demon Monkey - is played not by a grotesque monstrosity with mis-matched eyes and a waddling gait, but a fairly good-looking bloke with a velvet voice.
Especially as a man tackled the show before the book, he found it hard to picture any face but Peter Dinklage’s as he read Tyrion’s chapters. This made for a disconcerting experience at times, and for him underlined why the show got the casting right. Putting Dinklage’s obvious talent aside (he’s the standout in a series of standouts, at least in the first four seasons), in not making Tyrion the physical monstrosity that he’s purported to be, his key moments in the story pack so much more of a punch, culminating in that brutal moment at his trial when it becomes all too clear that his father hates him simply because he’s a dwarf. All his other reasons are “just wind”. Tyrion doesn’t need to be hideously ugly, unsteady on his feet or have half his nose chopped off to be a victim of discrimination in Westeros - it’s so much more effective, so much cleaner, to distil the prejudice right down to what it is.
Similarly, with King Robert, the showrunners cast an actor who could encapsulate the spirit of the character, rather than slavishly adhere to Martin’s description of his physicality, and this pays off in a multitude of ways. Thanks to the actors’ chemistry, Robert’s legendary kinship with Sean Bean’s Ned Stark is instantly credible. A man loves the moment that they are reunited in the show, where Robert accuses Ned of having got fat, in response to which Ned simply nods at his king’s (much, much larger) paunch and raises an eyebrow before the two men share a great bear hug. More fundamentally though, Martin’s vision of the war hero turned reluctant ruler, of the debauched king drinking and whoring himself to death to try and escape his usurped burden, is personified perfectly in Addy. The strength of the old rebel is palpable, as is his legendary fierceness, but it’s encased in fat and dulled by drink. The show couldn’t have got it more right.
The ageing up of the younger generation is perhaps a more contentious departure from the text, but it was a practical necessity - and one that would also make the show more accessible for viewers. HBO could hardly broadcast explicit images of a fourteen-year-old princess bathing in the nude, let alone being forced into a conjugal consummation, and what millennial would believe that a beardless fifteen-year-old lad could lead a promising Northern uprising against the crown, winning battle after battle and earning himself the
nom de guerre, the Young Wolf? Yet one of the most arresting attributes of the books is Martin’s meticulous medieval methodology. Just as Martin would never have a soldier enter a battle without his helmet on (something that he’s often blasting the show for), he wouldn’t think twice about building his plot around child brides and teen heroes. It lends his world an unpleasant sense of authenticity, a certain historical accuracy, if you will, that sets it apart from anything else in the genre. As such the ageing up of characters in the show effectively modernises them, and in so doing kills a little of that carefully-crafted world building.
Other central characters appear to have been torn straight from the pages of the book. King’s Landing whisperers Petyr Baelish and Varys, for instance, are not only mesmerising characters whose actors relentlessly deliver show-stealing performances, but they are utterly faithful to the spirit of Martin’s words, if not always the precise letter of them. A man can’t speak as to their fates in
A Song of Ice and Fire, of course, but it’s no coincidence that these two wonderfully crafted and inscrutable schemers become suddenly scrutable and erratic once the show overtakes their book storylines in later seasons.
As to the saga’s ice, the bastard of Winterfell, he may be older on TV and his direwolf may have gained a bark to match its bite, but otherwise his exploits in the show’s first five seasons rarely stray from the source material. The order of those exploits may get a little jumbled towards the end as the obligatory TV big bad, the Night King, is crowbarred in, but it’s still hard to see how book readers could have any real complaints. Even the show’s killing of many of Jon’s closest Night’s Watch brothers in “The Watchers on the Wall”, arguably the most significant departure from Jon’s tale in the published books, improves upon the text considerably, lending significant emotional weight to both the Battle for Castle Black and Jon’s lonely elevation to lord commander (which, more dramatically and logically, precedes the battle on the TV, instead of follows it).
Throughout the series, Kit Harington (
Gunpowder, Zog) is a study in sullenness; Jon is so completely joyless that for six seasons it’s easy to believe that he is Ned Stark’s bastard son, despite the very existence of such a bastard running contrary to everything that we understand about the Stark patriarch. Yet when he does relent, his fleeting moments of cheerfulness are incredibly affecting, be they a shared laugh with Sam or a moment’s intimacy with Ygritte (who’s played with the requisite fire by Harington’s now-spouse, Rose Leslie of
Luthor fame). “You know nothing, Jon Snow,” is a phrase that’s entered pop culture with almost as much verve as Darth Vader’s, “I am your father,” once did, which a man finds especially ironic as the show would ultimately bear the truth of this out - the damned boy doesn’t even know who he is.
Similar could be said of his opposite number, the saga’s fire, though after the first season there is never any doubt about exactly who she is. Daenerys Stormborn Targaryen’s limb of the narrative is often condensed and resequenced, but otherwise stays largely true to the text published to date. Yes, in later seasons she loses a dear friend and ally still alive in the books, but as with Jon, it’s to the betterment of the tale. The only truly significant changes come not of script but casting and performance - the widowed Khaleesi’s rebound lover Daario Naharis is not the colourfully hirsute Tyroshi Stormcrow of the books but (a couple of different) square-jawed Second Son hunks, while her most trusted confidante and devoted admirer, Ser Jorah Mormont, is not the great, lusty bear of the books but the wiry and weathered Iain Glen (
Mrs Wilson). Glen’s sympathetic performance subtly subverts Martin’s character, so much so that as the show grows beyond the books, so does his arc - and thus Dany’s too. Hands down, the TV series is far more stirring than the books here.
The show’s second season departs slightly more substantially from
A Clash of Kings, the second of Martin’s planned seven tomes, but no more so than most adaptations do their source material. The only major change to the narrative is in the introduction of the show-invented character Talisa Maegyr, King Robb’s soon-to-be bride. In the books, Robb Stark does marry, and as in the show that marriage destroys his alliance with the spurned House Frey, but the marriage is more a matter of honour than of love, which for a man is a far less affecting idea. Yes, there’s a certain tragedy in Robb’s honour being his undoing, just as it was his father’s, but even that never quite tracked for a man when considering that, in of itself, Robb marrying anyone other than a daughter of Walder Frey already makes him an oathbreaker. In the show, we get to see an unlikely romance blossom between an exotic and irreverent battlefield medic and a lost young man suddenly made a monarch. It’s beautifully written and performed, making a man care so much more about Robb’s plight than Martin’s books do. As Robb is not one of Martin’s viewpoint characters, the whole issue of Robb’s oathbreaking marriage is dealt with at arm’s length in print, admittedly to the benefit of his mother’s, Catelyn Stark’s, chapters, but very much to the detriment of the titular clash of kings.
Similarly successful improvements are made with the surviving brothers Baratheon. Gethin Anthony’s young King Renly, whom the book paints as flamboyant and charismatic but stops shy of cementing his homosexuality, might lose his “Rainbow Guard” on telly, but in its place he gains a fully-fledged romance with Finn Jones’ (
Marvel’s Iron Fist) Ser Loras Tyrell, the brother of his queen. The relationship is to the benefit of both characters, as well as to Queen Margaery, and gives rise to some of the season’s most intriguing dilemmas - after all, gay or not, a king needs an heir. Moreover, this bolder portrayal of Renly resonates right through to the show’s sixth season, where it lends the High Sparrow’s cause a lot more weight in the eyes of the faithful than it has in
A Feast for Crows and
A Dance with Dragons, gifting the already captivating Natalie Dormer (
The Tudors) and the legendary Jonathan Pryce some of the fifth and sixth seasons’ most dramatic scenes.
King Stannis, conversely, is not fundamentally altered in the transition from page to screen, yet the depth and gravitas that Stephen Dillane (
The Crown) brings to the part elevates the unyielding soldier above and beyond his often too singular literary existence. As a reader, you hate Stannis and his hypnotic red witch, Melisandre of Asshai (played by the dazzling Carice van Houten) - and as a viewer you probably should too. Stannis is, for all intents and purposes, the second season’s big bad; a religious zealot who burns those refusing to bow to his Lord of Light while breaking his marriage vows to beget a kinslaying (and, indeed,
kingslaying) shade. But Dillane quickly makes the viewer respect the grim and dutiful rightful (Baratheon) heir to the Iron Throne as we see him through the eyes of his daughter, Shireen, and particularly his most staunch advocate, Liam Cunningham’s amiable smuggler-turned-king’s-hand, Davos Seaworth - the self-styled “Onion Knight”. By the time he’s storming to the rescue of the Night’s Watch at the end of Season 4, it’s hard not to champion King Robert’s cold and self-righteous sibling and his bloody red witch. Fast-forward to an off-book (or, as the author has confirmed,
not-in-the-books-yet) burning at the stake, and you’ll be hard-pressed to pity any other two characters more.
The fourth of our five kings, the Iron Islands’ King Balon, has the least exposure on TV, just as it is in the books, as his people’s particular limb of the narrative concerns itself more with Balon’s Stark-raised hostage son, Theon. Though the followers of the Drowned God would ultimately find their numbers reduced and their storylines dramatically curtailed by the TV show, Season 2 delivers everything of importance from
A Clash of Kings, pausing only to rename Balon’s ball-busting daughter from Asha to Yara (presumably to avoid any confusion with Osha, Bran’s wildling protector who plays an intimate and important part in Theon’s rise and fall).
Theon’s journey is one of the most tragic, harrowing and utterly absorbing of all Martin’s characters’, and Alfie Allen is so good in the part that he attracts sympathy for the torn turncoat even when he’s at his very worst ebb. Much like with Stephen Dillane and Stannis, Allen somehow imbues Theon with something more than the sum of his ill-fated parts. Despite his betrayal and the blood staining his hands, you somehow want him to make good.
Yet the
Clash’s most memorable monarch is, without doubt, the tyrannical young Joffrey Baratheon. It’s rare for any of Martin’s characters to be wholly evil, as like many great scribes he finds his drama in shades of grey, but the twisted and cruel boy king is one of just a few exceptions that prove the rule. Supposed son of the late King Robert, but in truth a bastard child of incest, Jack Gleeson largely delivers what Martin wrote on the page, but with a touch of terrifying hysteria to boot. As in the books, his tormenting of his would-be bride, Sansa Stark, and his uncle, Tyrion, is utterly merciless, but on TV the show takes his mistreatment of others to a whole new level before painfully - and somewhat jarringly - reminding its viewers that Joff is nothing more than a spoiled brat with more power than most adults could wield responsibly. The show is especially careful to depict Joff’s death throes as those of a terrified teen rather than a deranged despot - something that really sets it apart from the near-rapturous treatment of his death in
A Storm of Swords, where it’s witnessed through the eyes of his victims.
Meanwhile, Arya’s misadventures are subverted slightly in their adaptation. Whilst she still gets from A to B in broadly the same way, albeit much faster, the show pairs her up with Charles Dance’s peerless Tywin Lannister for a number of scenes that prove to be a highlight of the season. Young Maisie Williams (another relatively recent guest star in
Doctor Who) rises to the challenge of holding her own with a veteran of Dance’s calibre, allowing the two characters to develop what almost appears to be a bond despite the agonising enmity and wall of artifice separating them. For me, their quiet but tension-charged exchanges typify why the TV series is so very addictive, particularly in its early seasons. The price paid for the show’s Arya / Tywin angle is the surgical removal of Vargo Hoat from the story, whose gleefully maiming presence casts a sickening shadow over Arya’s little gang in
A Clash of Kings before his attentions are turned to the Kingslayer’s sword hand in
A Storm of Swords.
Whilst Hoat is one of Martin’s most grotesque and memorable creations (and one of the few characters in
A Song of Ice and Fire to truly reap what he sows), his absence isn’t really felt at all on television - the so-called Tickler proves to be more than a sufficient bogeyman for Arya and company, and Noah Taylor’s (
And Then There Were None) Locke actually makes for a more much interesting foil for Jaime Lannister going into Season 3 than Hoat and his not-so-merry men did in print. Hoat is an unabashed monster, whereas Locke is hard to gauge for most of his first two episodes, making the ending to “Walk of Punishment” all the more shocking. To date, that remains a man’s favourite closing shot of any episode; even the raucous cut to a rocked-up rendition of
“The Bear and the Maiden Fair” is electric. The lyrics of a minstrel trying to drown out the sound of plotting Tyrells can’t hope to match the visceral power of the Hold Steady.
A final point to note about Season 2 is its phenomenally successful introduction of Gwendoline Christie (
Star Wars: The Fourth Awakens, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) as Brienne of Tarth - almost certainly the most formidable warrior in all of Westeros. On the page, Brienne is an awe-inspiring presence; a grittier Wonder Woman for a blood-soaked age. On screen, though, she’s even more than the sum of Martin’s wonderful words - Christie’s fearsome swordplay belies the ubiquitous sadness at the character’s heart; an emotion that’s burning in almost every shot of her haunted eyes. The real magic of the character is that she’s as relatable as she is inspirational; as vulnerable as she is fierce. And even though the books do more - much, much more - in terms of exploring Brienne’s past, her enforced courtships and all the other obstacles that stood between her and knighthood, it can’t compete with the raw emotion that Christie brings to the part.
The adaptation of a man’s favourite literary instalment to date, A Storm of Swords, begins towards the end of the second season as, under orders from Catelyn Stark, Brienne breaks Jaime Lannister out of Robb’s prison in the hope of returning him to King’s Landing to exchange for Arya and Sansa - Cersei’s presumed Stark hostages. So begins one of the most gripping and celebrated threads in the saga, and the showrunners weren’t looking to waste a word of it. A Storm of Swords comprises the entire third season of the TV show, as well as almost all of the fourth, with certain elements still influencing the show as late on as Season 6. The series’ most memorable set pieces - the Red Wedding, the Purple Wedding, the emotionally-charged battle between the Mountain and the Red Viper, the Battle for Castle Black - are all lifted from the pages of A Storm of Swords, which feels more like the closing entry in a trilogy than it does book three of seven.
It’s no coincidence, then, that Seasons 3 and 4 are almost universally recognised as being the show’s zenith - at least thus far. Benioff and Weiss were shrewd enough to translate as much of
A Storm of Swords to the screen as they possibly could, omitting far less than they had with the two preceding novels, but, crucially, by this point they had also grown confident enough to improve upon the source material when diverting from it, as they had done so successfully with Talisa in Season 2. That’s certainly not to say that all their changes went over well with critics; Theon’s many torture scenes under Ramsay Bolton, for instance, actually go into the grisly specifics of what even Martin only ever dares to imply, and they do so to the gross distaste of many. But in being so explicit about what Theon endures - and, indeed, what Theon
loses - the show only heightens and intensifies Martin’s already strong character arc, and this really pays dividends by the time that Seasons 6 and 7 roll around. Trying to defend the rape of a grieving mother beside her son’s corpse is admittedly harder, particularly when it’s in the middle of the attacker’s apparent redemption arc, but even such a radical embellishment seems to grow organically out of the characters’ deteriorating relationship as it’s shown on screen in the preceding episodes - a relationship subtly steered by tiny differences between text and screen. As on TV Jaime returns to King’s Landing just ahead of the Purple Wedding, it means that Joffrey dies on his watch, instead of in his absence, thus lengthening the crack between him and his sister/lover.
Yet the most interesting, and perhaps the most effective, difference between
A Storm of Swords and
Game of Thrones Seasons 3 and 4 is the softening of the relationship between Jaime and Tyrion. Over the course of three turbulent tomes and four fantastic seasons, the brothers Lannister are kept largely apart, but together in spirit - their love and affection for one another is always plain. Unfortunately, when they are reunited in
A Storm of Swords, Martin starts down a road with them that a man really doesn’t want to see them go down. In both versions, Jaime frees his younger brother on the eve of his execution and provides for his escape across the Narrow Sea, but in the book their parting of ways is soured when Jaime confesses his role in a cruel deception that informed much of Tyrion’s attitude towards life, and Tyrion reciprocates by falsely claiming that he did indeed murder Joffrey and throwing in - truthfully - that Cersei fucked her way all round King’s Landing in his absence. It’s a spiteful, venomous exchange that couldn’t be any further away from the touching scene brought to life by Peter Dinklage and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau on TV. It’s plain where Martin is going with the cruel breakdown of the brothers’ kinship - Hell, if Season 7 of the show is anything to go by, Martin’s route is more logical than Weiss and Benioff’s - but it’s irreconcilable with the characters as realised by Dinklage and Coster-Waldau. By the end of Season 4, a thousand little changes and omissions, combined with the nuances brought to the characters by the actors playing them, had given rise to a brand new creation - one no longer able to adhere to the integrity of its source material.
Not that it had much of a choice in the matter.
The next two books in Martin’s series - 2005’s
A Feast for Crows and 2011’s
A Dance with Dragons - had seen the author abandon the linear narrative of the first three volumes in favour of a bizarre and frustrating Tolkien-esque location split. Most of the two novels take place concurrently, with
A Feast for Crows following our viewpoint characters in King’s Landing; the Citadel; Dorne; and the Iron Islands, while most of
A Dance with Dragons (its first volume, also published separately with the subtitle
Dreams and Dust) concerns itself primarily with Dany; Jon; and Tyrion, before all the saga’s threads converge again towards the novel’s end (in its second volume, helpfully subtitled
After the Feast for those trying to keep track of timelines). Whilst not impossible, a direct adaptation would have been arduous for producers and viewers alike. Even putting the obvious logistical struggles aside (benching Kit Harington, Emilia Clarke and Peter Dinklage for a couple of years just for starters), books four and five aren’t quite the all-conquering masterworks that their predecessors were. Whilst still mostly engrossing,
A Feast for Crows feels more like the start of a spin-off series than a continuation of Martin’s flagship saga, and
A Dance with Dragons is just downright poor most of the time.
Dany’s once-rousing journey languishes in Meereen, an apparent casualty of Martin’s on-the-fly expanding of
A Song of Ice and Fire from a trilogy to a septology, while Tyrion is bogged down in an Essosi slavery sub-plot that eventually leads him to a Targaryen long thought to be dead - one whose existence, it has to be said, diminishes Dany’s standing in the eyes of the reader more than it enhances the increasingly labyrinthine narrative. On TV, Dany’s Meereen encampment is still far too long for a man’s liking, but the writers at least vest it with more verve and consequence than the author does. One much-loved character meets his noble end, two very minor players on the page are fascinatingly fleshed out and even allowed to develop what’s possibly the show’s sweetest romance, and, perhaps most importantly, the question mark hanging over the Sons of the Harpy is properly addressed.
For Tyrion’s part, his time is chains is reduced to a period in keeping with its narrative significance, and better still he’s paired up with Ser Jorah earlier and for longer than in the book. This is greatly to the show’s benefit, as not only does it treat us to almost a season’s worth of Peter Dinklage and Iain Glen sparring as they build up an unlikely mutual respect, but it also gives us much more Jorah than Martin does. The character even absorbs the forgettable Jon Connington’s greyscale arc, ultimately leading to some of the series’ most moving scenes to date with Dany - and, indeed, one of its most disgusting with Sam. And when the show does lift sequences directly from the book, as it does so memorably with the, “Your dragon immolated my child,” petitioner in the fourth season finale, “The Children”, it does so with great poise and aplomb. Emilia Clarke is so damned good - as a viewer you’re as heartbroken for the Mother of Dragons as you are for the broken, bereaved father prostrated before her.
The continuing trials and tragedies of the Greyjoys - Victarian, Theon and Asha/Yara - fare only slightly better on the page than the Meereen saga does as Martin dwells on minutiae at the expense of incident, and as a result even the continuing exclusion of Victarion Greyjoy, the lord captain of the Iron Fleet, is fairly easy for the show to gloss over. Yet Martin’s minutiae often make for captivating reading, particularly the focus on Asha’s rumination on her past loves and the pitfalls of being a woman in such a sexist society as she fights to hold Deepwood Motte, but it does little to further matters, and the showrunners obviously felt that they could portray Asha’s struggle much more economically simply by making Yara “one of the lads” despite her gender. They were utterly mistaken, of course - as wonderful and surprising as Gemma Whelan (
Upstart Crow) is in the role, Yara should have been portrayed as an all-conquering woman who treats men like meat, rather than lazily becoming the series’ token butch lesbian and eyeing up everyone from Ellaria Sand to Daenerys Targaryen, but good intentions often have a way of manifesting themselves horribly. Almost as egregiously, the Kingsmoot, which in print is a novella in of itself, is bumped back a season and squidged into just one scene that, presented in isolation, lacks the weight of context. Fortunately the Drowned God’s followers are redeemed on TV thanks to Pilou Asbæk’s madcap interpretation of pirate turned queen-charmer, Euron Greyjoy. Just as cruel and ruthless as the Crow’s Eye of the books, but with a bonkers John Simm Master-like sheen, Euron is the only character on the show to always look like he’s having fun as the world freezes and burns.
Meanwhile, the Dorne subplot gathers momentum if not pace
per se, tying into Tyrion’s misadventures and turning what initially appeared to be an apparently weak and cautious ruler in Prince Doran (quietly brought to life on TV by
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and
Gotham’s Alexander Siddig) into one of
A Song of Ice and Fire’s most cunning players. The problem is that none of the other Dornish characters are anywhere near as interesting as their counterparts from other threads or the multi-faceted Red Viper from
A Storm of Swords that they must follow. In fact, their viewpoints are so tedious that it’s easy to see why Weiss and Benioff decided to put a red line through everything but Ellaria, who they’d already successfully established through Indira Varma’s (
Luthor, Torchwood) marvellous performance alongside Pedro Pascal’s (
The Mandalorian) Viper in Season 4, and her Sandsnakes, who collectively assume Arianne’s insurgent storyline. It may make no sense whatsoever if you think about it for any longer than it’s up on the screen -
let’s kill Doran, then we can just rule Dorne and get behind the Eastern usurper, no questions asked - but it happens fast and is over quick, and nobody can say that it’s dull.
A Dance with Dragons’ Westerosi passages are absolutely thrilling when compared with the rest, and quite rightly many of them make it to the screen, Cersei’s walk of shame being the most notable. If one sequence could sum up a show, then this might be it - on the face of it, it’s a mother of four being frog-marched through the street in the nude, but with five years’ context and subtext it’s absolutely transcendent. Martin’s story, read or viewed, delights in shock and misdirection - but a man thinks that it isn’t the main character beheadings, faction wipeouts or jaw-dropping reveals that truly surprise. It’s the characters that a man thinks he knows, when in fact all he’s seen is a veneer. This is never more apparent than in “Mother’s Mercy” when Cersei is, for the first time, naked.
For the most part, though, the show’s fifth year would see it abandon any pretence of formally adapting Martin’s books. Instead, its storylines would be informed by
A Song of Ice and Fire’s, but not dictated by them. The colossal narrative mass of both
A Feast for Crows and
A Dance with Dragons is, for the most part, compressed into just this one season along with a lot of original material. The massacre at Hardhome, for instance, is but a distant whisper on the page, yet in the critically-acclaimed TV episode named after it it’s a colossal set piece charged with positioning the Night King - the figurehead for the Others (more evocatively called “White Walkers” on TV, this being the name given to them by the Free Folk in the books) and their Army of the Dead - as Jon Snow’s silent nemesis.
As a result, great swathes of still-expanding stories in the book are closed down or cut altogether, resulting in many longstanding fans of the books coining the ironic phrase, “efficiency is coming.” Even those not familiar with the text will have noted the year-long absence of Bran Stark and his companions. Their arc up until that point may hardly have been well-received by viewers (it’s certainly a man’s least favourite of the first four seasons’), but it’s arguably one the saga’s most crucial, as the later, off-book material would bear out. Additionally, Davos’s fascinating, but admittedly circular, tour of the Seven Kingdoms is excised as on TV Stannis simply marches for Winterfell with the host that he has rather than wait for his hand to (fail to) muster support, while Sam and Gilly’s voyage is altered beyond all recognition - they don’t even have the same baby in tow. And Mance Ryder, the self-styled King Beyond the Wall, who in print has a vested interest in that same baby, finds his involvement in the saga suddenly curtailed thanks to an arrow from Jon Snow that proves to be much more fatal than the one fired in print.
It’s to the show’s credit that such radical departures work at all, given the complexities of Martin’s many interlocking storylines, but from this point forward it certainly does not pay to scrutinise any aspect of the show too closely. As a glossy, tits-and-dragons event series it continues to amaze, but if you pick away at illogical threads and questionable motivations then the whole tapestry starts to unravel. Fortunately for HBO, most viewers don’t, and a man is beginning to wish that he hadn’t started to. Particularly on the second viewing, the drop in quality between the show’s fourth and fifth seasons is overpowering, and while this is largely due to the weaker source material, the shortcuts taken by the showrunners only compound the folly. At least Martin’s books make sense.
Interestingly, many casual viewers that a man discusses the show with point to the TV show going off-book as the main reason for its decline, but right from its opening scene the sixth season makes a course correction that quickly sees it return to form. When pressed, the views of these people seem to be borne of the idea that the show suddenly overtakes the books at the end of Season 5, and the showrunners just aren’t up to the task of continuing Martin’s staggering story. They’re often quite stunned when a man informs them that the storylines they don’t feel are working continue to be lifted from, or at least inspired by, the books (the siege of Riverrun, Arya’s seemingly endless training with the Faceless Men), whereas the season’s high points (“The Door”, Dany’s dramatic breaking of the so-called Meereennese Knot; the return of the Hound accompanied by Ian McShane in a punch-the-sky tale of redemption; the despicable Ramsay Bolton’s exploits in Winterfell and the ensuing Battle of the Bastards; Cersei’s explosive victory over the High Sparrow) are all the inventions of Weiss and Benioff. Nobody outside HBO seems to know exactly how detailed Martin’s “roadmap” for the showrunners is, but Weiss and Benioff have claimed that what we saw in the bravura “Winds of Winter” was all their own work. If that’s the case, then a man is not surprised that Martin is having trouble wrapping up its namesake novel. An episode that thrilling must seem impossible to top, especially when you have another dozen storylines to continue at the same standard.
“I choose violence.”
However, there is no disputing the dissimilarity in the style of the show when it follows the showrunners’ storylines instead of Martin’s. For starters, the difference in pace is almost assaulting, which to a certain extent is justified, given the tipping points that almost every individual plot thread has reached, but certain fundamentals - the time it takes for characters to travel from A to B, for instance - are frequently fudged, with the showrunners implying that
Game of Thrones’ short seventh season takes place over a longer period of time than previous seasons with heavier episode counts, and even that significant amounts of time now pass even within just one episode. Either that, or Euron Greyjoy’s fleet has warp drive.
Similarly, the gripping political brinkmanship that won the show such unprecedented critical acclaim in its early seasons is quickly surrendered to an anticipated and necessary, but by its very nature far less interesting, all-out Westerosi war. Spectacle replaces intrigue. Whilst this is undoubtedly what Martin has in store for readers in
The Winds of Winter and - perhaps -
A Dream of Spring, should he ever finish them, a man can’t help but expect much more finesse from him. It’s no coincidence that - with perhaps the notable exceptions of Cersei’s, “I choose violence,” line and Jaime’s glib, “Maybe it really is all cocks in the end” aside - any quotable lines in the TV series in Seasons 6 and 7 are still attributable to the books.
Game of Thrones’ later seasons are still amongst the finest television that’s ever aired, but
Game of Thrones is squarely a television show now, whereas before it somehow felt...
more.
And, whilst a dramatic improvement on Season 5, the sixth season is not without its problems - problems largely embodied by the sisters Stark. First we have Sansa, who, at her worst, abets a massacre by keeping a trump card from her bastard brother, of whom she’s clearly jealous, thereby causing thousands of needless deaths, and all so that the showrunners can utilise a “Riders of Rohan”
deus ex machina swerve for dramatic effect (though in fairness, a man fully expects the Tolkien-faring Martin to use exactly the same get-out in print). Once beyond
A Storm of Swords, and the central, harrowing part that she played in one of its central storylines, the show has really struggled in its handling of Sansa. Whilst she’s had much and more to do, as the showrunners place her in another character’s shoes before conniving a way to get her back into her own, Sophie Turner’s (
X-Men: Apocalypse, X-Men: Dark Phoenix) portrayal lacks any sort of consistency. Sympathetic victim, Cersei-influenced conniver, self-serving saviour, wannabe queen... Sansa’s personality is all over the shop, much to the ire of viewers who want to root for her after all she’s suffered through. Her “protector” Lord Baelish (Aidan Gillen of
The Wire fame) fares worse still, reduced to a feeble shadow of his earlier, Machiavellian self. His once razor-sharp instincts begin to fail him, with each misstep feeling as much like a failure in the writers’ room as it does one of the character’s own judgement.
Then we have Arya, whose torturous wrangles with the Faceless Men in Braavos defy all physical and emotional logic. How does she survive the canal? Why does Jaqen H'ghar forgive her when she kills the Waif? Is the Many-Faced God satisfied so long as he gets a life, irrespective of whose it is? A man thinks that the showrunners are looking to Arya to shoulder the books’ Lady Stoneheart’s vengeful role in the plot, and they aren’t particularly concerned about what leaps they have to make to get us there.
The silver lining is that we get there fast, and the seven-part Season 7 possesses all the strengths of the mostly off-book sixth season but without most of its flaws. Timelines and travel distances might still bamboozle all but the most scholarly archmaesters in the audience, but the content that really matters - the characters, the narrative, the cinema-quality visuals and sound - relentlessly deliver. Season 6 moved the players into place for the endgame, tying up what remained of Martin’s stories in the books and setting the stage for the finale described to Weiss and Benioff almost a decade ago. Season 7 begins to unashamedly deliver that endgame, beginning with Dany’s return to Dragonstone, the place of her stormy birth and ancestral seat, and ending with an ice-melting, fire-extinguishing reveal that changes everything viewers thought they knew alongside a game-changing set piece.
“Maybe it really is all cocks in the end.”
There is a sense throughout Season 7 that this is where the showrunners have wanted to be for a long time. It is the best of
Game of Thrones, combining the gripping political machinations of the first four seasons with the epic set pieces of those that followed, all turned up to eleven and all presented in a way that beautifully serves the characters to whom we’ve become so attached. Lesser players in Martin’s books who are now household names - the Bronns, the Hounds, the Davoses, Missandeis, Melisandres, Greyworms and Thoroses - give us the views from the trenches; the showrunners making us laugh, cry and simply stare agog. You can’t help but ’ship Tormund and Brienne, a delightful wrinkle that’s entirely of the show’s making, or root for Bronn (the devilish Jerome Flynn) on his selfish quest to get the two castles that the Lannisters now owe him. Even Davos’s slightly creepy hitting on Missandei feels more mischievous than sordid - if it wasn’t for poor old Greyworm, you’d want the old Onion Knight to get his happy ending too.
Our main viewpoint characters fare better still, as with six years’ history behind them everything they do is immediately vested with great weight. Whether it’s a Stark reunification, a Greyjoy redemption, a Lannister reckoning, a Tyrell confession, a Brotherhood expedition or even a love of ice and fire, every moment is charged with expectant tension.
By this point, the showrunners have successfully accomplished what the author is reportedly struggling to do, closing down subplots and narrowing the focus to just the saga’s central protagonists - Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen - and their remaining foes, Cersei Lannister and the Night King. Emilia Clarke’s performance is phenomenal throughout the series, but in Season 7, as she struggles to balance authority and compassion, all the while falling for the so-called king of a kingdom that she claims dominion over, she absolutely knocks it out of the park. Even when Dany is not on screen, her presence hangs over almost every action in every scene. And Lena Headey (
300, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) is every bit her equal as the self-declared queen regnant of the Seven Kingdoms. After all that we’ve seen her endure and overcome, our sympathy for this devil is tested at every turn. She’s utterly ruthless, putting her ambition to rule ahead of the fate of the whole realm... ahead of even her long-suffering and beloved brother / lover. Bombs planted long ago detonate as the series tears towards a conclusion that in print feels as if it’s decades away.
Whether the show and books will ultimately agree upon the identity of their respective Jon Snows, a man doesn’t know. It’s not clear whether the supposed bastard will even be dubbed “King of the North” in the books, though the showrunners have certainly stayed close to Martin’s published material when dealing with its central male protagonist. Still something niggles a man about Aegon Targaryen, Jon’s real name as it’s revealed in the show. Does Martin’s saga really have room for two Iron Throne claimants with exactly the same name? Two
half-brothers with exactly the same name, damn it! After all, young Griff,
A Dance with Dragons’ Dorne-funded, secret Aegon Targaryen hasn’t done a great deal as of yet - indeed, to me, his existence in the books is not only redundant but bloody ridiculous, calling Dany’s claim into question, and for what? If the showrunners share a man’s sentiments, then such a radical departure is at least feasible, and gives
Game of Thrones one hell of a leg up on the books. Perhaps efficiency really has come...
Potentially this issue, as well certain other aspects, will frustrate book readers. The absence of an explanation as to how the Night King is able to overcome the Wall’s protective magic burns hot, at least for now, while Lady Stoneheart continues to remain conspicuous in her absence. Even here, though, Bran being touched by the Night King has laid the groundwork for a book-sensitive explanation for the fall of the Wall in Season 7 (i.e. an explanation beyond, “He was riding a fucking zombie dragon!”) and Stoneheart’s role has been effortlessly divided between Beric Dondarrion’s always entertaining Brotherhood without Banners and, as a man has already said, Arya Stark. A man hates to say it, awesome as she is, but unless the erstwhile Lady Stark’s vengeful spectre has a significant role in Martin’s finale, it’s hard to see why
A Song of Ice and Fire needs to resurrect a fallen Stark when the house already has a living and lethal avenger in Arya.
As was the case with “The Winds of Winter”, Weiss and Benioff are taking all of the credit for the seventh season. It’s been reported that events of monumental significance - the death and wight-zombification of Daenerys’ dragon Viserion, even the Wall coming down - are, somewhat incredibly, entirely the inventions of the showrunners, prompting a statement from Martin to the effect that his forthcoming books won’t “slavishly” follow their narrative. This turning of the tables is, to the knowledge of a man, unprecedented in the long history of the adaptation of literature for TV and film. Rather than detract from either, though, this only seems to enhance the unique mystique of both, imbuing the show’s last few seasons with illicit excitement and raising the anticipation for Martin’s two concluding novels to unbearable levels.
Game of Thrones is superior to its literary forerunner in many key respects - including having its end in sight. Its final season might not air until mid-April, but its six feature-length episodes have been scheduled for broadcast.
A Song of Ice and Fire, on the other hand, could still be decades away from completion - assuming that it is ever finished at all. Even with George R R Martin living in log-cabin seclusion, desperately trying to finish the penultimate part of his great masterwork, many readers have given up on
The Winds of Winter ever arriving, and no sod dares to even
Dream of Spring.
Watching
Thrones is also a much more visceral and arresting experience than reading
Ice and Fire is. Martin’s world is probably the most meticulously drawn since Tolkien created Middle-Earth, but at times his excruciating level of detail, particularly when buried in his narrow viewpoint structure, kill any sense of pace. The TV series, which inevitably contains many omissions and much that is apocryphal, is at least accessible to all - in fact, it’s instantly gripping and unrelenting in its delivery. Weiss and Benioff deliver the flavour of Martin’s world while eschewing its minutiae; they present the essence of Martin’s epic narrative stripped of all its fat. We still learn much and more about the histories and lore that inform the present, but the show’s reveals are measured, timely and immediately relevant. The show earns almost every single one.
Another strength of the show is its superlative cast. Marquee names meet rising stars in one of television’s largest, and a man dares say, greatest-ever, ensembles. From legends the like of Diana Rigg; David Bradley; and Charles Dance to youngsters the calibre of Kit Harington; Emilia Clarke; Maisie Williams; and John Bradley, in seven years you’ll struggle to find a performance that’s even merely good; the quality of the acting is interminably superlative. Even Ed Sheeran makes for a passable Lannister grunt.
And the sheen on the production is the icing on the cake. Visual effects are, for the most part, exceptionally good for episodic television, and the set and costume design is absolutely incredible in its credibility; they make this world feel realer than ours, at times. A man can’t stop listening to Ramin Djawadi’s stirring score, and the opening titles’ constantly evolving 3D map, which bucks the modern trend of just throwing up a title card, has already become a staple of pop culture. The printed maps of the books seem decidedly dry in contrast.
When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die, but it seems that its creator is the exception that proves the rule.
Game of Thrones might be the best road into Westeros, at least for now, but George R R Martin’s
Song of Ice and Fire is far from dead. Particularly when
Thrones is all said and done, those still craving more from the World of Ice and Fire would be well advised to throw themselves into Martin’s books. Who knows? By the time that they’ve caught up to
A Dance with Dragons,
The Winds of Winter might be hitting the shelves, and a man might be reconsidering this hasty verdict.
As Martin himself says, a boy can dream.
Game of Thrones
returns to Sky Atlantic for its eighth and final season on 8th March. From 1st March Now TV – who are currently offering a fourteen-day free trial - will have Seasons 1 to 7 available to stream, presumably with the new episodes being added to the catch-up service shortly after their broadcast on Sky Atlantic as has been the case in the past.
A Game of Thrones
: Seasons 1-7 box set is available to download from iTunes in 1080p HD for £119.99. Unaccountably (when a man takes into account the costs of manufacture and shipping), the physical release is almost half the price, with Amazon currently offering the Blu-ray box set for just £69.99 with free delivery – for those of you not confident in advanced mathematics, that’s less than a tenner per season.
For early adapters of 4K, Game of Thrones
: The Complete First Season is available on UHD in 2160p HDR. Whilst the release does benefit from HDR, and has garnered many a favourable reviews from techies, it has been upscaled from 1080p HD (and so is “fake 4K”, for want of a better term), which is why a man hasn’t been tempted to double-dip himself. Today’s cheapest retailer is Zavvi who have it listed for £41.99 plus delivery.
A Song of Ice and Fire
by George R R Martin is available to download from iTunes’ iBooks Store for £28.99. Amazon’s Kindle Store is slightly cheaper at £28.49. The five (or seven) books are all available separately too in their original form or as enhanced editions or audiobooks read by series star Roy Dotrice. A collection of paperbacks is available from Amazon for £29.90 with free delivery, but you’d probably need to order a new bookshelf too if you go for this option. These books are big.
