WILL GAME OF THRONES EVER END?
A week’s worth of TV
MY writer friends and I often discuss what it must be like to be George RR Martin, author of the Game of Thrones books. By the time you read this, the premiere of the latest season of the biggest TV show in recent history will be mere days away. But where is Martin’s latest opus? Publishers said it would be in stores by March, which has come and gone with no new book.
As someone who has a complex and generally abusive relationship with writing deadlines, I experience only the greatest empathy for George. Writer’s block is real, yo. I can barely get it together to compose columns that most people use to mop up water with when they’re defrosting their freezers. How would it feel to be trying to produce one of the most hotly anticipated books on earth? I would be living in an underground bunker with a sawnoff shotgun to ward off my editor’s phone calls. In fact, I wouldn’t have a phone at all. Or e-mail. Or a postbox.
It doesn’t help that Game of Thrones fans seem on the needier side, to say the least. Witness the hysteria on social media at the recent death of George Martin, the genius music producer responsible for the Beatles’ finest songs. How galling for the original George, peering down from heaven, to see so many outpourings of relief that he had died and not the other one?
I haven’t read the Game of
Thrones books, partly because 800page sagas about dragons aren’t generally my literary cup of rooibos. But I’ve also stayed away because I can’t bear the idea of being that bore at dinner parties who holds forth on the ways the TV series deviates from the books, and I probably wouldn’t be able to restrain myself.
On the basis of the trailer released for Game of Thrones, season six, however, I am positively slavering in anticipation of the latest televisual instalment. While the last season was uneven — featuring too few of the epic crowd scenes which have made previous episodes so spectacular — this latest edition looks likely to hit the spot.
Then again, I’ve been lied to by a trailer before. But it is goosebumpinducing stuff, set to a haunting cover of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game. It also elicits so many questions. Has dwarf actor Peter Dinklage’s faux British accent improved at all? Will deposed queen Cersei Lannister’s hair grow back? And when will the Khaleesi (who I like to think of as the Lindiwe Mazibuko of Westeros) return to claim her kingdom?
If you’ve read the books, please don’t write in with the answers. I’m holding out in solidarity with George.