OK, so it's not Proust or Trollope. But when times are tough, there is no better distraction than these magical tales
We wrote off our summer holiday this year. On the first day I skidded across a junction in pouring Glaswegian rain, right into the side of a silver Astra, necessitating a change in our plans to reach the Moray Firth. On the second, we found bedbugs in our hotel room and decided to scrap even our revised plans for a Glasgow mini-break. We were back in London little more than a day after we left, just in time for the riots.
I usually cherish my holidays, but I didn't mind at all. A holiday in northern Scotland would have meant unrelenting driving round, trying to find something to keep the kids amused (in temperatures that week barely strayed above 13C). I wouldn't have had any time to do what I wanted: sit by a pool in the warmth and keep ploughing through the series of novels – all 6,500 pages of them – I'd started earlier in the summer. Back home, though, we could go to the lido at Hampstead Heath and I could indulge myself.
I wish I could say the novels that so engrossed me were Trollope's chronicles of Barchester, or Proust, or pretty well anything that didn't involve dragons, magic, wraiths from beyond death, shapeshifting wolves and banished princes. I wish they had been novels I didn't feel the need to slightly cradle when I read them on the tube, for fear the person sitting next to me would lean over and see the rather creaky prose (and the dragons, magic, wraiths from beyond death, shapeshifting wolves and banished princes). I wish, too, that I weren't slightly ashamed about finding myself completely, overwhelmingly hooked on George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.
Fantasy is a silly genre. I thought that at 14 (or four-and-ten, as Martin would have it), after reading Stephen Donaldson's series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. It was so silly I didn't touch it again for nearly 30 years. It wasn't literary snobbery about genre fiction that kept me away: I read plenty of crime and espionage fiction. But I had a deep and abiding distrust of any fiction in which the writer could simply invent something to move the plot along: it seemed the antithesis of rigour (I never got on with magical realism for similar reasons).
Perhaps what you're expecting me to say here is that George RR Martin's novels are different. But they're not. Sure, there are some alterations to fantasy convention (he kills major characters with alacrity; no one is clearly and indisputably good; some of the most forceful characters are women), but there's no getting away from the fact that all five novels are filled with dragons, magic, wraiths from beyond death, shapeshifting wolves and banished princes.
What I discovered reading A Song of Ice and Fire is something I knew when I was a kid, but had forgotten in adulthood. That when things are, on the whole, pretty crappy – worries about family health, about work, about money – it's a deep joy to dive headfirst into something so completely immersive, something from which there is no need to surface from hours at a time. And if that immersion involves dragons, magic, wraiths from beyond death, shapeshifting wolves and banished princes, so be it. George RR Martin, I thank you. Trollope can wait.