Today I took possesion of two wonderful items - the next installment of George R R Martin's Game of Thrones series - Book 5 "A Dance With Dragons", so lengthy with description, intrigue and anticipation that it is split into two parts. This book is the last of the series, so far, though the author is anticipating two more installments before the series is completed. I am looking at the two new novels now, shiny and unbreached on the bed beside me, urging me to lift that front page and dive back into the story. But I just cant bring myself to start it.
I have been reading the series steadily since Christmas, when my then boyfriend bought me the first 4 as a boxed set, carefully interspersing Game of Thrones with other reading material, lest I be left with no more of them to read. For those of you who haven't read them (or watched the TV version on Sky) first of all I suggest you do so RIGHT NOW. The characters are wonderful, the plot intricately detailed and utterly gripping. I disappear into Westeros when I read, and have become so seriously involved with the (perilously short) lives of the protagonists that I found myself once texting my friend in the middle of the night to say "W T actual F... things are not well in GoT. I can't speak about it. Its too awful".
Game of Thrones has developed quite a following, and not only with the slightly geeky role playing, comic book types, but with well-rounded socialites such as myself and my good friend Alex, who lead fairly normal daily lives and then descend into this dark book-porn world of an evening. I could happily shut my bedroom door and read for days (as long as someone fed the cat from time to time and let me out to go to the loo). So why can't I bring myself to start to read A Dance With Dragons? Because after I finish it, there is no more. And then what will I do? It is very much like I imagine crack addiction to be: I need to know where my next fix is coming from. All the time the book is here, I know there is more for me to read. After I finished reading Lord of the Rings, at 4am in my first year at university (sure I should probably have been out drinking meths or something, but I never claimed to be exciting), as I finished that final chapter I cried. Real actual tears of loss. I had fought through the chapters of dross at the beginning with Tom Bombadil and his bloody songs, I had travelled with the hobbits, I had triumphed with them at Mount Doom, I had mourned the losses. I read the appendices - every word - to squeeze every last minutae of Middle Earth from those pages. And then I was lost with no more to read, certain that nothing would ever be so wonderful again.
So, here I find myself yet again, on the brink of a very similar situation, desperately trying to stave off that final moment, that ending. And the worst of it is that George R R Martin is still writing, albeit very very slowly. I could be waiting at this precipice of misery for years and years to come. I wonder if he thinks it is fun, keeping all his loyal fans (who buy his books and watch his TV series and spunk money on "House of Stark" hoodies from the HBO website) waiting and waiting for the next installment. Or if he really is just a very slow writer. To which end I would direct him to the hilarious YouTube video made by some fans, a song entitled "Write Like the Wind" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7lp3RhzfgI - where they beg the author "please write and write faster". Because, ultimately, the author has some responsibility to the reader to complete the tale, does he not? And as the writers of "Write Like the Wind" pointed out, he's not getting any younger, you know?
K x
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