Game of Thrones review

 

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

So I spent the last year or so chipping away slowly at this work of cultural garbage, to stay up on what is popular in the world today.

The TV series was notorious for its graphic sex and violence, and it seems it was just copying the book, which was bad enough. Martin depicts incest, beheading, rape, and the more common methods of breaking the 6th and 7th commandments, all as an afterthought. “This is the way the world is.” While the focus lies elsewhere:

1. This is another counterfeit fantasy world, akin to Narnia or Middle Earth, with all the Christian worldview sucked out, and post-modern assumptions stuffed in. The gods are viewed cynically as cruel or absent. The world is a patriarchy all about power. Everyone has an agenda different from yours, so you have to fight for yourself against everyone (close family included).
It dawned on me as I read, that this is the way unbelievers view Christendom. They distort a proper view of the world and see only power and cruelty, with trace amounts of kindness as a rare exception. When the actual institutions of a civil society are meant to uplift everyone, not keep anyone down.

2. This was the perfect book to read along with Carl Trueman’s Modern Self. Game of Thrones popularizes the academic belief that individuals need to struggle for free expression and to find their own identity, against the oppression of the patriarchy or whatever power structure is holding you down. And you should use any means necessary to do so, because your desires are the highest good.

The writing shines at times. Martin has some skill in depicting a place at large, and then zooming in to a sympathetic character caught up in it.

But don’t waste your time reading or viewing this series, unless you are in need of understanding how people are encountering post-modernity on the street, to help lift them out of it. Then maybe, though there are probably better options.

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