20. Game of Thrones: The Horrifying True Story Behind A Song of Ice and Fire

What real-world historical events and figures inspired the political conflicts in Westeros? Is George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones better than J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings? And, is it likely that George R. R. Martin will ever finish the A Song of Ice and Fire series? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of A Game of Thrones, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. You can order A Game of Thrones and explore our favourite Folio books at https://foliosociety.com/thebookclub Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: thebookclubhq.com Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Jack Meek Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  A Game of Thrones is a story built on kingdoms, banners and bloodlines, where loyalty is fragile and power is always shifting.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  George R R Martin's world feels so immersive because Westeros is governed by history. From Dawn to Castle Black and beyond the Wall, there is no such thing as neutral ground, or of course, harmless hospitality.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Folio Society brings that sense of detail into the reading experience right from the very first pages of A Song of Ice and Fire.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  So it's beautifully illustrated by Jonathan Burton and the book has a fold out map, it's got these amazing illustrations of the house sigils, it's got family trees. And all of this brings the scale of the world and the complexity of its tangled loyalties to life. Folios A Game of Thrones is available now with a limited edition launching on the 14th of July.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  You can order A Game of Thrones and explore the other books we keep coming back to at foliosociety.com/thebookclub. That's foliosociety.com/thebookclub.

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• 3:20Speaker 01

  Tell me, my honourable Lord Edard, how are you any different from Robert, or me, or Jaime?

• 3:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  For a start, I do not kill children. You would do well to listen, my lady. I shall say this only once. When the king returns from his hunt, I intend to lay the truth before him. You must be gone by then. You and your children, all three, eh? And not to Casterly Rock.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Exile, she said. A bitter cup to drink from.

• 3:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  A sweeter cup than your father served Rhaegar's children, and kinder than you deserve. Your father and your brothers would do well to go with you. Lord Tywin's gold will buy you comfort and hire swords to keep you safe. You shall need them. I promise you, no matter where you flee, Robert's wrath will follow you to the back of beyond if need be.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  And what of my wrath, Lord Stark? She asked softly, her eyes searched his face.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  You should have taken the realm for yourself. It was there for the taking. Jaime told me how you found him on the Iron Throne the day King's Landing fell and made him yield it up. That was your moment. All you needed to do was climb those steps and sit. Such a sad mistake.

• 4:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  I've made more mistakes than you can possibly imagine, but that was not one of them.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Oh, but it was, my lord. When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground. So hello, everybody. Welcome to the book club. That was, of course, from George R R Martin's A Game of Thrones, published in August 1996. It's the first of the five books, well, so far, five book series that makes up his A Song of Ice and Fire series. There are two more books forthcoming.

• 5:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Supposedly.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Supposedly forthcoming, exactly. And we'll be discussing whether or not he will or even can finish this legendary series after the break. And this book, the book that, you know, sets it all off, it's an immense fantasy epic, and it's about these noble houses battling and scheming for ultimate power to sit atop the Iron Throne while an ancient supernatural threat brews in the north. And it's based in this kind of medieval world of sex and violence and betrayal, kind of loosely based, has lots of historical precedents, but loosely based on the Wars of the Roses, and we'll discuss that too.

• 5:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  We will indeed. So, hi, everybody. These were books that were celebrated at the time for injecting high fantasy with a dose of gritty realism, weren't they? There's a lot of sex and there's a lot of, a lot of violence. They are one of the great literary phenomena of the last, what, 20 years or so. I think he sold something, getting on for 100 million books, 90 million books, something like that. He's become George R R Martin, one of the most recognizable novelists in the world. And obviously, a lot of that is because of the television series. So there were readers, of course. There were lots of readers beforehand. But it was the television series done by HBO in 2011 that really cemented Game of Thrones

• 6:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  as one of the cultural sensations of the 2010s. And it turned all of the books into bestsellers. People started naming their children, didn't they? Daenerys or Arya or whatever.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think they came to regret that later on, but.

• 6:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, exactly. Yeah. How many Cerces are there? I don't know.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  There should be more.

• 6:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Well, after that reading, I thought that was chilling, actually. And I mean, one of the fun things about this, this book and this series, George R R Martin, we will obviously talk about how he creates this enormous host, this biblical host of characters. But there's something there for everybody, isn't there? So everybody looks at this and champions a different contender to the throne. And whether you are a Lannister or a Stark or a Bolton or whatever, it becomes, you know, it's a fun game to play, as it were. And actually, Tabby, we should, we should decide at the end of the show who we most resemble.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Oh, we definitely will. I think, I think we should work out which characters we most resemble, which houses we would belong to. And we're also going to make our predictions for who we think, should George R R Martin ever finish this series, who we think will win.

• 7:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, not least because the TV ending was so controversial. So not everybody will agree with the TV ending who has seen it. And actually, I have strong views, as you know, Tabby, about the ending of the TV series.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Such a poor take.

• 7:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which we, well, we'll get to that supposedly poor take later on. So let's talk about the experience of reading the book, first of all. So did you read it before you'd seen the series or after?

• 8:06Speaker 01

  No, after. I actually stumbled across the series kind of by accident. But I think like, it wasn't massive, massive yet. So I'm one of those really annoying people that sort of says that I love Game of Thrones before it was mainstream. But I was really, I was, I was captivated by it. And also, I was very intrigued by the fact I came across so many people that compared it to Lord of the Rings. Because the TV series didn't seem very Lord of the Rings-y to me. So I was intrigued by that. And then I went and I read the series over lockdown. And obviously, you know, anyone who loves fantasy, I loved it. And I actually liked it, the more able I was to separate. The TV series in my head from the book, the more I liked it because it came alive as, you know, much more medieval in terms of the chivalric romance of it, or whether or not that's

• 8:49Speaker 01

  there at all. The sigils, the colour, Vase Dothrak, for instance, the home of the kind of the horse lords. In the book is this remarkable, complex, vast civilization and doesn't quite translate in the TV series. And so I really, really enjoyed it, but I didn't, it's not comforting and it's not, it's not easy, I would say. What about you?

• 9:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, actually, so I saw the TV series first. I saw the first series and I really enjoyed it. And then I sort of said to myself, well, I'll obviously never read these terrible books. And then whenever I was, I had this weird thing where whenever I was getting a train and I was waiting for a train, the books were everywhere at this point, into the WH Smiths, in stationed bookstores. And I would sort of loiter, hoping that my train was delayed, looking at the books, like standing in the shop and like flicking through the books.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Slipping a different book jacket on top though, like.

• 9:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Crime of punishment.

• 9:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Pretending I was reading East of Eden, surely. Anyway, eventually I cracked and I was just like, I'm gonna read this. Okay, I'm gonna read it. And then I was absolutely addicted. I have no shame in admitting this. I was riveted. All night I would be reading the books, couldn't wait to get the next one. The one thing I noticed though, was my interest kind of peaked with about book three, and then started to decline as to my disbelief, George R R Martin started to introduce yet more characters.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  I was totally the same. And also, we'll be discussing the style of these books, but the thing is, you spend a lot of time in lots of different characters' heads. And as the books progress, there are more and more and more of them. And it becomes more and more tedious because you're just hoping to get to the characters that you want to be with and their plotlines that you want to follow.

• 10:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  I agree. We'll talk about this. I think it's, I think it's an object lesson, actually, in this is a, it's an odd thing to say, but if you were teaching creative writing, I think this would be an excellent thing to teach, because one of the key things that any writer needs is a degree of discipline and focus. And whether George R R Martin has, has those qualities, we will discuss later in the episode. Actually, let's talk about George R R Martin, Tabby.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. Let's talk about him himself because he he's an unusually recognizable figure, I would say, for a lot of contemporary authors. Everyone knows kind of what he looks like. He's quite distinctive. He has a bit of a reputation for being fairly irascible in interviews and stuff. I think probably in part because people are constantly asking him when the next books are coming. But I've watched a lot of interviews with him now and he always just seems, you know, quite sweet and, you know, a massive nerd essentially. And that might also explain why this world got out of control. He's born on September the 20th, 1948, in Bayonne, New Jersey. His mother's family were once very wealthy, but they lost all their money during the Great Depression. And then in 1953, Martin and his family moved into public housing. And that his world at this period during his upbringing was very

• 11:35Speaker 01

  small and quite confined. You know, the same sites every day, the same routes, the same people. And I think that's important because it meant that he developed a voracious imagination. He read extensively, I guess. If you can't kind of travel and your opportunities are more limited, it allows you to see and experience things that you might not otherwise be able to. And so fantasy was his escape. And he began writing as well. So he would sell monster stories to other children for pennies, which I think is charming. And then at high school, he started writing superhero stories. And he fell in love with science fiction and fantasy, in part because of comic books. And so he said, you know, rather than Dick and Jane and Sally, this suburban family with a dog called Spot, you know, it was magic and fantasy

• 12:20Speaker 01

  and heroes. And I kind of get that because, you know, some of the books that you're made to read when you're at prep school, when you're kind of six, seven, eight, you know, Biff and Chip and all those. I know you love those books, but I had no patience for them whatsoever.

• 12:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, first, I'm I'm never here for Biff and Chip slander. I think Biff and Chip is brilliant.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  I know. It's just, it's such a flaw in your personality.

• 12:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Also, Tabby, I mean, you're giving yourself away there. Are you still reading Biff and Chip when you're eight? Really? I mean, when did you learn to read?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Fifteen? No, I just remember being in year two at my prep school and my mom actually wrote, you know, wrote to school and was like, please can they be allowed to read, you know, what they want to read. Obviously at that time for me it was Proust.

• 13:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. Anyway, so yeah, he has this, he's a reader, he's a, he loves writing, all of this kind of thing. He discovers Tolkien. So what is, so he would discover Tolkien and actually the point when America discovers Tolkien generally, which is the mid 1960s. That's when there was a very famous kind of pirated paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings that outraged Tolkien because he didn't get any royalties. But anyway, this went around America like wildfire, precisely the point when George R R Martin is what, in his late teens, early twenties. So he reads it. He says, you know, it completely blew my mind. I couldn't wait to kind of get into that world and to create worlds of my own. He, interestingly,

• 13:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  given that war is such a big theme in his books, he was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. And then he became, he did think, dabbled in teaching and stuff and then became a full-time writer at the end of the seventies, specialising really in science fiction and in fantasy. And he actually won some awards, I think, for some of his book, early books and his short stories.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Panny has this brilliant vampire book about vampires going down the Mississippi and it sounds great. I think we should do it on the show sometime.

• 14:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  His big thing in the eighties was TV. He worked on a sort of reboot of The Twilight Zone. And all of this time, you know, he wasn't a name. He wasn't a well-known name to people outside the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. Within those worlds, yes, maybe, but not outside. And then he gets the inspiration for what becomes this first book, A Game of Thrones. And I think it started more science fiction than fantasy. He has this idea of a boy, you know, so often these books start with a single image or a single incident.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  It's insane how often this happens though. I'm so struck by that. It's almost like some kind of strange divine inspiration or something. This image that floods a person's mind and they get captivated by it and they have to write it down.

• 14:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then they have to create a world and a narrative to sustain it, I suppose. So in this case, it's the image of the boy who watches somebody being beheaded and then discovers these wolf cubs, sort of pups in the snow. And this is an image that you see right at the beginning of A Game of Thrones. He says, "It came out of nowhere in 1991. When I began, I didn't know what the hell I had. I thought it might be a short story. It was just this chapter where they find these dire wolf pups. And then I started exploring these families and the world started coming alive. It was all there in my head. I couldn't not write it." Just one thing about this, he has the idea of the image, the scene, and then he starts to create the world to justify it almost.

• 15:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  One thing he doesn't do is work out the world and the story before he starts writing. And that explains, I think, why over time, the project becomes larger and larger and larger. And there's a lack of, there's a, frankly, a lack of discipline.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he didn't plot it.

• 15:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, he didn't plot it. So very different from a J K Rowling, let's say, who does famously plot everything out in the Harry Potter world before she starts writing. She's got it all written down in exercise books or whatever. George R R Martin absolutely does not.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  So he has this idea, he's really into it. So he completes his first chapter, this thing with the boy and the dire, the wolves in the snow, in only a matter of days. And then, as with so many of these epic fantasies, comes the map. And he draws this over the summer and I have to say, it's, it's a magnificent map. I was looking at it just yesterday. But again, you know, it's not like he has it all planned out. It's kind of still expanding as he writes. And you can feel this in the book, you know, you start in Winterfell, the home of the Starks, who I suppose are our protagonists. And it's quite limited, it's quite bare, you know, you have, you know, glimpses of the world beyond. And then the further we travel into the story, even in book one, the more and more and more is going on.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Anyway, he had planned it as a trilogy, because most epic fantasies during this period were...

• 16:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Copied from The Lord of the Rings.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. Tolkien really is, he's, he's the godfather of fan, I mean, he is now, but at this point, he really is the imprint. But then the more he writes, as we've said, the more it expands. And so the initial draft was already just way too big. And so we had to split the initial draft into different volumes right away. And so we have A Song of Ice and Fire. And this is why the first three books were written in the space of four years so quickly.

• 17:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, they were originally one thing.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And then, I don't know, there's a slightly longer hiatus and then a slightly longer hiatus. And then now, you know, The Winds of Winter, the second last book, we've been waiting for for 15 years.

• 17:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Whether it will ever come, we will discuss.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 17:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  So when it first comes out, which is 1996, it's not a colossal hit, but it does get a following. I mean, there are a lot of reviews. I was looking at some of the reviews, actually, before we started recording. There are a lot of reviews, generally quite positive, I think. Even at the time, with the first book, with this first book, some people said there are too many characters. You know, I find it overwhelming, the number of characters and the number of names and so on. He took the chapters about one of the characters, Daenerys Targaryen, didn't he? He published them as a standalone kind of novella.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  I can see how that would work.

• 18:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  It works very well. It's a very good story. So for people who don't know, it's this princess, effectively, who is exiled, who is sold off to these horse lords. And she, you know, it's a, it's a classic example of us seeing an alien world through the eyes of an outsider to that world. You know, so we're travelling with her and it's a portal fantasy. So it's like you've gone through a portal with a character who doesn't know what is on the other side. And you're seeing through their eyes, this, this new and exciting kind of landscape. Anyway, he publishes more books. And then obviously, the TV series, 2011, turns it into this tremendous phenomenon with which surely everybody listening to this podcast is reasonably familiar, even if they'd never seen so much as a frame of

• 18:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  the TV series or read a single line of the book. Everybody's heard of Game of Thrones.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. But just a quick, I mean, word here on the style before we dig into the plot, which will be recognisable to most people. As we've said, it unfolds via multiple characters' perspectives. So this is a limited third person. And so you have an external narrator who has access to the thoughts and feelings of only one character. So in this book, we have seven of those. They're mainly Starks and they're mainly nobles. And that's probably why it's the noble houses and particularly the Starks that we sympathise with most over the course of the series and why the peasants often seem like. I don't know, kind of, I suppose, the most basic view a person might have of medieval peasants. You know, they all seem a bit uneducated and a bit naive.

• 19:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Isn't that interesting? I hadn't thought of that, but it's a very much a top down view of this world, isn't it?

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Definitely it is, you know.

• 19:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, the peasants, people who are not aristocrats, generally, what do they call them, NPCs? You know, they're not, they're not, they don't appear to have in a lot, I mean, they must have in their lives, but we're never given access to them.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  They're like, um, they're like, they're like, sort of the great mass of the suffering majority, you know, and that's kind of it. But with one exception, and this is the prologue, where we're inside the minds of a low-born member of the Night's Watch. These are the people that guard the wall that separates Westeros from kind of the wildlands beyond. And I actually think this opening is so good, because you know, straight away, you're in some kind of medieval, magical world from the clothes, the descriptions. There's a high-born knight, and then there are the kind of, you know, the low-born men around him, and it's very eerie and it's, it's very creepy. But as the series progresses, as we've said, these viewpoints multiply, and there are more and more and more, and so it becomes more unwieldy.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  But something that is brilliant, I think, about it is that it is so unreliable throughout, because you have different perspectives. And so people come across in different ways, and there are moments when you might be tricked into wondering whether, oh, are the Starks really the good guys? So for instance, there's a character called Jorah Mormont, who is helping the princess Daenerys through her, her, her travels. And he sees the guy who in this book is essentially our protagonist, Ned Stark, as a terrible man, you know, harsh in his principles. Whereas for us, expending a lot of time this book in Ned's mind, he seems like a very decent, good, you know, honorable man.

• 21:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think it's a, it's a deceptively simple device, but allows quite a sophisticated characterization. So the, the funny thing about this is, on the surface, a Game of Thrones seems to be very, very simply and accessibly written. So the prose is, I think, I think you're more keen on the prose than I am. I think the prose is unremarkable and, and, and quite workmanlike. I don't really mean that as a criticism, because as we've said before. On the book club, sometimes very simple and accessible prose works greatly to your advantage. You don't always have to be writing like Charles Dickens or Vladimir Nabokov or something.

• 21:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  If you want to write a successful popular book, you know, simple, clean, unremarkable prose is a great way to to get lots of readers in and to and to prioritise your narrative. But what Martin does, I think, by focusing, you know, he'll have a chapter called Caitlin, a chapter called Edard, a chapter called Arya or whatever, and we're seeing the world through that particular person's eyes. What he does is exactly as you say, he allows us shifting perspectives on the events that are going on. He allows you to appreciate, and particularly in later books, as you, as as these point of view chapters multiply, you begin to realise that it's actually not as simple as you thought when you when you started.

• 22:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  And that actually, you know, an event that happened in the past is capable of having multiple different interpretations. And actually, you know, with my historian's hat on, I think that is a nicely complicated and nuanced way to think about political events or kind of, you know, things that have happened, great traumatic moments in people's lives or whatever, where you think, oh, it's a simple clash of good and evil. But actually, because Martin allows you to see that through the eyes of different characters over time, you realise, okay, I was wrong about that. Maybe there was another side to the story.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  But he's also kind of playing with with the idea of the ideas of kind of sagas or songs or, you know, stories about legendary events from the past, which are often kind of glorified and people are turned into heroes, whatever, because he uses this slightly kind of chivalric language, you know, my sweet sister. Or, you know, my lord father or whatever it may be.

• 23:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  So you mentioned some of the chivalric language. In a lot of fantasy books, that is very annoying and it's a very arch. You know, it's very flowery and over the top. And even Tolkien, when they get to Gondor and stuff, there are bits that Tolkien critics scoff at because Tolkien is writing in a deliberately very archaic way. Martin, I think, has found a very nice middle ground where it's not quite modern prose. It doesn't feel too 20th century, 21st century, but at the same time, it is not fake medieval prose that you would get in some sort of Victorian, you know, some incredibly lush Victorian romance about knights.

• 24:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, he's found a nicely neutral narrative voice, I think, to tell his story. Anyway, let's talk a little bit about characters and the story. So this is particularly, this is a bit of a reminder, I guess, for people who've read it or seen the TV series and a sort of a crash course for people who haven't. So you mentioned already, we have the prologue. The prologue is basically these blokes who are guarding effectively Hadrian's Wall. They go out into the north and they discover there's basically, you know, zombies out there who have come out of nowhere. And this is absolutely terrifying because this is like a sort of climate change style event that is going, I mean, it literally is climate change, isn't it? Because winter is coming and this is basically going, this is an existential apocalyptic threat.

• 24:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Besides which, the petty arguing about who's king is, is nothing. Then we move on to the sort of petty arguing because we get to, you said they're our protagonists. I think they kind of are, they're set up that way. The Stark family, so they are the lords of the north. You've got Ned the father, Edard, as he's, he's, but we, everyone calls him Ned. He's married to Caitlyn and they've got these kids, Rob, the oldest, who's very, he's your classic oldest son from the Chronicles of Narnia or from whatever, you know, brave, dutiful, a good person, decent and all of this. You've got Sansa, who's very romantic and completely like obsessed with kind of the chivalric stuff and, and also with boys.

• 25:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  You have Bran, who is mischievous and has a sort of, there's a, from the beginning, you kind of think, oh, is he going to be our hero?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  A whiff of destiny.

• 25:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's exactly, he's, he's fun and he's a bit naughty and you kind of think, okay, he, you know, he could be a character to kind of, you know, to invest in. You have Arya, who is a tomboy. She's a girl, but she's a tomboy. She likes, you know, fighting and swords and stuff. You've got poor Rickon. Everyone forgets him and no one cares about him because he's, how old is he, three or four or something? And basically no one cares.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's the baby. Yeah.

• 26:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's another bloke hanging around called Jon Snow. He's their half brother because he's Ned's bastard child or appears to be anyway. And also Ned has a ward called Theon Greyjoy, who is sort of more saturnine and sardonic and stuff.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we should have, he's got red flags all over him right from the start because everyone comments on the fact that he laughs too much and he laughs at everything that he should kind of take seriously.

• 26:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  But all I was going to say about the kids.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  He'd fare well on this show.

• 26:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  He would do, actually. The thing about the setup with the kids, I think this is classic, a classic device from like children's fiction or teenage fiction. Which is, you have a family, you have, you have all these siblings, each of them given different qualities. And, and when I first read it, or when I first saw the TV series, I thought, okay, I know exactly what, how this is going to go. Basically, they're all going to split up, the kids, they will all face challenges. It's kind of in a weird, I mean, this is a very weird comparison to make. But there's a slight, you know, it's not unlike Little Women or something. Each of the children is given a different identity. Each of them is given different flaws. Each of them is given a set of different challenges.

• 27:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the expert, our expectation is they will overcome these challenges. They will mature and become well-rounded people. And then at the end, having separated and gone their separate ways, they will reunite. The fellowship will be reunited. And they will, yeah, the final scene will be the Starks all grown up, you know, laughing and exchanging happy memories because they have triumphed. Effectively, because that is the trajectory of so many children's fantasy novels and books for kind of, you know, younger readers.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  They're given this kind of, this portentousness right from the start because they discover these dire wolves in the snow. And they, it's the sigil of the House of Stark and they each have one. It's the perfect thing. Every single Stark child, even the bastard. A direwolf to keep it company, to defend it, to fight for it. And so you kind of think, oh, these are our heroes, you know, nothing can go wrong. Anyway, a little bit about Ned himself. He is probably, he's, he's honorable, he's a good man, he's stern, he's dutiful, he's probably the best. You know, the, the most honest, the most admirable character in the book.

• 28:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's the soul of integrity, isn't he, Ned Stone?

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Yes, he's sort of humorless, unfortunately, but he is incorruptible. Then he's married to Catlin Tully, who is a family from the south. She loves her family, she's dutiful, she's a very strong woman. She makes mistakes, though. And the other thing that you don't see in the TV series that comes across a lot in the book is Ned constantly has dreams or is flooded with memories from a time before the present in the book. From battles of the past and, and also this recurring um, memory of his sister's death, his sister dying. Anyway. Then we get the kind of the other, I don't know, I suppose they are the antagonists of Game of Thrones. The Lannisters arrive at Winterfell.

• 29:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  So this is the king, Ned's, Ned's old mate, Robert Baratheon.

• 29:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  He just featured on the show there, amazing. So Ned and Robert basically teamed up in the past to overthrow this bloke who they thought was a terrible king, a tyrant, a mad king. They overthrew him, Robert seized the throne.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  He, he's a Targaryen and they're the longstanding ruling dynasty of Westeros.

• 29:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. They overthrew the Targaryen dynasty. Robert took the throne. Ned hasn't seen him for years because Ned's been up in the north and Robert, his pal, has been down in the south, ruling in this sort of very, you know, Rome or Constantinople like capital in the sort of Mediterranean capital. Robert turns up. He's come on a great visit with all, with his wife's family. His wife is from a very rich family, the Lannisters, who are kind of famously cynical and ruthless. They all turn up and Robert, to Ned's shock, has got very fat, hasn't he? He's, he's really let himself down.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  He, he drinks too much, he eats too much, he hates being a king, he's bored by it all.

• 30:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. He turns up, uh, he's got his wife Cersei, who you played in the, in The introduction, who is very beautiful, but she's very cold. She's chilling, isn't she? I mean, she's lit, you know, she, she's icy as a personality.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  She's manipulative as well. She's, she's, um, she's clever. She, she's, she's wicked.

• 30:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  She is. She has this twin brother called Jaime, the King Slayer, as he's known, because he supposedly killed the mad, the bad king during this uprising and betrayed his oath as his, as the king's bodyguard.

• 30:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  He, but so people have a sort of a very conflicted view of Jaime Lannister. I think when the book begins, maybe I'm just, this is just my own personal prejudice. But I, I assumed when you first read the book that he was going to be the primary antagonist. Because he is somebody who has betrayed his oath. He is suave. He is.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Handsome.

• 30:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but he is shown to be violent, cynical, ruthless, all of these kinds of things. And I sort of thought, okay, they're setting him and his sister up as the primary antagonists. These are clearly the villains of the, of the story. But they also have a, he also has a brother, doesn't he? So they have another brother, Cersei and Jaime. And this is Tyrion, who basically ends up taking over the entire series. I mean, he, he's the character who kind of comes from nowhere to, to grow and grow and grow and, and to dominate the story.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  He's probably the most iconic character from Game of Thrones, partly because of the TV show, partly because he's a, he's known to be kind of witty and intelligent and he, you know, he's a very complicated character. He's actually the character that George R R Martin himself said that he liked the most. And he said that he would be, if he had, you know, if he could be any of them, it's that he's the one he'd like to be.

• 31:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Nicole, our producer, says that he's the most lovable in the chat.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  I think, I think Nicole might be right about that. He's, he's very lovable. So the Lannisters have come because Robert wants to ask Ned to be his Hand of the King, kind of his Lord Protector, his advisor. Because his own Hand of the King, a guy called Jon Arryn, has died under mysterious circumstances. Ned, therefore, kind of reluctantly agrees. He doesn't want to enter the snake's pit. You know, in a sense, he didn't, he doesn't want to go south. The north is where the air is clean. You know, it's not corrupt. It's it's things are simpler and more honorable, but yes, he he finally does agree. And then something terrible happens. Bran, the his son who we were speaking about,

• 32:26Speaker 01

  he falls out of a very, very high tower and almost dies and he loses the use of his legs. And we discover, this is a spoiler, but we discover that he was thrown out by Jaime Lannister because he had caught Jaime and Cersei having sex incestuous sex because they are twins. But the thing is, we know this, but none of the other characters know this. No one, no one knows what's happened to Bran. So we enter this phase of the novel that's kind of a murder mystery and I really like it. Because Ned goes south with his daughters. He goes to King's Landing. Along the way, we learn a little bit about the malevolence of of Robert's apparent son Joffrey,

• 33:08Speaker 01

  who's a terrible, terrible person. And he has Sansa's direwolf Lady killed out of spite.

• 33:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Just a quick thing on him killing the wolf and the wolf being killed. Sansa's wolf. This is, I think, the first moment in the book where we start to think that, where it might occur to you that George R R Martin is going to, has been subverting your expectations. Because as you said, Tabby, when they, you know, that, this was the first thing that came to him, remember? The scene of the child finding the wolves in the snow. And I think that when you, the different wolves are allocated to the different children, you do think, oh, so the children and their wolves are the heroes and they're going to clearly survive and they'll all be reunited and isn't this going to be lovely? And Sansa really loves her wolf, it's called Lady, you know, she sort of grooms it and she's, you know, she's in the way that a sort of teenage girl can be about a a dog, right?

• 33:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  But Lady is killed very brutally. Her father is basically ordered to put Lady down. And I think that's the first moment, that's what, a hundred pages in or something? Where you think, God, this is actually pretty brutal. Like, you definitely wouldn't give this to a child because the child might be very upset about this. And you realise that Martin is doing something much more grittier and much more cynical with his world than you might expect.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Also, lots of more wheels start coming off. The minute we enter King's Landing, which is kind of like this, it's this court of vipers. It's like some sort of Byzantine court of kind of corruption and scheming and whispers. And Ned begins investigating Jon Arryn's death. And it takes a very unexpected turn in that the truth behind his death is much darker, much more adult and much kind of, you know, more salacious than you would expect from a book. The book that you've tricked into believing that you were reading with its direwolves and its children and its castles and its swords. The tension and the drama really starts escalating because then his wife, Catelyn, takes Tyrion Lannister prisoner because she believes that he was responsible for Bran's near assassination.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  And then Ned, our hero, is injured and in time also imprisoned after threatening to expose Cersei's secret, the secret behind the parentage of her children with Robert Baratheon. And this is the scene from the very beginning. And so when Robert Baratheon dies, Ned tries to have his brother Stannis crowned. And instead, you know, our hero is flung into a prison and his fate hangs in the balance. And while this is happening, his son, Robb, goes to war and wages war on the Lannisters.

• 35:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  So if you've never read the books, by the way, and you're confused at this point, we should just say that the thing to bear in mind is that basically they've, George Aaron Martin has set up this world with this family. And terrible things have started to happen to the family. They've been, they've split up, various of them have been locked up or whatever. Their sort of high idealistic expectations of what life would be like have been completely punctured. And the question that's by about three quarters of the way through is, well, are they going to overcome these trials and everything? Or ultimately be happily ever after? Or you start to think, you know, I can't actually, there's a point where I think when you're reading it, where you think, I can't actually see a way out of this for them. You know, surely he's not going to start killing off some of these characters in whom we've invested.

• 36:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so that creates, I think, the, I mean, you are, you're right, there is a mystery element to it, which is very exciting. But the, the question about whether he's going to actually sacrifice characters that you've come to know and like, that's what keeps you turning the pages, I think, by the time you're at like page 500 or something. Now meanwhile, there's another, there are two other elements to the story, aren't there? One of which you've mentioned already. So one of which is this character called Daenerys from the Old Dynasty. She's in exile with her brother and she's basically been sold off to the Horse Lords. So they're like the Mongols or something. I think it probably sort of step nomads. They ride around on horses. They're incredibly violent. They live by a completely

• 36:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  different moral code. There is an awful lot of sexual violence, which we'll probably talk about after the break. And so she's been sold off at the age of 14 to this terrifying, but also hunky Horse Lord. There's a lot of, you know, she's basically forced to sleep with him, but then ends up falling in love with him.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it basically all culminates in this, in his death, the death of the baby that she'd been carrying. And, you know, the possibility that the dragons, which haven't been seen in Westeros for hundreds of years, since the Targaryens were at the height of their power, may come back and that Daenerys may bring them back, you know, by entering the flames of her husband's funeral pyre. And then the final narrative that we're following is the bastard, Jon Snow. He's at the Wall. He's joined the Night's Watch, the defenders of the Wall. And his is a very, very different narrative. It's the narrative that allows us to play with the possibility of the supernatural, because he's not that invested or interested in or close to the politics of King's Landing, the medieval world down there, the Byzantine medieval

• 38:02Speaker 01

  world, the more historical world. He is kind of coming face to face with a terrifying ancient threat, supernatural ancient threat. And he encounters this firsthand. So we can see from all this that Westeros itself is an incredibly detailed, sprawling world. On the map, it resembles Britain. And, you know, the way that the North is depicted versus the South, there's something of Britain, I think, in that historically.

• 38:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Completely. And the Wall, obviously.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll get into all the history behind this in a second. But I would say this world is much, much more complex than the TV series. And for instance, if you just look at all the sigils for all the different houses, and the way that he's plotted their family trees and stuff, it's remarkable. And the way that he melds.

• 38:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the sigils are kind of them. Heraldic emblems.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's the dire wolf for Starks and they have their words, the Lannisters have their words and then, you know, they have their lion and so on and there and, you know, the TV shows. Show is deceptive in that you think there are a couple of main houses. There are so many in the book and and he melds different histories, different cultures. He's pulling from all sorts of fantasy precedents, allusions to magic, politics. So it is an incredibly impressive world, I think.

• 39:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  But so play devil's advocate with you, Tabby. George R R Martin himself has once said that there were two different kinds of fantasy writers. There are architects and gardeners. So an architect designs the world and then puts you within it. And he sort of said, the gardener, the world somehow exists and you're discovering it and you're tending it and you're going through it and and you're kind of planting new things and whatnot. The problem with being a gardener is, I mean, Tolkien was a bit of a gardener in a way because the Lord of the Rings didn't turn out as Tolkien expected. You know, you can tell that when you read the book in that the first section is very much like The Hobbit. It's set in the Shire and so on. It's kind of a little bit twee. And then there's the stuff with Tom Bombadil and whatnot. You know, he's going off on little tangents and side quests.

• 39:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then he gets into his big story, which is drawn from his earlier kind of Middle Earth stuff that he'd been working on. George R R Martin is, there's a definite element of him making it up as he goes along, I think. And by the time he's in bit four or five, he thinks to himself, I'm kind of a little bit bored of these main characters now. I'm going to introduce some new characters and some new cities and things.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  And I mean, and I'm, you know, if anyone ever played Age of Empires, you know, where the map kind of expands and you go into the darkness. There's definitely a sense that he's doing that with this and he's like, oh, I actually am really struggling to write the plot. So I'm going to just, you know, work out what's going on with the Redwines, you know, who are a family or whatever it may be. And he definitely, you can tell in this book elaborates the history behind the book as he goes. You learn more about the the war that resulted in Robert Baratheon becoming king and you learn more about the ancestors of Westeros, the children of the forest and and things like that.

• 40:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's something he's got from Tolkien, isn't it? The idea of a deep history behind the world. And he gives you clues, little clues and hints the characters sometimes talk about it. They sort of say, oh, these, this is where the first men lived, or this is where the children of the forest came from, or all of this stuff.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  But it's kind of mythologized. It's like a bit like talking about, um, I don't know, the Viking sagas, the Nordic sagas or whatever, you know, you're never really sure, you know, how much of it is real. And he says this lovely thing where you can tell that he just loves painting the world. He loves doing his gardening much more than kind of shaping the narrative where he says, there are days when I sit down in the morning with my cup of coffee, I fall through the page and I wake up and it's dark outside and my coffee is still next to me. It's ice cold. And I've just spent the day in Westeros. And I love that because you can see that he's just like a total fantasy head. He's a total nerd.

• 41:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is that you? I mean, this speaks to you, Tabby, but I know you love all this stuff and the kind of world building and the genealogies and the maps and all that.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  I can't tell you how many YouTube holes I've fallen down just about like Westeros. But, um, it is also heavily based on history. Or is it heavily based? I would say that it draws on an idea of history. It draws on the sexiest, most popular version of historical events. There are kind of the guts and the glory and the medieval world is, this is a medieval world that we're in essentially. In the same way that the Lord of the Rings, Middle Earth is, has shades of a medieval world around it. It's the aesthetics of the medieval world, you know, it's court rituals, it's chivalry, it's soldiers, it's a feudal society. But I would say it owes more to kind of, you know, the horrible histories interpretation maybe of the medieval world where it's.

• 42:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because, what, because it's so bleak, you mean?

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so, it's, it's all the, it's only blood, rape, brutality, dirt.

• 42:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, we can talk about the cynicism of the book, but I think it is a very, uh, grim view of, of the Middle Ages. So high ideals are always punctured. I mean, there are lots of things that are missing from his medieval world or relatively absent, that are also absent from a sample of the Lord of the Rings. So he doesn't really care about the economics of, of how it works.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  He admits that though, yeah.

• 43:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. I mean, I think that would be perhaps a weird thing to put in a, in a fantasy. He's not terribly interested in ideas. So, you know, characters, we're not really introduced to scholars who are thinking about ideas or philosophers or or any of these things.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  But then there are actual features of the medieval world that he draws on or events or organisations. So Hadrian's Wall, probably most obviously.

• 43:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes. Yeah, you love that, don't you? Because he.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  I do. I like I do like this, actually, because I would do this.

• 43:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  He went to Hadrian's Wall, didn't he, in the eighties and stood out and and kind of looked thought what it would have been like to have been a Roman soldier and looking into the wilds of Scotland and wondering what kind of terrible things were happening.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Horrors are coming his way.

• 43:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, you did that recently. You went to Hadrian's Wall, didn't you? Did you gaze out and pretend to be a Roman soldier?

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Totally, I did. Totally, I did.

• 43:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know, actually, you probably did.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not I'm not joking.

• 43:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then there's so the people on the on the wall are themselves, you know, there are clearly historical inspirations for the Night's Watch. So this is this kind of monastic order that are protecting Westeros from, you know, whatever horrors lie north. And they're based on the Crusader knights, the sort of knightly orders, you know, the Knights Templar or the Hospitallers or whatever from the Middle Ages. But there's also a French Foreign Legion side to them, isn't there? Because they're kind of convicts and rapists and bad people who basically get sent to the Wall to join the Night's Watch as part of their punishment.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  And a little bit about of the Black Watch, which is a battalion of the British Army in the 18th century, and they were there to police the Highlands. But I think the greatest precedent of all, and Martin himself has admitted this, historical precedent, that is, is the Wars of the Roses. So he said, my model for this was the four-volume history of the Plantagenets that Thomas B. Costain wrote in the 50s. So, the Wars of the Roses, a series of bloody conflicts between two powerful English houses in the 15th century. You have the House of Lancaster, they have the Red Rose, the House of York, the White Rose, and they're fighting for the throne. So in this book. The Yorks are the Starks, they're a northern house. And then the Lancastrians are the Lannisters, they're the wealthy southern house.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  And then, and you know, people have actually used the Wars of the Roses to try to work out how the books will end by trying to follow the historical precedents. But then there are specific kind of characters based on specific historical figures. So you have the Duke of York, who was appointed protector of the realm. And that is kind of, you know, Ned Stark is loosely based on him. They're both quite honorable men and they both.

• 45:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Richard of York.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, Richard of York, and they both face the same fate. And then that means that Robb Stark is, is, is kind of a young Edward the Fourth. Young warriors, very good at battle. They win, have a series of early victories. But Robert Baratheon is the most Edward the Fourth figure of all, because they both won the throne. They were both physically imposing and, and very good warriors in their youth.

• 46:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then turn into Elvis in Las Vegas.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Then they literally turn into Elvis in Las Vegas, exactly. They eat too much, they have mistresses.

• 46:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Bloody good lads.

• 46:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  So there's basically two Edward the Fourths in this book.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, the young one and the old one, yeah. And then you have, and they both had a kingmaker, Tywin Lannisters, the Earl of Warwick. They grow increasingly reckless and they both have sort of troublesome brothers. So Robert has Stannis and Renly, based on the Duke of Clarence and Richard the Third. But then there are other kind of allusions, so Tyrion could be Richard the Third. But then is it a historical Richard the Third or is it a more literary Richard the Third? And we'll discuss this. And then Cersei is, is quite an Elizabeth Woodville character. So this was Edward the Fourth's beautiful queen, who filled the court with her own family to have as much power as possible. And then also quite a Margaret of Anjou character, you know, she fought tooth and nail to get her son on the throne. So she was the wife of, of Henry the Sixth.

• 46:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  So basically what George R R Martin has done is taken a very, very sensational soap opera. From the 15th century, sort of, that your classic medieval soap opera. And, and, and taken aspects of all the characters and created different versions of them and basically set them at each other's throats, which is a very fun thing to do. And the Wars of the Roses, by the way, I loved the Wars of the Roses.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Me too. I still do.

• 47:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and actually, I think we've both read the same bodice ripping historical novel, The Sun in Splendor by Sharon Penman.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  You've read that, haven't you?

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, cool.

• 47:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  I love that. So that's from the perspective of Richard III. It tells you the whole story of the Wars of the Roses. It's a very, very romantic, isn't it? And there's a lot of sort of fumbling addresses and stuff. So when I was 13, I thought it was the best thing ever written.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolute heaven. While other boys were like really getting into, I don't know, like page three in the sun or something, you were like, oh, the sun in splendor. Fantastic. But it's actually really relevant because I would say that what George R R Martin is doing is he is isn't basing the series so much on, you know, actual history as the interpretation of history in literature, I think, particularly Shakespeare.

• 48:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes. So there are definite literary precedents. I know we've got to get to a break eventually. Otherwise, Nicole will never, ever forgive us. However, he's obviously drawing on Shakespeare. He's drawing on a French writer called Maurice Druon. Have you ever read him, Tabi?

• 48:22Speaker 01

  I can't say that I have, no.

• 48:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Maurice Druon was an ultra conservative. He's one of Vladimir Putin's favourite writers.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  No way.

• 48:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ultra conservative writer. He wrote these books in the 50s, 60s and 70s called Les Rois Maudis, The Cursed Kings, about sort of, what is it, 14th century France. And so their historical novels, I've actually tried reading them. Some people rave about them. I found them very thin, gave up. I thought they were bland. Not as good. I think genuinely not as good as George R R Martin. And actually, the author himself, Maurice Druon, thought they were rubbish. He just wrote them for money. Anyway.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  In an odd way, I respect that.

• 49:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  So they're based on these precedents, obviously Shakespeare, Macbeth. You know, the idea of Cersei as Lady Macbeth, that hangs over it, doesn't it?

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah. The idea of power corrupting, the idea of a reign based on the bones of a violence and therefore being inherently unstable.

• 49:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. Then you've got obviously Tolkien. I mean, Tolkien hangs over this whole project. Martin himself admitted that what he was doing was, you know, partly a kind of homage to Tolkien. It would be inconceivable that you'd be writing medieval fantasy without Tolkien's model in your head. But at the same time, what he's doing is he is trying to escape from Tolkien's shadow, because as he himself admits, Tolkien is writing in a kind of heroic, mythic, moralistic, good versus evil vein. The idea of evil is such a huge part of Tolkien's world. Martin's world is much less idealistic. Idealism is punished.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  It's random as well.

• 50:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's, yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  It's lawless.

• 50:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  The operation of fate or destiny or providence which runs through the Lord of the Rings, the sense that everything is preordained, you don't get any of that in George R R Martin at all.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also it's this, you know, we said that Martin was a conscientious object to the Vietnam War. And he has said of Tolkien that he and Tolkien have, they have very different perspectives on things. He even says that they have different attitudes about war and sexuality. So it's almost as though what Martin is trying to do is say, I'm actually showing you the, I'm not showing you the version that they sing about in the songs or they write about in the epics. I'm showing you the real world version, you know, this is what the Middle Ages was like. This is what war is like. It's blood, it's guts, it's rape, and everyone is stabbing everyone in the back.

• 50:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  But isn't it interesting, though, that of these two men, the bloke who actually fought in one of the most horrendous battles in human history, the Battle of the Somme, Tolkien, in the trenches, in the mud and the slaughter, that he writes The Lord of the Rings, which is much more idealistic. And, and Martin, who didn't fight in Vietnam,

• 51:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Slightly wallows in the violence and particularly the sexual violence.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  I actually think too much. I think he goes overboard with all that. But I think that's because if you had actually experienced the horrors of war, particularly if you were from the generation that Tolkien was, these were people that, you know, didn't believe in leaning into your pain. They believed in kind of carrying on.

• 51:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  And it's that painful and it's that raw. You're not gonna, it's not going to be an easy thing to do to to talk about war, based on your experiences of war. So you probably subliminally channel it into other things. Whereas when you write about war, it's probably easier for you to draw, especially if you're kind of, if you love history as as he did, to draw upon something that is idealistic and chivalrous and legendary, because it's less painful for you, isn't it?

• 52:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's all, it's all, well, I mean, it just would have run counter to the way that people talked about their their experiences in wartime.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  It wasn't the ethos.

• 52:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, absolutely. But I think it's psychologically interesting that Tolkien still, you know, he's not blind, of course, to the suffering and whatnot. But he he still presents us with quite an idealized version of medieval combat. Whereas Martin, who never, you know, had been in a war zone, absolutely, you know, he he, I mean, as you say, I think there is perhaps an element of it. It being not not self indulgent, but I think there is a kind of voyeurism sometimes, particularly to the sexual violence in Game of Thrones.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they also have very different attitudes to like the supernatural and and in, you know, trying to make magic, trying to build a system into or not. But we have to get to a break now. Because this is actually just, we we're like Martin. We've gone off on total tangents, out of control. So we'll get to a break and then when we come back, we will talk about the way that George R R Martin handles the supernatural in Game of Thrones. We'll talk a little bit more about the sex and the violence. And we'll talk about the most shocking moment in all of fantasy.

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• 54:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the book club. Tabby, we're talking Game of Thrones at great length, of course. We've done a George R.R. Martin. So we've mentioned already the supernatural element of it. The interesting thing about this is that this is kept really at arm's length, isn't it, throughout the first book in the in the sequence? So there is a sense that there's all this sort of very gritty, realistic power politics in King's Landing. But that out there, almost beyond the imagination of lots of our characters, who are very literal minded, there is this sort of this otherworldly, the world of the kind of numinous and the divine and whatnot, that is actually going to, whether they like

• 55:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  it or not, that is going to kind of eventually get across the wall and consume Westeros and, you know, undermine all their ambitions and stuff.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it kind of exists in the North, the hint of the supernatural, you know, where far away from King's Landing, where it's politics and it's machinations, it's very human. And the implication is that the very human threats of the novel are drowning out the the real threat of the novel, which is the supernatural. And it's almost as though in the prologue, George R R Martin is telling us to look out for the real dangers at the heart of the book. And also, Martin's very keen in interviews to always say that he's, his is kind of a hard magic system. There's logic, there's laws to it. It makes sense. It's almost scientific. And he, it's a departure from the kind of the soft magic system of Lord of the Rings. So he's still trying to root it in the real world. But I think he does this very well. I think he lulls you into forgetting that this is a fantasy book and

• 56:18Speaker 01

  there is magic and there are dragons and there are zombies. And then suddenly he lifts the curtain. And particularly when you're following Jon Snow's narrative, and it comes as a really exciting shock.

• 56:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  When the zombie, for example, attacks the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  And it's not just about who's allied with who in King's Landing and who's closer to winning the, you know, the throne. And, and, you know, it's at the very end of this book, a massive spoiler, that we find out that dragons actually exist. So that is kind of the ultimate reveal that yes, we are in fact still in a fantasy.

• 56:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the interesting thing about the dragons, though, is that the dragons. They're playing the part that, you know, if this was a modern thriller, a Tom Clancy or something, they're playing the part of weapons of mass destruction, aren't they? So even though they're magical creatures, or that we regard them as supernatural creatures, they are actually, their function is to be nuclear weapons or something, or to be chemical weapons that the Targaryens have used in the past to subjugate this world, and that now Daenerys has the possibility of doing so again. So they are magical, but they're-

• 57:35Speaker 01

  They're not human, they're animals, if you see what I mean. They're not magical beings, you know, they're not like the dragons of Aragon or whatever. You know, he's even himself said that he wanted them to be realistic. I mean, they are still dragons, but he said, you know-

• 57:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're not Smaug, they don't chat about burglars.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. He said, you know, they could only have two legs and two wings, because what animal do you see in the real world with six legs? I mean, I've never seen a dragon in the real world either, but you know what I mean, it's the hard magic again. But despite all this, and the fact that there is a supernatural dimension to Game of Thrones, the evil in the book is firmly rooted in humans. The worst parts of it are always humans. So it's not like, say, Stephen Erickson's Book of the Fallen, or the Wheel of Time series, where the evil is kind of some often nameless and then very dramatically named supernatural threat that's coming in and the forces of good have to battle against it. In this, it's humans committing, you know, pillage, rape, doing battle, shedding one another's

• 58:31Speaker 01

  blood, and that's the most violent and aggressive feature of the novel.

• 58:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And so actually, do you not find when you read it, that as much as, you know, the stuff with the White Walk, what are they called, the White Walkers?

• 58:44Speaker 01

  The others in this, yeah.

• 58:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  The others, yeah. The stuff with that is fine, you know, it's, I don't mind it.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  I like it.

• 58:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the real interest lies in the politics. That's where Martin's, his heart really lies. Because as you say, the suffering, the wickedness, the cruelty is so much more intense when it's done by humans to each other than when it's done by, you know, these sort of zombie figures to the members of the Night's Watch.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  It's such a cynical take on, I mean, we said the medieval world, but it's such a cynical take on human nature. Ultimately, everyone will betray everyone and the people that refuse to betray someone will ultimately end up dead. It's quite like, but then it's not even, it's not even a barbaric system in a way. There is no system. It's kind of like the crusade estates or something. Everyone's just fighting to get on top. It's not a question of good or bad. And this is why, you know, you're lulled at points into thinking that this is, you know, a chivalric romance, something Arthurian even, you know, something came out of the reign of Edward the First or whatever. But then you're constantly reminded that that's just a story and that's not the real world of today.

• 59:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, this is the point about the children. The children have grown up with reading chivalric romances and certainly one of them, Sansa Stark, who's one of our, you know, one of the characters in whom we invest. I mean, she's quite annoying, isn't she? She's a teenage girl.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, she grows on you, though.

• 1:00:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  She does grow on you, I think, because you, once she starts to suffer, you really start to feel for her. She has trapped, she can be a little bit spoiled and a little bit selfish, but not in an outrageous way.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  She likes pretty things. She's just very ladylike.

• 1:00:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  She's a classic kind of teenage girl protagonist.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  But I would never, ever, ever call my dog lady.

• 1:00:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, that is terrible.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  A lot of them have bad names for their dire wolves. Shaggy Dog?

• 1:00:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Shaggy Dog is a shocking name. Yeah. Anyway, they, she goes to King's Landing and she believes, you know, she idolizes Prince Joffrey.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, her sweet prince.

• 1:00:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  She has a massive crush on him. She, and she goes to see a tournament and I think this is actually very well done, this scene.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  You know, this is my favourite scene in the whole book. Yeah.

• 1:00:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because you can see how. You know, I mean, I I read books about tournaments when I was a kid. You know, you would, you'd be, oh, I can't wait, I can't wait. And then right away in the tournament, very early on, there's a bit where this terrifying character called the mountain, Sir Gregor Clegane, who's an absolute horrendous bruiser. He, he's in a joust with this other knight. And to quote, he, he strikes him under the gorge with such force that drove through his throat, killing him instantly. The point of Sir Gregor's lance has snapped off in his neck and his life's blood flowed out in slow pulses, each weaker than the one before. And this is one of the first moments in the book.

• 1:01:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Again, one of the early moments when George R R Martin, it's like he's, he's forcing you, he's got you and he's pressing you right up against the screen or something. He's saying, look, this is what it's actually like.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  It's very intense, it's very visceral. And it's kind of like, that's the real knights, you know, chivalry is dead, that's what knights were really like. They're not like this guy, St. Loras, who wears beautiful armour and hands women roses as he rides around, they're like this, they kill and blood will be shed.

• 1:01:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it's right after that moment, actually, that Sir Gregor's brother, who is called Sandor, who is called the Hound, he's talking to Sansa and he says, you know, his face is all being burned and he tells Sansa, my brother, Sir Gregor, did this to me, held me down and he pushed my face into a fire and whatnot. And it's a really kind of, oh my God, you know, again, a very sort of striking moment.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  So you think that you're in this kind of traditional epic fantasy world, but it's, it's far more brutal, it's random, it's unforgiving, it's unusually violent. And, you know, when this book came out in 1996, that wasn't unusual, it wasn't unusual to encounter genuine darkness in, in, in, or fatalism in fantasy. So you had Conan the Barbarian by Robert E. Howard, dark, visceral, even quite sexy. But these stories were kind of about wizards, dragons and destiny, but they, in a sort of medieval world, a bit like this, very much walking in the footsteps of Lord of the Rings, but they had delineated good and bad. And they usually leaned heavily into the environment, you know, sweeping landscapes, think Middle Earth, I guess.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  And that's not something that Martin is particularly interested in. He has his maps and things like that, but it's constantly rooted in, as we've said, in the human sphere. It's about people. So what it does is, and what he does very well, is he mixes the radical and the new. He takes on a lot of these themes and a lot of the kind of furniture of the world and coaxes you into a feeling of safety. You feel like you know what to expect, as you said, with the Stark children. And then something totally unexpected and shocking happens. And this was very unusual fantasy. It wasn't just dark, it was shocking. And good and evil don't really exist, and the characters aren't just good or bad.

• 1:03:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I think this point about good and evil is actually, is a really important distinction with Tolkien. So Tolkien, who's obviously to some extent Martin's kind of mentor or whatever, this godfather. Tolkien had an incredibly powerful sense, because he's a very, very serious kind of Catholic. He has a very, very powerful sense of the issue of evil, what evil is, the evil that lies within us, original sin, all of these kinds of things. And it's not true, I think, that Tolkien, people sometimes say of Tolkien, oh, it's very simplistic. I don't think that's true at all, because actually the whole point of the Lord of the Rings is that we all carry the evil within us and the ring brings out our inner corruption. Exactly. The ring equals temptation and we're all tempted. Even Frodo Baggins, the hero, is tempted.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  Even Aragorn, who's kind of the perfect knight.

• 1:04:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. But in this, all the characters are, it's not that there is evil within them, so much as the distinction between good and evil just doesn't really exist at all.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  No, exactly. There's no system.

• 1:04:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Each of them, in that, from their own perspective, is doing the right thing to survive in this Darwinian world, whereas you said earlier, you know, it's that classic line, it's the Cersei line, when you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. You absolutely have to do, you have to be a killer. You have to do what you have to do to survive. You have to sacrifice every principle, every friend. And if you don't do that, if you show mercy, if you show idealism, then you will be punished for it. And this is, I suppose, some readers of Martin think he has a, he has a sort of relish for punishing virtue.

• 1:05:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  So as we'll see, some of the Starks, you know, they show mercy, they show decency, they show kindness or compassion. And whenever they do, you think, oh, don't do that because Martin will punish them for it.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is, this is very, I mean, this is very Sam Brookian, I think, in that basically, you know, we, you've always said that the more ruthless you are, kind of in history, the better you tend to do.

• 1:05:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  The better you do.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Whereas, you know, Ned Stark, you know, so if you're Robert Baratheon and there's a Targaryen threat on the horizon, the sensible thing to do is kill that threat, even if it's a young girl. Whereas Ned is like, no, because it's just wrong. It's morally wrong. Cersei plays the game very well. She's a terrible person, but who wouldn't? And I actually asks you that question in a way. Who, I mean, if you take, if you take Cersei out of the mold of just wicked queen, and you think to yourself as a mother, what wouldn't one do to save your children? I mean, maybe sleep with your brother, but.

• 1:06:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, you're a twin as well, Tabby. I mean, tread carefully.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Oh, I was so afraid that would come up.

• 1:06:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  But, but Cersei, you see, we are led to believe through most of the book that she's an absolute monster. But I think as certainly as the series develops, we see that although she can be cruel, you know, conniving, all of these kinds of things, in her own mind, she is simply doing what she has to do to survive. And actually, no character captures that better than Tyrion Lannister, than the dwarf, because he doesn't have an eye. Well, actually, this is the funny thing, does he or doesn't he? He has been brutalised all his life by being treated as an unwanted child. Everyone's been horrible to him because he's a dwarf. He once fell in love, didn't he? He fell in love. But actually, it turned

• 1:07:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  out that the girl had been paid, that she was actually acting. And then his, her father gave the girl to his guards to kind of, to sleep, the guards all slept with her and she was handsomely paid for it. And Tyrion's heart was broken. And I think the fact that his heart was broken suggests that there is a kind of romantic side to him, an idealistic side, that has been shattered and damaged, I guess. And so he purports to be more cynical than maybe he is. Do you not think?

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that's definitely true, the fact that he tries to help Bran. To ride after Bran loses his legs, you know, because he understands what it's like to feel like a cripple. And it's interesting as well because he's always the character that's the most intoxicated by or fascinated by this almost mythological past. You know, dragons and what exists beyond the wall, even though he purports to be a man of intelligence and reason. So, yeah, I think that's definitely true. I think he's many things at once and that makes him very interesting.

• 1:08:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  And also that's, I mean, that's true of Jaime Lannister. So Jaime Lannister, who I said in the first half, I think at the beginning you're set up to believe that he's going to be the great, the villain. Then Ned Stark will defeat him in a final duel for the, you know, and get, and good will triumph over evil. Do you not think that over time, over the books, you start to become much fonder of Jaime Lannister? And again, you see that actually he's not the, the cynical villain that everybody thought he was. Um, and actually, and actually then you take a good character, so Daenerys Targaryen, in whom so many readers invest very early on and they end up naming their kids after her and all this kind of thing. But actually she turns out to be much more, more morally ambiguous, doesn't she?

• 1:08:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Even in this book, that there's good in her, but she, but she is capable of great ruthlessness. Seven hundred pages into this book.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Makes her a great queen. Um, yeah, because we're not even talking about the TV series where she has that very controversial ending. In the, in the books, she does a lot of very, very brutal things. And, you know, believes she's right to do it. And that is another massive element of Game of Thrones that sets it apart from other kind of epic fantasies. It is so very violent and there is so much sexual violence. And, you know, in that way, it's actually, I mean, you could say, is it more Sarah J. Maas than Tolkien? Because in her books, there's always full of, you know, sexual violence and stuff.

• 1:09:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  In a different league, though.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. This is not a book for teenage girls. It is so gritty and it's full of references to brothels, prostitutes. I mean, the Dothraki wedding, when the fourteen year old Daenerys marries this massive. Hunk? Do I want to say hunk? Definitely not my type, but Dothraki lord, Khal Drogo. There's just people having sex all around them, left, right and centre.

• 1:10:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  But also, there's bloodshed, right? Men are grabbing women and having sex with them. And then if they're fighting over a woman, they will fight with knives and kill each other and then go back to having sex or whatever. There is an aggression. There is a definite aggression. Now, George R R Martin would say, that's fine.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  That's the real world.

• 1:10:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's the real world. And of course it is, and we're much more aware now of how rape is used as a as a weapon of war. And actually, I do think, Martin wrote this between 1991 and 1996. One of the themes of the book is how the violence, how political decisions have horrendous consequences for ordinary people. They're the villagers.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  For the small folk.

• 1:10:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, the villagers are put to the torch, they are massacred, all of this kind of thing. And actually, probably the single biggest international news story of the 19, early 1990s, when he was writing this, was the war in Bosnia. And scenes on the news every night, and this would have been the case in America as much as in Europe, of paramilitaries invading villages, burning people's houses, driving them out. You know, neighbour turning on neighbour. For political reasons that you don't understand, you've suddenly been kicked out of your house. Men are being separated from women, being led off to be shot, all of this kind of thing. I mean, obviously, you had the genocide in Rwanda at the same time. So there's a lot of very bleak news going on at the time that Martin is writing this.

• 1:11:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  A lot of stuff about how political violence is vented on ordinary people who don't, you know, are completely helpless. And I think that, that's again, a big difference from Tolkien. You know, and you don't get anything like that in Tolkien.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  And someone who objects to war anyway, as Martin does, I mean, he might say that, no, I'm not being voyeuristic. I'm just telling you, like, I'm telling the truth. I'm saying that war has terrible consequences and it's not glorious and it's not kind of mytho, you know, it shouldn't be mythologised, I guess.

• 1:11:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  I mean, it's all just very intense, though, the violence, the rape, but also the twists. You know, we said how he slowly, slowly kind of lets you know what kind of a story we're dealing with and that it isn't going to be the Chronicles of Narnia or whatever. And then there's probably, you know, there's, so you have Bran being thrown out of a window very early on by. You know, a couple having incestuous sex and you're like, whoa. And then you get um Daenerys's brother's death, which is appalling. And this is where, this was very iconic in the TV show as well. And this is where he has molten gold poured over him.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  And so his skull sort of melts and then he collapses on the floor. It's, it's very shocking and you don't see it coming at all because you, you know, you see characters kind of being a bit, you know, brash and rude and he's been knocking her around a lot anyway. And then this happens and he just comes out of nowhere. And then the most shocking scene of all, a scene that I think um, Joanne Abercombe, the guy that wrote the introduction for the Folio Society Edition, said changed fantasy forever. And this is the execute, massive spoiler alert. Turn off if you're like the, one of the three people who hasn't, you know, seen the series or read the books. Um, well, this is where our hero Ned Stark is unexpectedly executed

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  after having shown weakness by admitting to treason that he didn't commit.

• 1:13:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so it's a, it's, it's very well done this, I think. There are a couple of things to say about it. Number one, as you absolutely say, Ned, he's tried to do the right thing and he's been punished for it. He is, he wanted to spare Cersei. He wanted to um, you know, he's, when, when his friend died, he wanted to give the throne to his friend's brothers rather than his son, who's not really his son, Joffrey. Um, and, but he's shown compassion. He hasn't moved quickly enough. He hasn't moved ruthlessly enough. He hasn't killed his enemies, all of that. He's been crippled because he's been injured in the leg and then he's locked up. And it looks like he's going to be forgiven or because he grovels and he, to save his family, he grovels and he says, I was wrong and I committed treason and all of this.

• 1:14:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the other thing I think that's so interesting about this, that makes it so effective. It's so effective precisely because of Martin's narrative method. We've been in Ned's head. He's been one of our chief point of view characters. So a lot of chapters have been narrated through his eyes. And it never occurs to us as a reader that one of those characters would be sacrificed. Now, interestingly, we don't see his death through his own eyes. They, they, it's like the angle has changed and we see it through his daughter Arya's eyes because she's in the crowd.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Which is horrific because she's a Child and she barely understands.

• 1:14:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it's a really clever moment because we have invested so much in this character. We assume he's the hero and then bang, he's out. If you were watching the TV series, of course, the fact that he was played by Sean Bean should have been a giveaway. Sean Bean always, Sean Bean never lives in anything since the Fellowship of the Ring.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  I know. He dies so well. He really does. But then this is nothing in comparison to some of the shocks that come in the later books. I mean, I'm not going to say what it is, but the red wedding.

• 1:15:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Massive shocks, although I think there is definitely a point. So I, people have always said about this. Well, the, the effect of this is that you know, no character is safe, that anybody could die. I'm not sure about that because I think once you're about three or four books in, you know that he's, that there are some characters in whom George R R Martin has invested so much, they're carrying so much of the narrative. There's no way he's just gonna, so for example, Tyrion or Daenerys Targaryen, because if Daenerys Targaryen suddenly died in book four, you'd be like, what? So the whole of that narrative was a complete waste of time.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  This brings us nicely to the question hanging over the Game of Thrones books now. It's so discussed. Will he, can he ever finish them? You know, because the theory goes that he told the showrunners of Game of Thrones that that is loosely how his books would be tied up. And then they obviously did the ending that they did on screen. There was huge, huge clapback. And now he doesn't know what to do because he has to change his ending because he doesn't want the same response. And the thing is, it is almost impossible because if you've put so many different stories and so many different characters heads, how do you tie that all up? They're all in different places geographically, you know?

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  A lot of them don't know the others exist and don't relate to each other. Like, do you have a second red wedding, but bigger? But then how do you get everyone there?

• 1:16:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I've read them all, as you have. And by the time I got to the last one, what's the last one called? A Dance of Dragons, is it? Huge, like 7,000 pages long.

• 1:16:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's a point at which he introduces a new claimant to the throne there and I just, and I just thought, come on, come on, this is insane.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  Really, I like him.

• 1:16:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now, he's travelling under a false name, isn't he? And he lands with some group of mercenaries. I can't remember the full details. Anyway, I just thought, that's mad. You cannot now be introducing new characters. And I did also think by that point, you're never going to wind this up because the characters have travelled too far away. I mean, this goes back to the, the point about the discipline, right? Tolkien has a small group of characters in Lord of the Rings. There's the breaking of the fellowship and they go off in a couple of different ways, in groups, but it is clear that it would be relatively easy for Tolkien to reunite them. You know, in, you know, in a few, in a couple of hundred pages time, Frodo and Sam, Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli or whatever, you can bring, start to bring them back together.

• 1:17:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  In this, we are thousands of pages deep in the series and you're like, they've spent thousands of pages to travel further and further and further away. Unless suddenly somebody, they get to a civilization where they've actually invented air travel, there's no way that these characters are going to be re, they're not going to be reunited before they're 70.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  But also because in Lord of the Rings, they have one goal, both sides have one goal, you know, Frodo, Aragorn, all those guys want to destroy the ring, they want to bring down Sauron. In this, they all have different agendas. Some of them are trying to take down the White Walkers, some of them are trying to, I don't know, make deals in Tarth or whatever. And Martin himself has said, "The Winds of Winter is not so much a novel as a dozen novels, each with a different protagonist, each having a different cast of supporting players and antagonists and allies and lovers around them." And all of these weaving together in an extremely complex fashion. So it's very, very challenging. And he's not wrong.

• 1:18:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's more than very challenging, it's impossible because their agenda, their goals, and some of them are mutually exclusive. It's, you know, the Iron Throne, only one person can claim the throne. And the parlour game that people play, who do you want to win? You know, I'd like Daenerys to win, or I'd like Jon Snow to win, or whatever. The fact is, they can't all win and the rules of the game that Martin has established are such that if one person wins, other people have to die. And he, I don't think could bring himself to kill off some of these characters.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  But who would you like to win if, if it were possible?

• 1:18:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know perfectly well who I like.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  Go on then.

• 1:18:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know that I have always been.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  Reveal yourself.

• 1:18:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very much.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  Reveal that you are a.

• 1:19:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, he's dead.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Dour, stern and uninteresting.

• 1:19:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's dead, but I think the throne should go to Stannis Baratheon.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know what?

• 1:19:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's a proven soldier. He's very good at governing. I think he'd be, I think he'd be a good king.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  He's Tiberius. He's based on the Emperor Tiberius.

• 1:19:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is based on the Emperor Tiberius.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  Who I don't like, so.

• 1:19:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Whereas I think you are very much, um, come on, you're surely team Renly on you or something like that.

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  Renly? Are you joking?

• 1:19:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  I do like, I do like Highgarden though. I like Margaery Tyrell. No, I want young Grif to win.

• 1:19:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  What? So hold on. What were you doing in the first four books? Like there was no one who appealed to you.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  I had my heart broken so many times that I decided to bet on an outsider because I couldn't, I couldn't keep losing my men. Um.

• 1:19:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, what? You don't want, you, you don't want Daenerys.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  I mean, obviously ideally Daenerys, but you know, that is one thing I think they did really well in the TV series was marrying the threat of the north, from the north of the White Walkers with the, the struggle for King's Landing by bringing together, you know, Jon Snow and Daenerys and then sending them to Winterfell.

• 1:19:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, you liked all that.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  I did like all that, but you like, I mean, I, I didn't like the way the TV series ended and you did.

• 1:20:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  So massive, now we're massively into spoilers for people who are going to watch the TV series. People don't like the ending because of Daenerys, big spoiler, because of Daenerys revealing that she's basically been so brutalised by her experiences. She's become so ruthless herself. She's become so fanatical and so bloodthirsty that she will kill everybody in King's Landing if necessary because she thinks she and her family have been wronged so much, you know, and, and that there is a darkness in her. People didn't like that because they'd invested massively in the character. I thought you just haven't been watching properly. From the very beginning, I thought she'd be moving in that direction. The way she she was brutal to the slavers, wasn't she?

• 1:20:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  In all those kind of eastern cities.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  She's right, though.

• 1:20:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  But that's the point, isn't it? She thinks she's right. You know, there's a point at the very end, tragically, I actually watched the last episode of the whole series to prepare for this, Tabby.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  I watched the first episode. What's wrong with you? Come on.

• 1:21:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the bit where Jon Snow kind of confronts her and she says, come on, break the wheel with me. You know, and he says, I know what's right. And he says, but there's lots of people who don't know what's right. You know, how do you know? Or whatever in his.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  What was that?

• 1:21:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, it's in a slightly wooden way. He says this.

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  Well, there goes our opportunity to have Kit Harrington on the show.

• 1:21:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think it's in the probably in the directing rather than the acting. Anyway, I think, you know, she says, I know what's right and all of that kind of thing. I think that that's been it's been building to that from the beginning. I felt it was consistent. I felt it was plausible with her character. I thought that probably is what would happen, that she would lose the plot and she would kill everybody. I liked it. I think also the fact that she's seen so much hideous sexual violence, that she's been raped, that that's hadn't that would have no effect on her saintly character. Of course it would.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, of course. But the thing is, it all happened too fast. The pacing was ridiculous. They managed to wipe out the biggest threat known to Westeros. You know, the gathering might of the white walkers who are going to wipe out human civilization. You know, in the course of a night, they weren't even that well prepared and they were all in the dark. And also, why would Arya be the guy to kill the the guy? Well, the girl to kill the Night King when she's had no connection to him whatsoever. Whereas Jon Snow has been, you know, he's the he's the boy of destiny. You know, he's been that he's the son of ice and fire. And also Bran the Broken on the Iron Throne, madness.

• 1:22:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Dull. I agree with that because no one cares about Bran, like boring character, get rid. I also, I told you before we started recording how I would have I would have had Arya kill Cersei and Jaime Lannister. And then I would have had Jon Snow kill the but I guess they thought that everybody thought that's what would happen and they wanted to.

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  That's the risk, I think. That's the other difference. Difficult thing for George R R Martin now is when everyone expects you to do radical things, you start writing for the crowd and then you're no longer, you know, keeping to your own ethos.

• 1:22:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't, I feel sorry for the showrunners because I think, I mean, this is very, I know no one agrees with me on this. The showrunners had a really, really difficult task.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  Okay. Much more interestingly, let's finally, before we grow old and die, let's work out which houses we'd be in. So I'm going to go for you first because I've already thought this through. You would a hundred percent be a denizen of Highgarden. You'd be a Tyrell.

• 1:23:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, wow. Well, I'll take it.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:23:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay. Well, because they like, is that?

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  Perfumed poison.

• 1:23:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Perfumed, yeah. So I'm hanging around with Diana Rigg and Natalie Dormer.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you like nice things, you know, you like thing, you know, nice things. You like nice things. But, uh, you know, you're calculating, you're calculating behind, behind, um, the petals.

• 1:23:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  I love Marjorie Tyrell as a character. I think she's great. Yeah. I think we'd be a great match, actually.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, she, she's, she plays the game well. Yeah.

• 1:23:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  She plays the game really well, but she's also sweet and nice.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  Do you think?

• 1:23:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So that's fine.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  It's only paper thin.

• 1:24:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. Okay. So I've massively overthought this. I've actually nailed you down to a character.

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:24:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, um.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Fun.

• 1:24:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I mean, if you're, you're obviously either going to be a Lannister or a Targaryen, given, given your appearance.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  I'll take it.

• 1:24:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I think, here's the thing, you are, uh, we've actually alluded to this character already. So this character purports to be very cynical and sardonic, um, goes on an awful lot about how much, how much fun they're having, how much they love parties and drinking and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But actually, deep down, I think this character is much more sentimental than, uh, people realise. Very witty, actually. So a lot of people really like this character. So you are so Tyrion Lannister. It's unbelievable.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  My God.

• 1:24:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  You knew that was coming.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I'll take it. I'll take it.

• 1:24:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Come on, it could have been worse, Tabby.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be worse. Could have been Old Nan, which is what I said you were last night.

• 1:25:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, you did. You did. After I said, come on, I know I'm virus and I've just.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  You did say that. You said, if you say I'm Varis on the show, I'll never forgive you. So.

• 1:25:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  I did.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  I think we all came out of this.

• 1:25:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  How many, how many molten golden crowns?

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  I'm going to give it eight.

• 1:25:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  I do think it is a, it's a masterpiece of, of fantasy writing, world building, all of that. Yeah, I think it's undisciplined. I think he has lost the plot a little bit, but in this book, it's quite cohesive. It's quite tight. You get a really good sense of all the characters when you're in their heads and I was riveted to it when I read it. And actually, when I rewrote it this time, and yeah, so that's my take.

• 1:25:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Uh, boring, so boring. I'm going to give you exactly the same mark. I'm going to give it an eight as well. Um, I think, um, it's, it's not high literature. It doesn't purport to be. It's a, a absolutely, as you say, riveting, um, page turner. Um, I loved reading it the first time. I couldn't put it down. The second time I thought, ah, it's going to be a massive slog because I know what happens. I can't believe I'm going to have to plough through all this again for this podcast. And do you know what? I really enjoyed reading it again, much more than I expected. I, I enjoyed being in the characters heads. I like the world. I think it's well done. I think it's, it's a fascinating case study in an author losing, completely losing control of his material.

• 1:26:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  But I, I, I think there is so much to enjoy. I mean, this is why, for example, I gave it to Arthur, my son. Because I said to him, I think you'll love this. And of course he did love the first three books. And then I could see him losing interest by about book four or book five. And I thought, that's just like how I felt when I was reading this, that I couldn't get enough of it at first. And then the more complicated the narrative became, the, the more the characters, you know, the, the more characters Martin threw into it, the more I could see his attention sort of waning. And I thought, this is the problem that George R R Martin has.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  So. What have we got coming up?

• 1:27:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  We've got the thing called Book Club Notes and these are, it's a weekly newsletter. It's completely free. You get talking points, you get book recommendations, there's loads of insights from other listeners. So we want it to be a real kind of club newsletter. There's a real sense of community, Tabby, which I know you, you love a community.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  Just like King's Landing.

• 1:27:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that will be delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. If you just go to the book club website and you just put in your email, you will get the newsletter. And there's loads of stuff about, we'll, we'll also giving updates about the books coming up. So loads to look forward to. And on that bombshell, Tyrion Lannister, thank you very much and goodbye.

• 1:27:38Speaker 01

  Thanks, Old Man. Bye.

• 1:27:50Speaker 05

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