Game of Thrones: a dark fantasy sheds light on political reality A child has inadvertently discovered a brother and sister committing incest, and is crippled for life in the lovers" attempt at concealment. A bastard son is exiled to the ends of the earth, and sworn to eternal chastity in recompense for his noble father's crime. A princess is sold to a cruel barbarian by her scheming brother in exchange for an army, then watches unblinking as her new husband burns him to death in a "crown" of molten gold. It may sound like Jacobean drama - and in fact, the scheming brother is played by Harry Lloyd, currently starring as the brother of the Duchess of Malfi in the Old Vic - but this is not what is generally understood as high culture. Yet over the past six months, HBO's serialisation of Game of Thrones has become the literary world's guilty secret. How can yet another fantasy involving men with swords and bad hair, soft-porn style sex scenes and dragons possibly be acceptable to anyone over 14? Well, it is. If many of us snigger at the resemblance of the dwarf Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) to Martin Amis, the rest have discovered its complex storytelling as a form of drug. I got onto it after John Lanchester, the distinguished novelist, told me he'd just finished watching it for the second time, and was feeling "bereft," adding, "I think George R Martin is a seriously good writer who doesn't get his literary due, entirely because he writes fantasy, which is somehow, to people who don't read it, inherently ridiculous." It takes real intellectual confidence to admit that fantasy at its best can be an art, because for much of the past century, it has been associated with escapist drivel. Hostility to The Lord of the Rings has been the default setting for generations of Oxford English graduates, still obliged to this day to study Beowulf thanks to Professor Tolkien. George R Martin has been called the American Tolkien, and to admit that you perceive any intellectual or artistic merit in his work is to get a response akin to that in a Bateman cartoon. It is certainly not likely to be to every taste. Like The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil and The Changeling, Game of Thrones is a mesmerising, grand guignol portrait of all that is worst in humanity. The kings, queens, lords and leaders of Martin's world of Westeros manipulate, torture, kidnap, murder and bargain away children and each other in the struggle for power and survival. By turns thrilling, cruel, rampantly sexual, horrifyingly violent and rapaciously political, the novels and TV adaptations are about corruption on a scale that makes The Sopranos look anaemic. "In the game of thrones, you win or you die," as its exquisitely beautiful, infinitely nasty Queen Cersei says. Or, as a child's fencing master tells her: "There is only one god and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: 'Not today." " No character is without moral ambiguity, but all (even a eunuch) are passionate: their loyalties, fears and friendships make you side with them even when they're chopping off somebody's head and swearing obscenely. Unlike Tolkien, the good are capable of bad, and vice versa, and perhaps this is why it exerts such a spell. I myself enjoy good fantasy literature and film, but my husband and daughter find it intellectually repulsive: yet over the Easter Bank Holiday, we all became equally desperate to find out what happens next. Some of this may be due to HBO's high production values, which are those of a major feature film. The actors (which include British stars such as Charles Dance, Iain Glen and Sean Bean), the sets and the script are first-rate. Game of Thrones, inspired by the Wars of the Roses, depicts a world which is fully realised in all its familiarity and strangeness - and which bears as much relation to reality as the Italy of Webster and Seneca. Martin doesn't hesitate to kill off characters we care about, and his hypnotic, labyrinthine world is one in which magic is less a part of its characters" consciousness than loneliness, politics, doomed love, deceit, fear, incest, unexpected courage, duty and compassion. In contrast to the usual unpleasantly Nietzschean tropes of fantasy fiction, it's the children, cripples, outcasts and servants who are truly heroic, while the strong, well-born and beautiful act with monstrous selfishness. Its most engaging character, a dwarf magnificently played by Peter Dinklage, is as articulate, venal and clever as Mephistopheles, but he also perceives what makes us worth taking care of: "Most of us are not so strong. What is humour compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms? Or the memory of a brother's smile? Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory and our great tragedy. If the series lacks the exquisite poetic language in which dramatists like Webster, Middleton and Marlowe revealed the thoughts and feelings of their protagonists, it carries a ferocious conviction as a portrait of politics at its most foul and corrupt. Perhaps it is this which has extended its appeal. Uneasy alliances, inherited privilege, deadly feuds and wars are all closer to us than the polite, minimalist world of Danish politics as depicted in Borgen. We no longer trust our leaders to be noble, disinterested and benign: we feel, on the whole, that as a breed they are less trustworthy, more greedy and less compassionate than ourselves. Just as Jacobean revenge tragedy (which has been enjoying a revival on London stages this year) enacted the inner conflicts of its age, so Game of Thrones dramatises a powerful sense of the plebiscite's anger, disenfranchisement and suspicion on both sides of the Atlantic. It's worth catching, just for that.