One annoying thing that George RR Martin does in his A Song of Ice and Fire novels is use the word mayhaps. This is based on an archaic way of saying "perhaps," but the problem is that the proper term is mayhap, not mayhaps. (See Dictionary.com here and here.)
Mayhap we shall meet again someday.
While mayhaps was almost never heard in "Game of Thrones," it appeared several times in "House of the Dragon." Much to my frustration. And none of the actors thought to bring the matter up with the directors and scriptwriters, or with Martin himself?
ADDENDUM: the word does appear in Wiktionary and in Merriam-Webster under the variant mayhappen. Wiktionary seems to take it as a given that the word exists; there's no accompanying etymology aside from "mayhap + s." In the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word is said to occur "less commonly," which sounds sketchy. I'm still not convinced that mayhaps is legitimate. Martin, being the stubborn ass that he is, would doubtless disagree.
Now is the moment where I reveal that I never read the GoT books. I was going to, but I didn't want to start a series that wasn't finished yet. I'm kind of glad I made that decision. I did see the first season of GoT, got to the end, and thought, "Yeah, not for me."
ReplyDeleteQuestion for you: Do you think Martin is not finishing the series because he has written himself into a corner, or is he just a lazy bastard? Or is it a little bit of both?
I've been calling Martin lazy, but that's not really the truth. He's extremely prolific, and that is, in fact, the problem: he's easily distracted and sidetracked thanks to the initial success of the first five A Song of Ice and Fire books he wrote. He continues to flesh out the world inside his head through books like Fire and Blood (upon which "House of the Dragon" is based), but he really needs to stop with all the damn side projects and concentrate on the series that brought him such fame. Fire and Blood is supposed to be a history of one of the main families in the series, the Targaryens, but it's not part of the main storyline of the five novels.
ReplyDeleteAs for writing himself into a corner... no, if anything, Martin's fictional universe is so wide and rich that he could take his stories in any direction. There is, of course, the question of the impending danger from the north (those ice zombies) and how that will affect the politics of the human world, but far from funneling the story down a narrow path, I'd say the current situation, by the end of the fifth book, leaves the playing field wide open for any number of story arcs. This isn't one of those "the story can end only one of two ways" situations. The sky's the limit.
One thing I do appreciate Martin for is his sense of how history actually works. History isn't just a single thematic line that follows some clean narrative arc: it's messy, disjointed, bizarrely interconnected, and utterly chaotic in terms of how certain events cause other events. There's no bird's-eye view that provides a clear perspective from which everything makes sense. And really, the story never ends. Martin noted this in a recent interview in which he was talking about the life of some great leader in history, noting that the story doesn't stop with that guy's death: he had siblings and cousins and children who all have their own stories to tell, their own roles to play. And Martin, in writing his fiction, revels in that messiness, and in the knowledge that so-called cosmic moral laws either do not operate the way we think they do, or operate in a manner beyond our understanding. The good and honorable do not always come to a good end. Evil is often rewarded. Random happenstance can cause incalculably enormous ripples. Almost nothing ever goes according to a grand plan.
So whereas someone like Tolkien might write stories that have clear arcs taking us from, say, the rise of a great evil to its fall, Martin thrives in the murk and confusion and incommensurability of how events actually play out. This isn't to denigrate Tolkien, nor is it to take away from the profound sophistication of Tolkien's own universe, which isn't really as simple or neat as I implied above. I'd say that Martin's universe stands in marked contrast to Tolkien's; the two represent radically different ways of approaching fantasy writing. It's a bit like how I think Heinlein's Starship Troopers really needs to be read in tandem with Card's Ender's Game. Viewed in that way, Martin's work is kind of refreshing.
I despair that Martin will actually ever finish the series. He isn't exactly in the best shape, and he's no spring chicken, and because he's terminally distracted by side projects, I just don't think he has it in him to finish The Winds of Winter, let alone the supposedly final novel, A Dream of Spring. So I'd say you ought to read the first five novels, anyway, with the understanding that we might never get a proper ending to the story.
Well, that was certainly a longer answer than I was expecting. But I appreciate the insights.
ReplyDeleteAs for just going ahead and reading the novels anyway... honestly I'm not sure if even want to at this point. Your description of Martin's approach to his fantasy world (as contrasted with Tolkien, etc.) fits the general impression I have gotten, both from S1 of the show and stuff I've read about the books, and I'm not sure if that appeals to me. I think I might prefer my fantasy worlds to be set in a moral universe.
That being said, my current recreational reading is Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy, which is billed as "Harry Potter for adults" and very much buys into the idea that the real world is messy and the good guys don't always win. And yet I am enjoying it immensely. So obviously I'm not completely opposed to that type of thing. In the end, I don't know if I have a genuinely rational reason to be hesitant. Fear of disappointment, maybe?
I started reading fantasy with Stephen R. Donaldson before I ever started Tolkien. Donaldson's first Thomas Covenant trilogy had already been written by the time I started it, but when I moved on to the second trilogy, it hadn't been completed yet: only the first book of the Second Chronicles, The Wounded Land, had come out. So I ended up having to wait patiently for The One Tree and White Gold Wielder—a wait that took years. We're all kind of in that situation right now with Martin's books, but unlike Donaldson, who kept pretty faithfully to a schedule, Martin is an undisciplined slob who, as he's said repeatedly in interviews, will finish the next book when he finishes it. Grrrrrr.
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