Review: A Dance with Dragons

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Better than the last book, A Feast for Crows; the story finally feels like it's heading somewhere again. I guess it helps that Tyrion, Jon Snow, and Daenerys are finally back to give the plot a sense of direction, as without them the rest of the POV character chapters just feel like aimless, arbitrary distractions (granted, distractions that made for entertaining romps into the world of Westeros- that much I can appreciate). Even Theon's storyline alone in this book seems to accomplish more than the majority of AFFC, though, and what little details mattered from that book are continued in last third of this one anyway.

But at the same time, this book essentially suffers from the same problem that AFFC had: overwriting. In a way, most of the Song of Ice and Fire books have always had this problem, but the original first three had the benefit of taking on a conventional plot structure where their climaxes actually felt like an appropriate reward given (or in spite of) the length of each book.

This is less so with ADWD: Martin wound up writing so much for this and the last book that the major events that this book builds up to (The Battle of Slaver's Bay and The Battle of the North) got moved to the beginning of the next book, The Winds of Winter, and instead we're left with a bunch of cliffhanger moments that make it feel almost as if we've been stopped and left stranded right before the top of the roller coaster. There's no real resolution or conclusion of anything that's happened so far by the end, and given that we've had to trudge through over a thousand pages to get there, it almost feels like a rip-off. I say almost since I'm assuming the next book will come out... hopefully sometime in the next year or two. But you never know.

I recognize that Martin had issues trying to write both this and the last book in a coherent way - hence the splitting of POVs between the books by geographical location rather than making AFFC a two-volume work - but as this became less consistent towards the end of the book and more AFFC character POVs started coming back, it made me realize how flexible the chapter placement in this series is... and how awkward it is to suddenly have random characters turn up who you'd forgotten about from 500-pages-into-the-last-book ago.

I think it would've been more effective if he'd stuck to a normal chronological order and focused on making the character chapters more concise, perhaps condensing some of the aimless exposition details (so much writing about FOOD- no, I'm not interested in how cooked the locusts looked) and even scrapping some of the minor character POVs that barely contributed to the main plot; how many Greyjoy or Dorne character chapters do we really need anyway? Too much overwriting and even the likes of Tyrion or Jon Snow or Daenerys (well, especially Daenerys in this case... unfortunately) will seem whiny and frivolous. And if that happens, this series will lose a lot of what it has going for it.