High Fantasy Hangover

An Antandroy man sells razor-sharp throwing spears in Manambaro's market.  No, I did not buy one.

Written April 3, 2012
Manambaro

    This past week and a half I have been reading.  I’ve been working too, adding some cartilage to the bones of a future project on neem cream.  Neem is a tropical tree whose leaves have insect-repellant properties.  The cream is an easy-to-make alternative to bug spray, one more tool in the fight against malaria.  I’ve also been making plans to run a tabletop RPG, and if you don’t know what that is, it’s best left to a surprise.
    But mostly reading A Dance With Dragons, the fifth novel in the Game of Thrones series.  It’s not the best in the series, because it falls just short of A Storm of Swords.  And it is long.  Remember seeing Return of the King in theaters?  Or Pirates of the Caribbean?  It’s like that, in book form: so long you start to wonder just how it can still be going, but at the same time so good you don’t want it to end.
    I think it’s fair to say that I spent more time in Westeros than in Madagascar recently.  And you know you’re in Peace Corps when you start thinking, Tsk, tsk, those peasants in this completely fictional albeit pretty true-to-history medieval fantasy world have too many children.  They need some family planning counseling.
    Serendipitously, the second season of the Game of Thrones HBO show premiered on Sunday night.  Once a digital copy of the first episode arrives here, probably thanks to some intrepid online buccaneer, there’s little doubt it will explode among us PCVs.  That isolation is one of the problems of doing Peace Corps on an island, although I don’t imagine we’re as isolated as South Pacific Volunteers.
    Of course, after you finish such a grand epic, especially one that has sucked up every spare moment of your time with its black hole draw of WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?? you’re bound to feel a little empty inside.  Actually, the feeling is not so different from the one I felt when I left Niger for the cushiness of Rabat.  I’m no longer invested in this world of dragons, knights, and mercenaries, just like I got plucked out of one of desert winds, Muslim ceremony, and my Peace Corps duties.
    So instead of dwelling on the feeling, I began the second novel my dad sent me, Death of Kings by Bernard Cornwell, book six of his Saxon Tales.  It’s about King Albert the Great’s death in 899 and the next step in the Saxons’ ongoing struggle to oust the Vikings from England.  And it follows pretty much the same recipe as most of Cornwell’s other books: the intrigue in the first half only serves to set up the blood-drenched battle scenes in the second half.  Formulaic, but does that matter if it’s a good formula?  If I ever start writing war novels, which would naturally be set in a post-apocalyptic Shenandoah Valley, I hope I can write half as well as Cornwell.
    I’ve also been figuring out my new shortwave radio.  Nothing like a squealing radio on a tropical island to make you feel like Sayid from Lost.  It always takes a while to hunt down the BBC World Service, because it seems to be on different frequencies at different times of the day, but it’s worth it.  Mostly news about the coup in Mali, the violence in Syria, and Japan’s resettlement efforts in the nuclear zone.  I love the BBC for one simple reason: no frivolous news.  No Kim Kardashian, no Fox News fear-mongering, and not a word about Romney or Gingrich.
    Of course, the British are not at all immune from silliness: “I’m coming to you live from the New Forest, in the south of England.  It’ called the New Forest because it was new [very slight pause] when it was established by William the Conqueror [very slight pause] in 1079.”
    But then that story turned into a very interesting piece on local-level environmentalism.  Rule Britannia.