But perhaps, if we pause a little for reflection (a perilous habit for those who would be up to date, for fashion is a Red Queen’s race and you can never afford to stop running), we may find some value in an older and contrary school of thought. Long ago, the necrophilic works of the then young Salvador Dalí forced George Orwell to come to terms with the stark opposition between ‘progressive’ aesthetic sensibility and morals; and he decided, rightly as I believe, in favour of the latter. In ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí’, Orwell wrote: "One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being." The touchstone of Elfland — the most characteristic characteristic of fantasy — is the eversion of symbolism. The One Ring is not merely a symbol of power; it is power. Excalibur is not merely a symbol of kingship; it confers kingship. In these terms, we can say that the recent novels of Martin and Abercrombie (among lamentably numerous others) not only symbolize but are the walls around a concentration camp in Faërie. This is the camp of ‘edginess’, where the gaolers are grimly determined that no memory of sun or moon, tree or flower, stone or sea, goodness, truth, or beauty, shall remain to the inmates, but only the unending, ever-increasing, bloodshot craving for the pleasures of torture and the pornography of pain, suitably euphemized as ‘moral ambiguity’.

One signal difference between the historical wars and Martin’s fantasy version is the role of religion. The Catholic Church, and still more the mediaeval ethic of chivalry, steeped as it was in Christian sentiment, held an unquestioned supremacy in fifteenth-century England. Certain things were simply not done, and public revulsion and swift retribution followed the criminals who breached the code. It is far from certain that Richard III executed his young nephews in the Tower of London, but many Englishmen at the time believed it, and that belief helped to fuel the fresh round of rebellions by which the apparent victor was finally overthrown. Some of Henry Tudor’s partisans at Bosworth Field were motivated by political gain, but others by moral revulsion against a usurping and murderous King; and the ranker soldiers, who did not stand to gain by a change of sovereigns, must largely have had the latter motivation. But in A Song of Ice and Fire, the rather colourless gods of Westeros and their priests, the ‘septons’, neither restrain the slaughter nor even cry out in vain against it. Stannis Baratheon, one of the innumerable pretenders to the throne, imports an outlandish cult of his own, and the more primitive paganism represented by the Targaryens is always on the verge of recrudescence. Religion is nothing more than the complaisant handmaid of politics, and politics is pursued only by the most brutal of means. There is no Parliament, no Kingmaker, no truce that the various sides will honour even for the blink of an eye; only ceaseless war and cynical betrayal.

I started reading Martin’s series because it had been lavishly praised and had sold enormously well, and I wanted to keep myself posted on what the best of my prospective competition was up to. I followed the story through three fat volumes, at which point nearly every character who had ever been known to do a decent or unselfish deed had been brutally killed, and Westeros was in the hands of as pretty a collection of homicidal maniacs as one should ever find outside a maximum-security prison. By the time the fourth volume appeared after a long delay, I found that I just couldn’t care anymore. It was the salting of the land. Harlan Ellison correctly predicted, in the essay quoted above, that the horror genre would implode and all but vanish within two years. My interest in Martin’s carnival of obscenities has already imploded and vanished. No doubt the public taste for this kind of monstrosity will last until the last book of his current series appears in paperback. But here, too, we see ever-increasing gore for ever-diminishing shock value, and the end is already in sight. Either the fantasy genre as a whole will turn away from this obsession with the minutiae of slaughter, or it will follow horror into virtual extinction as a viable commercial category. No trend lasts for ever; and those who bet that it will, and race far ahead of the bandwagon to stake out their places as future parade marshals, are sure to be disappointed when the parade never gets that far. As Harlan Ellison said of the hack writers who drowned horror in its own barrel of fake blood: ‘They won’t desert the ship . . . the ocean will dry up.’

For the really striking thing about splatter fantasy is not its dreary multiplication of pornographic violence, but its abject inability to describe much of anything else. Every reader of The Lord of the Rings remembers the scenery of the Shire and Lórien; Tolkien’s reputation as a writer, as I have said before, rests largely on his skill at describing nature. But there are no Shires or Lóriens, no ordinary life, and not much scenery of any kind, in Camp Edgy. Instead there is the dystopia of 1984, dressed up as utopia: a place where ‘a boot stamping on a human face for ever’ is a good thing — good to contemplate, and good for rousing wholesome entertainment; anybody who objects to it merely because it makes him vomit (let alone moral reasons: what on earth are those?) is damned as a philistine who has not yet discovered what century he is living in. Orwell was fundamentally right about walls; and the walls of Camp Edgy, even if they are the best walls in the world, deserve to be pulled down. I will not go so far as to say that Martin’s and Abercrombie’s books should be burnt by the public hangman: that would give an unearned halo of martyrdom to the authors, and an unholy taste for publicity to the hangman. But we need to recognize that splatterporn is a beast that will devour our souls if we let it; and we need to stop feeding the beast, and instead feed our souls on something that will sustain them. We shall need such sustenance in an age where the obsessive description of acts of despicable evil is routinely mistaken for art.

But in print, where there are no ratings or censors to worry about, it seems that such restraint is passé. George R. R. Martin is a brilliant and accomplished writer, but A Song of Ice and Fire is largely a paean to just the kind of pornographic violence and untherapeutic shock treatment that Ellison so caustically derides. Almost at the beginning of A Game of Thrones, a brother and sister commit incest in full view of a small child, and when they discover that they have been observed, throw him out of the window of a tall tower to get rid of the witness. That book and its sequels do not abound in sex scenes, but when sexual acts are portrayed they are nearly always instances of one perversion or another. We see huge numbers of characters slaughtered, maimed, mutilated, lavishly tortured, assassinated, betrayed to their deaths by their closest allies — a regular litany of ‘realism’.

As recently as November, 2012, Eric Brown was able to write in the Guardian in praise of Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series, saying that Abercrombie was "continuing his mission to drag fantasy, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century with his characteristic mix of gritty realism, complex characterisation, set-piece scenes of stomach-churning violence and villains who are as fully rounded as his flawed heroes." Please note that this is intended as praise — unmitigated praise — even the bit about ‘stomach-churning violence’. Stomach-churning, it happens, is a good physiological description of what I referred to above as ‘objective disgust’. Being revolted until you puke, you see, is good for you now: it is something that you ought to want from a book, and if you don’t, you need to be ‘dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century’ yourself. The horrors of the 20th were not enough; Hiroshima and the Holocaust are, like, so five minutes ago. We shall outdo them all, and you shall like it. That is the gospel according to the up-to-date critic.

One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.