The stables are full of bones

On the recommendation of a friend, I started reading George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones”. I’m not sure I like it — in essence it’s “The Office” with broadswords — but there are moments where the deliberately archaic writing achieves a lovely poetry.

I especially like a line I just stumbled upon: “The ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of bones.” This sentence has an elegant air of wistfulness. It sounds like the reminiscence of a old knight who has known happier times. In fact it is spoken by a young boy, while recounting a dream.

One of the fun things about the fantasy genre is the permission it gives an author to blur the line between the actual and the poetically imagined. In a world where dragons are real, and a well timed magic spell might change the course of political history, there is no clear bright line between the dreams that trouble a character’s sleep and the waking world where he or she lives.

Unfortunately, this very freedom seems to create its own restrictions, by encouraging a set of genre conventions that are in some ways more rigid than the strictures of kitchen sink realism. Apparently when magic rules the world, then such considerations as class distinction — particularly the accident of one’s parentage — become as unyielding as fundamental laws of physics.

I wonder whether there is some sort of conservation law at work here. The more freedom of movement is allowed between dream and reality in a fictional world, the more rigid and unyielding is its social order. The castles in these worlds are lovely indeed, but the stables are full of bones.