Novelist Margaret Atwood is a Huge ‘Game of Thrones’ Geek, Pens Essay

Poet-novelist Margaret Atwood.

She’s also a geek, in general, based on her comparisons and her flowing sentences that drip with description.

Atwood, perhaps most famous for writing the award-winning The Handmaid’s Tale, wrote an essay for British magazine The Guardian, detailing just why the world is so obsessed with George R.R. Martin’s series and the vital place ‘stories of old’ have in our modern-day world.

An excerpt:

So what else can be said about Game of Thrones, apart from I can hardly wait? I asked some people younger than myself what it was they especially love about the series. The acting, said some: so well done! The characters, said others. (Nobody said “the lavish outfits”, but I wasn’t fooled.) “What is it about the characters that you like?” I enquired. They’re mixed, they answered. It’s not all good on one side and bad on the other. They behave well or horribly according to the circumstances which they find themselves in. They’re like real people.

Except that some of them are like real psychopaths. Was it absolutely necessary, as “necessary” might be defined by, say, that helpful arch-pragmatist, Machiavelli, to cement one’s power position by cutting the head off darling Robb Stark and sewing his direwolf’s head onto his neck at that aptly named Red Wedding? No, it was not necessary, it was gratuitous. But the Game of Thrones folk go in for symbolism, in addition to conceptual needlecraft.

We might also say: if Game of Thrones is a game, what then is reality? What are “real people” like? Or possibly real aristocrats battling lethal rivals, most of whom are family members, since they are all so stunningly inbred. By mere chance, I happened to pick up Terry Breverton’s Richard III: The King in the Car Park,which attempts to explain why who was killing whom in the Wars of the Roses, and largely succeeds. (You have to pay close attention, because the bodies fall like snow.) “The Plantagenets had been their own worst enemies, killing nearly all claimants to the crown. Sons had rebelled against kings, brothers had fought brothers, wives had fought husbands, various Plantagenets had usurped the rightful monarch and so on. Plantagenet history is drenched in bloodshed and intrigue…” Those were real people. Lancaster and York, Lannister and Stark? Suggestive, at any rate. Kill or be killed was the watchword; without it, there would never have been a golden age of Elizabeth I, the Faerie Queene.

You can read the rest of her essay here.

Atwood also mentioned that she cannot wait for the HBO series to continue…and neither can we!