What made HBO’s Game Of Thrones the television event of our time – and George RR Martin our greatest living storyteller – were all those magical, mugged-at-midnight moments that make your jaw hit the floor.
The red wedding. The fall of the wall. Cersei’s naked walk of atonement, shorn and stripped, jeered at by the drooling plebs of King’s Landing every excruciating step of the way. The torture of Theon Greyjoy. Hodor holding back a door against an army of undead. The wedding night of Ramsay Bolton and Sansa Stark. Ramsay being fed to his dogs. The battle of the bastards. Shireen being burned at the stake by her father, Stannis Baratheon. Molten gold being poured over the head of Daenerys Targaryen’s brother Prince Viserys in lieu of a crown. Arya Stark taking her bloody revenge on Walder Frey and his cackling minions. Any form of eye contact with the White Walkers. Every social event where the Dothraki hordes are present.
How strange to recall that HBO expected Boardwalk Empire, whose 2010 pilot episode was directed by Martin Scorsese and cost $18 million, to be its big post-Sopranos hit. Game Of Thrones aired less than a year after Boardwalk Empire and, eight years later, its final series is the entertainment event of 2019. Martin’s series has now sold more than 90 million books in 47 languages and two more books are planned: The Winds of Winter and A Dream Of Spring. The HBO show airs in 170 countries. And we see now that the unprecedented shock tactics that made this epic fantasy such a blast both on screen and page were there right from the start. In the prologue of the first book, A Game Of Thrones, and the very first scene of the HBO series, we catch a glimpse of the White Walkers, the deep-frosted zombies who are coming – sometimes very, very slowly – for mankind.
At the end of that first episode, Jaime Lannister casually tosses young Bran Stark out of a window – because the boy has seen Jaime incestuously coupling his sister, Queen Cersei. “The things I do for love,” quips suave, smirking Jaime. This is what Game Of Thrones did so brilliantly. Like all great storytelling, you couldn’t see the twists and turns coming until they had you by the throat.
On the final page of that first book, Daenerys Targaryen emerges from a funeral pyre after nursing three dragons. Martin writes, “The other two pulled away from her breasts and added their voices to the call, translucent wings unfolding and stirring the air, and for the first time in hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of dragons.”
Not even the greatest TV shows of this golden age we’re living through – Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men – had the power to stun and stagger like Game Of Thrones. In that debut HBO series and that first book, Game Of Thrones put down a marker that it would be different from all the rest when it defied every convention of fiction to kill the hero – Ned Stark, brave, noble lord of Winterfell and warden of the north, beheaded in front of a crowd that included his daughters.
Any major screenwriter or novelist will tell you the protagonist does not get decapitated at the start of the story. That would be like Tony Soprano getting whacked when he was taking out the FBI rat in Maine as his daughter, Meadow, looked at colleges in the first series of The Sopranos. Or Walter White getting topped by Krazy-8 or Tuco before his crystal meth startup had even taken off. Or Don Draper, his heart weakened by whisky and Lucky Strikes, dropping dead of a heart attack on Madison Avenue in the first series of Mad Men.
You simply do not kill your hero in the first act. But Game Of Thrones did.
If the hero dies at all, he usually dies at the end – like Walter White in Breaking Bad, and, possibly, Tony in that final scene of The Sopranos, when the screen abruptly cuts to black. But Martin killed Ned Stark early and that told us Game Of Thrones was going to be a new kind of storytelling where all the old rules no longer applied. In the episode after Ned is beheaded by the king’s justice, Ser Ilyn Payne (Wilko Johnson at his bug-eyed best), Daenerys steps into the flames of her dead husband’s funeral pyre and you hold your breath because you want to know what happens next – you know, as they mount Ned’s head on a spike at King’s Landing, that nobody is safe in this pitiless tale.
The death of Ned Stark left a hero-sized hole at the centre of Game Of Thrones and it came to be filled by the unlikeliest of male leads: Tyrion Lannister, the Imp, the Halfman, debauched, promiscuous, malformed Tyrion. Yet he’s also courageous, moral and kind, beautifully brought to life by Peter Dinklage, who took the career-defining role because he saw that Tyrion was not the kind of dwarf we had ever seen before. “No beard, no pointy shoes,” Dinklage said. “A romantic, real human being.” Tyrion is cynical, hedonistic and bitter and yet he’s Game Of Thrones’ centre of humanity. After Ned Stark lost his head, here was a different kind of hero. And in the trials and adventures of Tyrion Lannister, there are valuable lessons for every man.
Feed your head
In the TV series, we first meet Tyrion when he is being fellated in a Winterfell brothel. But his first appearance in the books is as a bibliophile, as fussy as a spinster librarian. “He had been at it all night,” Martin writes of Tyrion, meaning books rather than blow jobs.
“I’m off to break my fast,” Tyrion instructs a flunkie. “See you return the books to their shelves. Be gentle with the Valyrian scrolls. The parchment is very dry.” Tyrion loves a good read. In all the Seven Kingdoms, only Samwell Tarly is a bigger bookworm. Denied the manly glory his brother, Jaime, enjoys in the physical world, Tyrion sees the power of ideas and knowledge. “Why do you read so much?” Jon Snow asks Tyrion. “My mind is my weapon,” replies Tyrion. “My brother has his sword, King Robert his warhammer and I have my mind. A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge.”
“There’s more to life than books, you know? But not much more,” sang Morrissey, a sentiment shared by Tyrion. “Sleep is good and books are better,” he says.
Career change is coming
In Westeros, summers span decades, winter can last a lifetime but jobs – reflecting our own volatile workplace – come and go with astonishing speed. Although when we first meet Tyrion he is one of the idle rich, a spoilt scion of House Lannister, his experience in the workplace accurately reflects our own time. Tyrion variously earns his crust as the hand of the king, a military strategist and – in the HBO series, though not (yet) in the books – as trusted advisor to Daenerys Targaryen, Stormborn, Mother Of Dragons, Breaker Of Chains.
And whatever his trade, Tyrion puts in a good shift. He does his best to stifle the sadistic urges of King Joffrey. He masterminds the defence of King’s Landing by destroying Stannis Baratheon’s invading navy with wildfire and leads a charge at the gates that costs him his nose. And after being smuggled out of King’s Landing and captured by slavers, Tyrion is pressed into showbiz, conscripted into a double act of performing dwarves.
These are all major career changes and they reflect a working world where we are all job-hoppers now.
“The average person changes jobs an average of 12 times during his or her career,” writes Alison Doyle on thebalancecareers.com. “Many workers spend five years or less in every job. The Bureau Of Labor Statistics reported that the median employee tenure was 4.3 years for men and four years for women. Upgrading your employment status has become an ongoing process, rather than something you do once or twice during a lifetime.”
Winter is coming and so is your new career.
Make ’em laugh
Tyrion has all the best one-liners in Westeros. Wit is his weapon of choice. Tyrion is the nerd’s revenge, the classroom freak who reduces the thug to impotent rage with just his witty Wildean epithets. The Imp is the poster boy of the outsider, the guardian angel of every weakling who ever got cornered for his dinner money in a school playground. The idea that a sharp-tongued freak can ultimately triumph over brute strength is possibly a greater fantasy than a hot blonde with her thighs wrapped around a giant fire-breathing dragon.
But Tyrion Lannister reveals a powerful real-life truth: this world can never crush you while you can still laugh at it.
Be honest with yourself
Tyrion is a man with no illusions about himself. “Let me give you some advice, Bastard,” he tells Jon Snow, the bastard of Winterfell, in their first meeting. “Never forget who you are. The world will not. Wear it like armour and it will never be used to hurt you.”
Family is hell
Born as the despised child in a family of overly familiar psychos, most of Tyrion’s problems stem not from being a dwarf – or a drunk or a sex addict – but from being a Lannister. “I always took you a stunted fool,” sneers his father, Tywin. “Half-right,” Tyrion responds. He can’t do anything about his family hurting him. But Tyrion never lets them destroy him.
Be kind when you can
After Bran Stark is crippled by Jaime Lannister, Tyrion has a saddle designed to help the boy ride a horse. When Sansa Stark is forced into an arranged marriage with him, Tyrion refuses to consummate the relationship. Tyrion’s empathy for the persecuted, the broken and the oppressed sets him apart from all the blond monsters in his family. “Kindness is not a habit with us Lannisters, I fear, but I know I have some somewhere.” Tyrion shows compassion whenever he has the chance.
Life’s not fair
Tyrion is falsely accused of attempting to murder Bran and later, also falsely, of successfully poisoning King Joffrey. In trouble with the law, Tyrion is quick to demand trial by combat. He is not much cop at swinging a sword of Valyrian steel, but he often knows a man who can. Imprisoned at the Eyrie and put on trial for the former, Tyrion’s freedom is won by the mercenary Bronn. Things work out less well after the latter, when Oberyn Martell dies fighting for Tyrion’s freedom against Gregor Clegane.
There is no justice in this fantasy world – or any other. You have to do everything and anything you can to even the odds.
Love is all
Like all hedonists, Tyrion is a hopeless romantic at heart. When he was 16, he fell in love with an alleged orphan girl (Tysha) and they were married by a drunken priest with pigs as witnesses. But, according to Jaime at least, Tysha was a prostitute hired by their father to “make him a man” – and Tywin had Tyrion’s bride delivered to the massed ranks of the Lannister barracks. Years later, Tyrion finds his beloved Shae in his father’s bed and strangles her to death (Tywin gets a crossbow bolt to the stomach while sitting on the privy). Tyrion is a sex addict and functioning alcoholic, but he believes in love, even when it breaks his heart. Like most men, he can’t tell where the great sex ends and the true romance begins.
Get some good chat-up lines
“A dwarf’s cock has magic powers,” Tyrion tells slavers who want to cut it off. They believe him.
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