I am feeling rather guilty. For the past few months, for various reasons, I haven’t felt much like reading history or Dickens. Faced with a long, arid series of plane journeys on which I knew I would not sleep, and equipped with an e-reader, I shamefacedly uploaded some ‘good bad books’, as George Orwell once called them.



This expression is probably very unfair on the authors, involved, George R.R. Martin (‘Game of Thrones’) and Stephen King (’11.22.63’). I wish I had their imaginative sweep and their ability to keep me reading for hours on end. What’s bad about that?



Neither of them pretends to be Tolstoy, and (thank heaven) neither of them is in competition with Virginia Woolf either. But both have obviously read widely, know a great deal of history, and have an enviable skill with words.



Yet I still have a deep cultural prejudice against admitting to reading such things. I should probably get over it.



‘Game of Thrones’ (I have not seen, and do not plan to see, the TV version, which is bound to be far less spectacular and or interesting than the books) is clunkier than King’s book. George Martin’s American English idiom (see my previous posting) is too modern and bare to suit some of the scenes and characters in an epic which is set in a sort of Middle Ages, in a world quite like, but also very unlike, Europe and Asia.



But setting aside some moments of ‘he couldn’t possibly have said that!’, and passing lightly over Mr Martin’s rather deep and intricate interest in food, his generous use of certain four-letter words and his perhaps over-detailed descriptions of various forms of cruelty, the story so far is really rather good. The world he has invented, out of an enormous imagination is crucially, unChristian. Its various religions, which we learn about in a sideways fashion, often involve sacrifice. There’s even a semi-secret cult of assassins and suicide. The main faith has seven holy figures who seem to have something in common with the Graeco-Roman gods. But it also has no classical civilisation, equivalent to Greece and Rome, in its past.



But the merciless paganism of the pre-Islamic East, full of slaves, and dreadful deeds done under a cruel sun, still lives among the sinister, spectacular and terrifying cities of Martin’s East. These places are a tremendous achievement of imagination (I couldn’t help thinking that he had been influenced in this by the wonderful works of Mary Renault, whose evocation of the Classical world sometimes produces a similar feeling of visiting a planet where hope and kindness have yet to be discovered).



While to the north there lies a nameless menace among the deep, deep snows, which, as far as I have got in the story, has barely begun to awake.



The supernatural – real dragons, armies of the walking dead, necromancy and shape-shifting, play a sensibly small part in the story, which I am told is broadly modelled on the Wars of the Roses, between the Houses of Lancaster and York, in the English middle ages.



In fact the most terrible monsters are human, because what Martin is very good at describing is the shocking ruthlessness of naked power politics, unrestrained by law or God. He draws his characters cunningly, tempting the reader to misjudge them and showing them a wholly different aspect as events unfold.



I might add that he is unsparing in his description of the real cost of war, particularly to innocent people who have no power. And, as I said, I am impressed by the richness, originality and detail of Mr Martin’s imagination, which (I would guess) encompasses far more geography, genealogy, philosophy and history of his private world than he has shared with his readers).



What can it be compared with? Nothing that I know of. Tolkien is far more literary and poetic, and his work is written in an entirely different register. And ‘the Lord of the Rings’ can be read by children, which ‘Game of Thrones’ certainly cannot be and shouldn’t be. (Tolkien can also be read by adults, who, even if they first read him as children, will be surprised by how much they gain from going back to the book in later life).Above all, Tolkien seems to me to have a profound and positive moral aim, to warn against the worship of power.



Martin does this negatively. Is it intentional? I am not sure. By showing what people do when they are fighting for power, the lies they tell, the mercy they fail to show, the surprises they arrange; by showing that those characters we like most are often not very good at this, whereas the hateful succeed –and by describing the exercise of power and its consequences, he builds up an indictment of power as strong as any I have ever seen.



And by trying to describe a society which prays, and has a religious hierarchy, scriptures and beliefs – but is definitely not Christian – he makes the thoughtful reader wonder if this is a picture of a world that was never saved, and perhaps never will be. If this is so, then I think it is a) frightening and b) instructive.



I have never seen a review of these books in a major newspaper or magazine. (I can’t actually recall how I heard about ‘Game of Thrones’ or decided to try it). Perhaps I have missed the reviews, but I suppose the literary industry feels it is above such stuff. Maybe it is. But if so, it must fall to other people to discuss them, as they are read by many people and must influence the way in which they think.



Stephen King does not get reviewed much in the grander journals, either, though some American publications treat his work with a certain respect. He’s obviously a highly intelligent and thoughtful person, and his latest book (I have read very few of his works) is a beguiling piece of time travel.



His hero (a New England schoolteacher) is given the chance to go back in time to 1958 and undo a series of tragedies. The greatest of these is the assassination of John F. Kennedy on 22nd November 1963, the reason for the title.



Does he succeed? How? I won’t spoil it for you. But for me the most interesting feature of the work was King’s elaborate attempt to recreate the wholly different America of the end of the 1950s. King ( by no means a crusty conservative) almost (but not quite) portrays this period as, yes, a Golden Age – especially of trust, but also of food that tasted better, of money that was still worth something , of an economy where people still made things, and used the things they made in modest but comfortable lives.



There’s a particularly moving and telling part of the book where he heads south along the unmodernised highways of the time, which I recommend, not least because after some rather moving descriptions of a lost but recent past, at a Dixieland petrol station he follows the sign for the ‘colored’ lavatories, and finds a pathway, flanked with poison ivy, leading to a plank over a stream.



There you have it. You have the one. You have the other too, not to mention the endless smoking, the crude medical care and the filthy, polluted air in industrial districts, and some harsh, disturbing evocations of slum life in the suburbs of big southern cities. One American reviewer, Marian Kester Coombs in the excellent ‘American Conservative’ magazine for which I occasionally write, says King is quite wrong about swearing in pre-1963 America, which was far more taboo then that he seems to think. I suspect she is right.



Despite all this dark-side material, I get the impression that King was quite taken with the world he recreated, and was strongly tempted to stay there himself. Does his hero? You’ll have to read it to find out. A lot of people will read it. This book will have more impact on the way more people think than a whole pile of literary prizewinners. It should be taken more seriously, and more widely discussed, even if the book reviews are probably the wrong place. I’m not sorry I read it.