As most readers of this blog know, I’m not exactly enchanted with George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Ice saga, although I have said repeatedly that he is a good writer. I just don’t like what he’s writing in that saga, but, based on something I heard in New York City, I may, just may, have to rethink at least part of my comments about this massive work.
One evening two weeks ago, at dinner with our son and his wife, our son made the observation, almost out of the blue, that “everyone on Wall Street reads Martin’s Game of Thrones. They’re obsessed with it.” He’s not a Wall Streeter, but he is the U.S. manager of a fashion outlet that caters to very upscale men, and a significant percentage of his clientele comes from the financial district. Then he mentioned that the same group really liked the movie, The Wolf of Wall Street. Both Game of Thrones and The Wolf of Wall Street share several attributes, most of all the fact that they’re about characters with few, if any, real redeeming characteristics who are out for wealth and power without any concern whatsoever about how they get it.
Then I considered another literary brouhaha between two writers, one of whom insists that writers who write works where the readers can identify with the characters are not writing “literature” and another who feels that the quality of writing is what counts in determining literary worth [with which I’m inclined to agree], with the subtext that almost all writing that gets published has an audience that identifies with a particular work… or author.
Combining our son’s observations with the reports of the literary kerfuffle, I couldn’t help but wonder if George is actually writing satirically about today in the guise of fantasy, if Westeros is really the western hemisphere in disguise, so to speak, where all those with power have few in any redeeming qualities, and where all those who succeed essentially have none… and all those finance types really love both Game of Thronesand The Wolf of Wall Street because they do in fact identify with the characters.
Could it just be that George R.R. Martin is actually this century’s Jonathon Swift… and I’ve missed it entirely? Even if that’s not what George had in mind, it’s what he’s effectively portrayed, and that segment of his audience certainly confirms that effectiveness.