The Song of Fire and Equivocation in the Penny Press!

The latest Rolling Stone serves up a double-dish of delights for all those rabid fans out there of HBO’s Game of Thrones - and the books that inspired the show: first, there’s an interview with pouting cover-boy Kit Harington (who was just on the cover of GQ and half a dozen other magazines, in every accompanying interview reciting the same lines about being publicity-averse and down-to-earth), and second, there’s a longer and meatier interview with the author of that ‘source material,’ sci-fi/fantasy author George R. R. Martin, whose almost unbelievable rationalizations and procrastinations are all but guaranteeing that this series will be finished posthumously by somebody else.

The Kit Harington is much of a piece with all the others he’s given recently: it’s full of what Sherman Potter was fond of calling horse-hockey. It’s not just that Harington himself fibs his pretty face off whenever given half an opportunity (there’s a good deal here about his pedigree, and it’s all just exactly as reliable as pedigree-talk typically is), it’s also that our interviewer, Stephen Rodrick, is perfectly willing – even eager – to lie on  his subject’s behalf in the predictable way of such interviews. The two of them are climbing a mountainous trail in LA as they talk, and part of the opening reads like this:

Kit Harington is nearing the top of the mountain, and he’s made some decisions … He is puffing slightly, the result of a few weeks of a few weeks of R&R in LA, and a cessation of the three-hour-a-day workouts he was doing for his roles in the recent dud Pompeii and as the hirsute loner Jon Snow in Game of Thrones.

Rodrick crosses the line from equivocation to PR when he goes so far as to mention that his diminutive subject is out of breath but not far enough to mention that he was chain-smoking the whole way up and down that mountain. It’s usually a fairly strict policy of mine that if an interviewer does that kind of lying in the opening paragraphs of his piece, the piece itself is irretrievably shifted into the realm of fan fiction, but I kept reading in this case because I’ve very much liked the nuances Harington has brought to the one-note character of Jon Snow and wanted to see if there was anything behind it, so to speak. And much as I actually wanted to see that here, I didn’t – instead, I saw just another brainless lunkhead who got lucky. My only consolation in this instance was that Harington himself would probably agree with that description.

Far more satisfying in many ways was Mikal Gilmore’s interview with the man behind the hoopla, Martin himself. Of course, there’s equivocation here too – there has to be. We get the usual ‘he’s a slow and meticulous writer’-style PR, not a bit of which is true (back when Martin wrote books instead of cultural phenomena, he was fast enough – as usually happens in cases like this, it wasn’t until he became a slow writer that anybody called him a slow writer). But Gilmore writes wonderfully, compressing a long and fascinating life into some very engaging exposition. And even more fortunately, he managed to catch Martin in an expansive mood and got some interesting answers (a big part of this, as I can tell you from personal experience, is asking the right questions: when Martin is bored, he goes into book-patter autopilot):

One of the things I wanted to explore with Jaime, and with so many of the characters, is the whole issue of redemption. When can we be redeemed? Is redemption even possible? I don’t have an answer. But when do we forgive people? You see it all around in our society, in constant debates … Our society is full of people who have fallen in one way or another, and what do we do with these people? How many good acts make up for a bad act? If you’re a Nazi war criminal and then spend the next 40 years doing good deeds and feeding the hungry, does that make up for being a concentration-camp guard? I don’t know the answer, but these are questions worth thinking about. I want there to be a possibility of redemption for us, because we all do terrible things. We should be able to be forgiven. Because if there is no possibility of redemption, what’s the answer then?

Of course long-time fans of the Game of Thrones novels will read that and concentrate on only one unforgivable sin: not finishing this series. If today’s well-fed fantasy guru would summon up the old, discarded work-habits of the deadline-hack he used to be, he’d avoid the fate that is otherwise coming at him like a freight train: that is, dying in the middle of the penultimate book in the series, probably face-down on a desk piled high with food-stained draft pages. His next book could be finished by September, and the series’ concluding volume by the following September, if he could still manage the weirdly effective trick called sitting down and writing a chunk every day. But that, too, is clearly the stuff of fan fiction.