A Feast for Creeps.

There was a big discussion over the weekend at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen about sexism in George R.R. Martin's popular A Song of Ice and Fire books, inspired by Sady Doyle's review, in which she justifiably concludes that "George R.R. Martin is creepy." I'm posting a version of what I said in that conversation because I had to think pretty hard about why I continue to read these books despite reservations about the content.

These books contain some really disturbing stuff, and it's important not to play that down. If Martin doesn’t win you over somewhere in the early part of A Game of Thrones, the rest of the series is going to be quite a slog. It’s really important in these discussions to distinguish between “if you’re disturbed, you’re reading it wrong” and “this stuff is disturbing, though I think there’s a point to it.”

The way I read these books, there are two reasons Martin writes creepy scenes. First, he’s trying to undermine (or maybe even “critique”) the conservative impulse to revisit feudal societies. He’s constructing an outsized version of medieval Europe with a deromanticized and Machiavellian patriarchal feudalism, and it should be clear to the reader that this is a bad system. In A Feast for Crows, Martin lets a character speak at length about the horrors that war inflicts on common soldiers; at this point in the book, we've seen that war is no picnic for the nobility, but it's hell for the troops. So a major project of the books is to flip the common tropes of fantasy literature. (As a side note: it shouldn't be taken for granted that these books give any kind of window into actual history, but that's a post for another time.) This take on Martin is, of course, nothing new. And I think this explains why he’s set up the large architecture of the novel in the way he has.

But it doesn't explain why he writes specific sections the way he does. Specifically, there's a ton of stuff that's way more intense than it needs to be: why the incest? Why the sexual abuse? Why the cannibalism? And why in such detail? I think the answer to all these questions is that Martin, as a storyteller, likes to try to get away with really dark stuff, and that's the second source of creepiness in the books. So in one instance there's a subtle implication that a man secretly kills and cooks one group of his enemies, and then proceeds to serve human meat pies to another group of enemies. If there's some kind of political-philosophical statement being made in this passage, I'm missing it. More obviously, Martin uses one subplot to give his readers an inside view of the Viking-like rape-and-pillage culture of the Iron Isles. Even if the point is to show that a culture based on rape and slaughter is not the best society to live in, I find these chapters to be incredibly unpleasant!

So, for those of us who like the books, I think it’s good to talk about what Martin is really aiming at, and to figure out where his critique falls short. But even if there’s some plausible liberal-humanist explanation of every single creepy incident in each one of the books, (a) people who find these incidents off-putting would not necessarily find them any less off-putting if they understood the purpose behind them, and (b) the very fact that bloggers are dispassionately parsing out the dynamics of consent and abuse in some of these hideous fictional situations might be off-putting in itself. Not everyone will agree or assume that these books are worth reading. That might actually be a good thing. There may yet be some decency left in this world.

On what grounds would I actually defend Martin’s writing, given how uncomfortable it makes me at times? Primarily, I enjoy the density and complexity of the narrative. In the best sections of the book, the drama comes from a clash of plausible competing interests. Clues to various mysteries are planted thousands of pages before the reveals. (Think LOST, but less ad hoc.) In short, I find the story compelling in all the ways a big novel should be compelling. Which makes me think that if I want more of that sort of thing I should finally get around to War and Peace.