Where did winter go?

It seems apt enough to see the back of winter in July, up here in the Northern hemisphere. Especially in Spain, where the temperatures are now regularly in the thirties (no, no, in real money, none of that Fahrenheit stuff). So it was perhaps a good place to watch the end of Game of Thrones, and with it the end of that glorious, sonorous threat that became synonymous with the series, “winter is coming”.

And I should warn anyone who hasn’t seen season 8 that there are spoilers ahead.

Ironically, it was that early catchphrase, “winter is coming” that kept coming back to my mind as I watched the last few episodes. Not because winter was coming, but because I kept wondering “where’s winter gone?” There was snow in the North, but hardly the deep drifts I was expecting. Little more than a powdering on the ground. Elsewhere, any skiing would have been the water kind rather than downhill.

The Queen on her dragon: perhaps not as nice as we thought

This happens in long series. They lose the plot, metaphorically and literally. The first season got some dread going through its vision of the far North with its strange, fierce inhabitants, the Wildings. And there were worse: there were reports, disbelieved by many, that White Walkers were abroad, though they’d not been seen for centuries. It seemed that the coming winter would bring with it not just terrible, freezing weather but fearsome invaders, storming across the Wall built to keep them out and invading the southern lands beyond.

That was all the worse because the implication was that seasons were far longer in that world than in our own. Rather like Ursula le Guinn’s Planet of Exile, where the planet took sixty Earth years to go around its sun, the implication seemed to be that in Game of Thrones land, winter would last years or even perhaps decades. Truly something to fear.

The problem is that the unknown is far more fearful than the familiar. White Walkers were far more chilling while they just shadowy figures we knew little about. But Game of Thrones is TV and eventually its makers felt we had to see what these hideous figures poised to cross the wall looked like. And what were they? Well, walking dead. One of the oldest, tiredest tropes in fantasy writing.

What’s worse, they turned out to be pathetically easy to defeat. All it needed was to take out the chief and his tens of thousands of followers simply broke apart and vanished. All that dread built up from season 1 simply evaporated in anti-climax.

Indeed, the danger from the far north turned not even to be the principal peril facing the main characters towards the end. That’s why the battle against the forces of winter wasn’t the climax of the series, but one battle on the way to a far more devastating one against an enemy in the deep south.

And here’s where the series broke a key rule in this kind of fantasy writing. That’s the rule that you have to be consistent in the way you present characters and their powers. Sure, you’re inventing creatures, but once invented they have to stay the way you invented them.

We’d been told repeatedly that dragons were an irresistible force that would burn up all foes. And yet, after defeating the army of the dead, their Queen flying way high above the boats taking part of her forces south, somehow fails to spot the fleet waiting to ambush them. That’s though the weather is clear and pleasant (“winter has been delayed”). The enemy has massive deck-mounted crossbows known as ‘scorpions’ to shoot down dragons with super-sized arrows, and successfully downs one of them.

What do the Queen and the other dragon do? Well, they look dejected. Especially when most of her boats are also destroyed and one of her closest friends is taken hostage (and, yes, this being Game of Thrones, the chances of survival of someone taken hostage by an enemy are negligible to non-existent). I understand their depression. I find their failure to take any action harder to grasp. Hardly consistent with my view of what a dragon represents in the Game of Thrones universe.

It made me wonder whether dragons were perhaps no good over seawater.

Well, no. Because it wouldn’t be long before the same dragon successfully destroyed the same fleet at anchor, even though by then there were far more of the scorpions ready to defend against dragon attack, both on ship and on land. Indeed, the dragon systematically burns every one of the huge devices to ashes, before going on to burn the entire city.

It could do nothing about the fleet when it had fewer of the weapons but proved invincible when there were far more?

That same lack of consistency governed the character of Arya Stark, who had turned over several seasons from a proud, strong-willed, gutsy girl into a young woman of ruthless determination, the ability to look like anyone she chose, and all the skills of a supremely effective assassin. By season 8, she’s just a brave and resilient warrior, but all those extraordinary abilities have apparently vanished. Arya’s still an interesting character but hardly the redoubtable one she’d become earlier.

To give the series credit, it does subvert the simple good and evil dichotomy which it seemed to be building towards. Indeed, the dragon Queen, leader of the forces of good, ends up doing far more evil than the evil Queen, in the battle to overthrow her. In the end, she too has to die, and at the hands of her lover. That sets up an ending which has the realism of being grounded on compromise. No one gets quite what they wanted, and the sense is not of the launch, Tolkien-like, of a new golden age, but the start of a time to adjust to terrible loss and to set out to rebuild what was grievously damaged.

Still. It feels a little anodyne, a little twee. For once, prisoners are not murdered but are released unharmed, if not to their rightful place. And it all happens under blue skies in pleasant weather. Winter’s gone.

So I ask myself, where did it go?

Oh well. It was a long and entertaining ride while it lasted. Good on surprise, to the point of shock. Good on retaining interest. But a little weak on plot.

Four out of five for fun. On the other hand, three out of five would be generous when it comes to structure. And two out of five for development. 

But hey, that’s a small price to pay for fun.

Ursula le Guin: in memory of an outstanding writer

I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world.

The words are spoken by a representative of the ‘Ekumen’, a federation of worlds, which has as one of its missions to find and make contact with all the far flung colonies of humankind across our galaxy. One of the driving forces for that mission is the knowledge that all of us, in every planet and solar system, are descended from one people, the Hain: the oldest human group with not thousands of years of civilisation behind them, but millions – more history than anyone can take in.

One of the acts of the Hain, at a period of their history, was to set out to populate planets throughout the Galaxy. That’s why there are so many human or humanoid groups out there: two legs, two arms, two eyes and so forth, though sometimes with certain modifications. The Hain introduced those changes, perhaps to adapt a group more fully to its particular environment, but sometimes apparently on no more than a whim – “let’s try this model here”.

So Genly Ai, a native of Earth, is on a planet being contacted for the first time by the Ekumen: Gethen. He is alone, because mobiles – those whose role it is to travel to other planets, as opposed to stabiles who stay behind and manage communications with the mobiles and the associated worlds – always go alone onto a new planet.

The first news from the Ekumen on any world is spoken by one voice, one man present in the flesh, present and alone. He may be killed… yet the practice is kept, because it works. One voice speaking truth is a greater force that fleets of armies, given time; plenty of time; but time is the thing that the Ekumen has plenty of…

However, Genly Ai hasn’t simply made contact with Gethen. He has made contact with just one of the nations of Gethen – unlike so many science fiction novels, where planets speak with one voice, Gethen is still in that primitive state of development where it is divided into nations competing for primacy. So Genly is visiting Karhide, one of the two most powerful nations of the planet. It is run on something like feudal lines, with a king and nobles though far more technologically advanced than feudalism was on Earth. Karhide is the rival of Orgoreyn, the other major power among the many nations of this strange world, in turn run on collectivist lines by a government with seriously autocratic leanings.

But Genly describes the world as strange. Part of that strangeness lies in something else he said – that it was in its Ice Age. Indeed, those who first identified the planet nicknamed it ‘Winter’. Life is only possible in a narrow strip on either side of the Equator; north and south of it, ice extending from the poles presses down threateningly on the peoples making their living in the cold.

Nor is the climate the only strangeness. For Winter was one of those planets where the Hain indulged their taste for playfulness. Gethenians have no gender most of the time; only for a short period each month do they become fertile and, as result, each member of a couple will develop opposite sexual organs allowing procreation – with no rule governing which will adopt which sex. This means than any individual Gethenian can be man or woman at different times, and can father children or give birth to them.

The tragedy of the king of Karhide, for instance, is that while he has fathered heirs, he has never been a mother – he has no heir of his own body.

Karhide, Orgoreyn and above all the ice, which has a major role to play in The Left Hand of Darkness, provide the setting for a gripping, truthful, insightful novel even though it is a fantasy creation, a work of science fiction. And the unusual bi-sexual population, where personality inevitably has no gender-specific features, provides a mesmerising cast of characters to populate it.

Why do I talk about all this now? Because The Left Hand of Darkness is an extraordinary work that shows how much finer science fiction or fantasy can be than many critics allow. As Margaret Atwood, herself a towering figure among today’s writers, it is the creation of “one of the literary greats of the 20th century”. Alongside, among many others, outstanding books such as The Dispossessed, Four Ways to Forgiveness or the series aimed at children but eminently readable by adults, the Earthsea novels.

Just a few of her outstanding novels

Their creator, Ursual le Guin, died on 22 January at the age of 88. She leaves an immense gap in the world of fine and compelling novels, as did Terry Pratchett when he went. The idea that we shall have nothing more from her pen is painful, just as painful as my realisation that I would no longer have my autumn brightened up each year by the arrival of a new Pratchett novel.

Those of us who know her work will miss her. And if you don’t know her work, well, remember it isn’t just me telling you – even Margaret Atwood thinks Le Guin’s outstanding. So, what are you waiting for?

My country right or wrong?

Dr Johnson described patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, but we still seem to treat “patriot” as an inherently favourable term to this day.

It seems to me that George Bernard Shaw got it right, when he said that “patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.”

One of my favourite writers is Ursula Le Guin, whose books present themselves as Science Fiction, but only use the genre as a vehicle for searing insights into humanity.

“How does one hate a country, or love one?” asks a character in one of her best novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, “I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks... but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry?”

A glorious landscape that I love
But if Scotland votes "Yes" it'll be abroad
Should I love it less then?

That’s the central issue. Love of country is closely linked to hatred of other countries. We call the latter nationalism rather than patriotism: Charles de Gaulle claimed that “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.” Curiously, though, I’ve recently had a personal experience showing that how little separates them.

I recently posted about how government, in Britain but not in Britain alone, is reacting to terrorist threats from abroad by trying to weaken key rights at home. An (inevitably anonymous) commenter wrote:

“My god are you the most un nationalistic individual in the entire UK not a single patriotic instinct in your entire body or mind.”

The writer’s tone suggests we can take him for a patriot. Indeed, for a him: his aggression suggests masculinity. Or is it perhaps that I suspect he tends to talk a load of balls?

He feels I have no nationalism or patriotism – note that he makes no distinction – but hasn’t realised that I regard such a judgement as a compliment. Britain isn’t better than anywhere else because I was born there (as it happens, I wasn’t – I’m certainly English by birth, but I was born abroad. Has that influenced my viewpoint? I rather suspect it has).

Britain’s better than many places because, among other things, it has a legal system which aspires, at least, to such principles as the presumption of innocence, and a political system which, when it resists attack from government or a particularly debased press, upholds freedom of thought, speech and assembly. It is no better than anywhere else that tries to apply those principles; and if it gives then up, it will be a lot worse.

We do Britain, or any other country, a disservice when unthinking patriotism allows our leaders casually to take such liberties away.

It seems the author of the comment on my post has grasped none of that. Like Ursula Le Guin, I see no good reason to draw an artificial boundary at a geographical line and stop my love there. That doesn’t stop me loving what is most admirable in my country.

But my country seems intent on undermining much of what gives it most value, a health service free at the point of care, a willingness to look after the vulnerable, a commitment to educate our children. As it seems intent on whipping up a climate of fear to undermine our rights. Just yesterday, the terrorist alert level was raised to severe, though no one expects any kind of terrorist attack and deaths from terrorist action can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand; by contrast, 1730 people died on the roads in the year to june 2013.

However, what David Cameron announced yesterday wasn’t a new initiative against bad driving, it was a move to make it possible to take away people’s passports on suspicion of terrorism. On suspicion.

All this is because of the violent success of ISIS in the Middle East. For which, I might add, the United States and Britain bear a major share of responsibility, through their invasion of Iraq. And yet we surely know which Britons have travelled to fight with ISIS and come back hardened jihadists, ready for action in Britain.

If we don’t know, then I’m at a loss to understand what purpose all that snooping by our spooks serves.

It seems to me that good intelligence is the answer to a terrorist threat – it’s what defeated the IRA in Northern Ireland – not further restrictions on human rights. That may not be a patriotic view, but it’s certainly one that upholds the very values that make Britain worth loving in the first place.

My answer to the anonymous commenter on my blog? Nothing sums it up better than the words of Carl Schurz, the first German-born American to be elected to the US senate:

My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.

If you can’t see that, my dear patriotic critic, you really don’t understand what a legitimate love of country is.