The divergence began, for me, with the death of Shireen. Yes, there have always been inconsistencies between TV’s Game of Thrones and the novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, but the sacrifice of a child to the Lord of Light felt like the most significant change yet. Then Stannis was killed (or was he? We didn’t see the sword strike home and the show usually likes to display every gory detail), Danaerys set out for Westeros and Cersei blew up King’s Landing. No wonder The Winds of Winter is taking so long; George RR Martin must be thinking up ways for the novels to outsmart what’s already been televised.
If there could be an alternative title to the first episode of Game of Thrones’s seventh season – Dragonstone – it might be Iago’s line in Othello: “I am not what I am.” The opening sleight of hand was gasp-making, even if you had guessed it was coming. (Is Arya Stark the person with the biggest body-count now?) But no one was themselves. Tyrion was not quipping. The Hound found religion. Littlefinger was on the back heel. Tormund was quite sweet. Only the ever reliable Lyanna Mormont was the same, stealing the show yet again (and as always giving the show some feminist credentials to offset the show’s many troubling depictions of barely clad women).
As we head into this seventh season, with only five books behind us, is the TV series spoiling the novels? Well, only if one is so obtuse as to think of this as an either/or situation. There are stories that play out differently in the books: Lord Manderly is responsible for the Frey pie, nicked from Titus Andronicus, rather than Arya Stark; we might not even see Maester Marwyn, last heard of in prose lighting out for the territory to meet Danaerys.
And there have been so many scenes in the show that we have not read, but loved on screen: the Hound v Brienne of Tarth, the suicide of Tommen, the gradual evolution of Sansa Stark from snarky teen at King’s Landing to secret power in the north. And there are elements of the books that I would have liked to have seen on screen. Where’s Victarion Greyjoy? What will Jojen do? Where is the face-shifting person from the Citadel? But I don’t care if the fates of Stannis Baratheon and Ramsay Bolton are different when we get their prose realisation, because there is more to a novel than mere plot. The books are focused on first-person narratives; an option unavailable to TV. In many ways, they must be different: the books give us the interiors, the series the exteriors.
Almost every franchise is now a multi-platform operation. Whether it is Star Wars, Doctor Who, Star Trek or Twin Peaks, with each come tie-in books, games, audio works, figurines, theme parks, T-shirts and academic volumes. To argue about what is or is not canon is a singularly useless endeavour. The books can be enjoyed as books, just as the programme can be enjoyed as a programme. Mythologies are allowed to contradict themselves: Achilles is different in Homer and Statius, Medea is not the same in Euripides and Ovid. So let Sansa be different on screen and in text (and let us hope the books contain less rape), or make Catelyn alive in one and dead in the other. I can’t imagine a situation in which having seen the visual version, I would absent myself from reading The Winds of Winter.
Rather than postulating over whether one ruins the other, the most important question that looms over both the book and show is: who will sit on the Iron Throne? My best guess is nobody. If, as the novel states, the dragon must have three heads, we have them in Danaerys, Jon Snow and Tyrion – who, as the books and series hint, may have Targaryen blood as well. If the Mad King in the series exercised droit de seigneur on Tyrion’s mother Joanna Lannister, it would mean all three of Targaryen blood are heading towards King’s Landing. And Martin is, indisputably, American; from a country that doesn’t have a cheery relationship with monarchy. Will Tyrion, Jon and Danaerys abolish the throne and set up a constitutional democracy? Either way, there is the small matter of the White Walkers and their apocalypse before we get to that point.
In almost every fantasy novel – spoiler alert! – if there is a battle between good and evil, evil doesn’t win. But if it does, regardless of how it all ends, my main hope is that Arya is not sacrificed before the end. She is the most fascinating of all. The happiest ending Game of Thrones could have would see her sailing off to the west, in search of new continents.
