CBR III Week 9: A Feast for Crows by George R R Martin

Since I've already reviewed the Song of Ice and Fire books that preceded this one, I'm not going to rehash all the things I said about the series in general. Instead I'm going to ponder whether it was a mistake to release this book or not. A Feast for Crows is, qualitatively, on par with Martin's other writing, but it's gotten some very middling reviews, because it only follows some of the characters we've grown to know and love (if memory serves, they are: Cersei, Jaime, Brienne of Tarth, Sansa, Arya, some Greyjoys, some Martells, and Samwell). Basically, Martin's manuscript got too long for publication and so it got split up into two volumes, by geography, A Feast for Crows being the first. This would've made sense if the two volumes had actually been published together, or within a year of each other, but instead, Martin took the second of these two volumes and expanded it (?) into a whole new fifth volume bla bla bla, which he's still working on. 

I suppose it made commercial sense to do this, since Martin is a relatively slow writer (not that there's anything wrong with that), and Feast is a nice sop to fans. In the end though, it feels like exactly that: a half-baked attempt to maintain reader loyalty that doesn't necessarily make sense in terms of telling the story. Where is Tyrion, guys? Tyrion is like 95% of the reason I'm reading these books. In addition to the cranky-making absence of a dwarf, the format sacrifices a lot of the dramatic irony that makes the series so delightful. If you happen to be making your way through the series, I would advise you to stop at A Storm of Swords, and wait for the next book in the series to come out before reading Feast.

Of the published volumes, I think the first and third are the most effective because they each contain events that are major game changers. They read like Greek plays: their tragedies are on that scale. A Feast for Crows doesn't do much more than build up momentum. 

Can I get a slow clap for the Arya storyline, though? She gets more emotionally complex with every chapter. Martin has made her transition into adulthood painful and fascinating, and I love that there's this potential that she'll grow up to be somewhat of a monster (like "sociopath", not like "Godzilla"). Talk about high stakes.

Molly Recommends: Ambition

Some exciting news for nerds everywhere who have been hypnotized by George R R Martin (like Molly: so sad…all she does is sit in front of a stack of his books, whimpering): A Dance With Dragons (and yes, I DID cringe while writing that, it’s not a great title) has a publication date. July of this very year! Between now and then, Molly plans to totally earn her enormous indulgence by reading some Important Books:

She WILL get to The Unbearable Lightness of Being

She WILL buy and read In Other Rooms Other Wonders, because once, she sat in a bookstore and read the first ten pages of that and it was luminous and delicious and available on Kindle.

She WILL read all the books from my MFA reading list. She never quite seems to get around to the stage and screen texts, because she secretly hates The Theatre, but she understands that this is stupid and makes exceptions for Shakespeare and Martin McDonagh.

She WILL finish Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.

She WILL get The Emigrants back from my father and read it.

She WILL continue to listen to PD James’s and Tana French’s excellent mysteries, because nothing else gets one through a long car ride in such style.

She WILL, once again, try to read Swann’s Way. Her yearly exercise in futility and boredom is once again upon us. One of these years though, she’s totally going to GET IT and just read right through to the end without nodding off every three lines.

Molly’s recently done a little bit of obsessive, frantic googling online research to figure out when the next book in Martin’s series comes out, and discovered that many people have been complaining about the fact that it has taken George R R Martin like six years to finish a thousand page plus book. And by complaining, I mean hurling fiery words of hatred like “you’re old and fat and you need to finish this series before you die”. These people need to stop. First of all, look at him:

People are yelling at a teddy-bear-person, and Molly, for one, is not ok with that. She could bite someone’s face off! Or bark a lot and cower behind her Ana! Whichever! Secondly, George is clearly a writer with ambitions and talent that transcend his much-maligned genre. Molly has the sense that he wants to write something of lasting quality, rather than a disposable book that will have been totally forgotten in a year, displaced by whatever stale iteration of boy-with-magic-sword somebody comes up with next. And that kind of thing takes time. Which Molly is happy to wait.

 

Seriously, come on.

CBR III Weeks 4,5, and 6: A Song of Ice and Fire Books 1-3 by George R.R. Martin

I picked Game of Thrones up as a direct result of all the attention the forthcoming HBO series has been getting on Pajiba, and I’ve been (mostly) really pleased. So much so that I read the next two books in the series (A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords) right after. Song of Ice and Fire is a high-medieval fantasy about the descent of a kingdom (Westeros) into civil war even as it’s threatened by malevolent outsiders, including the Others (ice zombies!), and the arrival of a years-long winter. At the beginning of the story, King Robert—who himself snatched the throne from its previous rightful holder—dies under suspicious circumstances, and two noble houses (the Starks and Lannisters) enter into contest for the Iron Throne. Other would-be kings emerge and soon enough, chaos rules.

Martin hasn’t reinvented the wheel or anything, when it comes to fantasy fiction, but he’s put together a great story in these first volumes of what is really an as yet unfinished mega-novel. In a lot of ways, Westeros feels like it was cobbled together from a catalog of fantasy fiction clichés: there’s the Wall-Type Thing Behind Which Evil and Blight Reside (which you may recognize from Lords of the Rings, or Robert Jordan’s work), there are dragons, there are humanoid beings, and magic. At times, Martin’s commitment to creating an original world can feel a little half-hearted. He’s no Tolkien, you know? But—and this is what’s so great about Martin—it doesn’t matter, because that’s not what the story is about. It’s all about the human drama: the machinations of men and women obsessed with power, the drive to survive, the need to avenge. They could be Tudors. Setting his story in a fantastical world merely serves to liberate him from the strictures of our own history.

There isn’t one character in here that is purely good. Honorable characters are often very foolish, and even many “evil” characters have their odd moments of introspection and kindness. My allegiances changed about as often as the characters’—which is to say constantly—and by the end, I don’t think there was a single person that I had cheered for throughout. Except Tyrion. Tyrion could shake a baby, and I’d still like him. Just as surprising as Martin’s willingness to make his characters complex and unlovable is his willingness to kill them. Even the POV ones*. DUN DUN DUN. It’s that kind of story.  

As a writer (in the technical sense of the word), Martin is serviceable. If he could have used a stricter editor to cut down on purple prose and the occasional pointless digression, well, at least he isn’t constantly repeating himself. I like that: I think it speaks to a certain amount of respect and trust in the reader that is often lacking in genre fiction. In Robert Jordan’s books, for example, about 20% of the text could probably be eliminated if Jordan hadn’t assumed we were all suffering from a tragic case of short-term memory loss. Martin ends almost every chapter at a moment of suspense, which is cheap, but effective. The chapters are short, so I didn’t mind so much.

I’d like to address the question of sex for a second: there’s a lot of it (especially in Game of Thrones), and I would argue that a lot of it is written to titillate, rather than to develop the story. Is the sex part of character development? Absolutely. Did I need every last sexy detail of a thirteen-year-old girl’s…um…rape? No. Frankly, it’s distracting. It’s probably more of a problem of style than the actual content. I’m kind of creeped out by the sense that Martin really enjoyed writing all the sex…it’s like a stranger on the bus telling you all about his fantasy involving a peep-toe heel and a lizard named Elmo, and that’s awkward. Even if it is informative.

I recommend this, overall, if you really like fantasy as a genre, and I can’t wait to see what HBO does with it.

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*I’m the kind of loser who needs to know exactly which character is going to die, or I get so anxious that I can’t enjoy the book. Am I alone in this?