George R. R. Martin - A Dance with Dragons

I’ve finally reached the end of the current published instalments of A Song of Ice and Fire and I’m left with a resounding sense of... mild disappointment. It’s not that this book isn’t great because it is, and it is certainly better than A Feast for Crows which did feel like an epic slog. It’s just that, well... nothing really happened.

I bought the book in two volumes. Dreams and Dust (624 pages) and After the Feast (493 Pages) have a combined length of 1,117 pages and that’s a lot of prose to write without pushing any major storylines forward.

It’s hard to describe my dissatisfaction towards this issue with ruining the books for those who have not read them. Incidentally, this makes it almost impossible to talk about it with my two friends who have read the books when my other friends, who only watch the television series, are around. So everyone will have their opinion on the subject but mine is going to remain very general.

I will, however, express even more dissatisfaction toward the lack of chapters relating to Jaime, who I’ve actually grown quite fond of. It seems that he has some kind of part to play but this isn’t elaborated on at all as all he does is ride around the Riverlands to chat to some minor characters about the King. He’s hardly in it and when he is, he is very under-written.

I have the same criticism towards the Iron Islanders chapters but for different reasons. I don’t like them. I think their whole background is shit and that they are just there to be a minor irritant. All they do during the book is sail. And then sail. And then sail some more. Victarion says some stuff about being from the Iron Islands and that’s about it. But, because of my overall dislike of them, I have to continue to question their overall contribution. I mean, obviously they must have some part to play. But I will be really annoyed of having been subjected to their Drowned God bullshit throughout If they just turn up at some battle and get smashed to pieces by everyone else.

Victarion also has a poor memory or he is poorly tensed. On page 345 of After the Feast, I became really confused. Victarion, while they are sailing, occasionally captures some ships. When he does, he changes the name of the ship to be more to his liking. However when he captures one such ship, the Willing Maiden, and renames it Slaver’s Scream, it is then referred to by its previous name in the following paragraph. It took me a while but I go there in the end. But my confused could have been avoided had the line read ‘the ship formally known as the Willing Maiden.’

There were only two other things that stopped me during reading, so compared to A Clash of Kings and A Game of Thrones it is essentially a very well written novel.

Number one was on page 141 in Dreams and Dust. It’s the first page of a Davos Chapter where we are talking about torches in a hall. ‘Twenty iron sconces were mounted along his thick stone walls, but only four held torches, and none of them was lit.’ I’m pretty sure this sentence does not need the last comma and also it should be ‘were’ instead of ‘was’ as it is referring to four torches, not one.

Number two was on page 370 of After the Feast and is simply a case of mistaken sex. ‘I am beautiful, she reminded himself,’ which I absolutely loved because I fucking despise Cersei Lannister and want to see her die. Without giving too much away, this was one of my favourite parts of both volumes.

Despite what I’ve said above, I really did enjoy the books even if the end wasn’t very rewarding. This is even more frustrating after looking back over publication dates. A Feast for Crows was published in 2005 and A Dance with Dragons in 2011, so it looks like we’re going to have to wait another three years before finding out what happens to some of our beloved characters. And the less beloved ones as well.

A Dance with Dragons bibliography:

A Dance with Dragons – 1: Dreams and Dust by George R. R. Martin was published by HarperVoyager in 2011. RRP £9.99 (Paperback)

A Dance with Dragons – 2: After the Feast by George R. R. Martin was published by HarperVoyager in 2011. RRP £9.99 (Paperback)

George R. R. Martin - A Storm of Swords

Instalment number three of the A Song of Ice and Fire saga is so large that it had to split of over two volumes of 569 and 554 pages respectively.

These two are by far the best books in the series so far, not only in terms of story but also in the quality of the writing. In Steel and Snow the only thing I picked up on was that a character’s name was spelt differently on the same page at one point.

We are also introduced to a new term towards the end of the book when we meet Prince Oberyn, who incidentally is one of my favourite characters. When talking about his... lover, she is referred to as his paramour. This, in itself wasn’t a major problem for me. In fact, quite the opposite. I thought it may have been a term commonly used in Dorne... until it appeared in some narrative from Tyrion’s perspective. I deduced that one of two things had happened. Either Tyrion was so awestruck by Prince Oberyn that he wanted to sound just like him (unlikely) or the author liked the term so much that they had to use it again – otherwise, why hasn’t it appeared previously when describing similar circumstances throughout the other instalments?

Blood and Gold was my favourite of the two volumes. I read it in its entirety in less than a week, (which for me is quick!) the story flowed really well and it was very difficult to put down. The only issues I had in this book were character related and subjective and I also found the answer to my earlier question in the A Game of Thrones review.

Continuing where I left off in A Clash of Kings, Catelyn Stark is just an unbelievable dick in relation to almost everything she says or does. She continually tries to put herself in the middle of things and always makes things worse for everyone involved. She has some classic moments in this book as well.

On page 59, she argues with Robb over his kingly decisions like she has the right of it and even uses her own ‘dead’ sons as a point of argument which is absolutely disgusting. Let’s go back to the fact that these sons might still be ‘alive’ if she had done the right thing and actually gone back to Winterfell to look after the two of them.

This point is really hit home on page 61 where she reflects that being able to use an axe may have given her the ability to better protect her sons and daughters. I’m milking this point but it really is a stupid internal monologue that only serves to highlight her deluded nature.

Incidentally Catelyn’s internal thoughts are not the most irritating of character traits in the book. For that, we need to look to the younger version of Catelyn – Sansa Stark.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS: Towards the end of the book, Sansa is taken away from King’s Landing to the Eyrie. She has suffered nothing but pain and suffering during her time in King’s Landing so her first thought of arriving in the Eyrie is that she was thankful to finally be safe... no, wait, that’s what I thought it should have been. In reality, her first thought is that there is nothing to do and that she would be bored. You have got to fucking kidding me, you ungrateful little shit!

In my review of A Game of Thrones, I was confused about a sentence that read, ‘...have the with the gods gave a goose.’ After reading Blood and Gold, I now know that ‘with’ was actually meant to be ‘wits’! I have had this hammered home because the expression, ‘Have the wits the Gods gave...’ is used in more or less every chapter where Tywin Lannister has dialogue.

The only writing that stood out as a sore point was on page 342 where Jaime is narrating and I couldn’t tell whether he was talking about himself or Barristan. The fact that this is the only writing issue I identified shows how brilliantly written the book is.

If you’ve read the first two books then you should definitely read these. If you haven’t read them though, don’t bother with this one as it will not make much sense, even if you have seen the television series. They are so different that you will have no idea what is going on!

A Storm of Swords bibliography:

A Storm of Swords 1: Steel and Snow was published by Voyager in 2000. RRP £8.99 (Paperback)

A Storm of Swords 2: Blood and Gold was published by Voyager in 2000. RRP £8.99 (Paperback)

George R.R. Martin - A Game of Thrones

After many, many people started creaming their pants about the television series, I saw this book on the counter at GameStation and thought, ‘Why not? Let’s see what all the fuss is about.’ So I took it. In exchange for money.

I’m ashamed that it is one of the only books I own that has the television cover on it, which is also annoying because all the rest of the books I’ve bought in the series do not having matching covers which is something I will struggle to live with.

While the TV series was enjoyable, the books are so much better. In terms of character building and story telling the narrative is well developed and the dialogue tells you so much about the type of person the character is.

I didn’t make any notes over the first 375 pages which shows how cleanly written it is, however after this point, it suffers from Stephen King’s Carrie syndrome as the writing completely falls apart. It was like the first 300 pages were submitted for publication and then the rest of it was just rush written with little editing.

For example at the bottom of page 376 there is a piece of dialogue that I still cannot understand; ‘Mind you, Princess, if the lords of the Seven Kingdoms, have the with the gods gave a goose...’ Can someone please tell me what this is supposed to mean? It’s clearly a typing error of some sort but it makes the dialogue meaningless which is unfortunate at best.

There are loads of other little ones that don’t have that much of an impact; an additional ‘e’ on ‘gather’ or ‘withing’ instead of ‘within,’ and a few additional punctuation errors but nothing too major.

One did make me laugh though. On page 451, one of the more casually written pages, George is writing about a character called Karyl, yet the spelling in the book of this character changes to ‘Kary!’ I’m not a hundred percent sure how this happened. The book was written in 1996 so I can only assume the author was using the standard keypad, but the ‘L’ key and the ‘!’ key are fifteen centimetres apart on my laptop keyboard so that’s quite the jump to make.

On page 481 we have the case of the overused description. In this instance, I will assume that most people have seen the series however, one of the characters is killed after he is mean to his sister and the narrative describes him as ‘the man who had been her brother’ far too often, thus it loses its impact.

There were a few instances of out of place narrative as well, one of the most funny being on page 718 where Sansa is confronted by Joffrey, has an emotional breakdown, and then describes his clothing – just like any normal person would do. The book is 780 pages long. I don’t think we need to know what the boy king is wearing in the middle of an intense scene. It would be fine has this been written from an omniscient narrator but we are effectively in Sansa’s head after she is talking about her father being killed. I don’t think she would stop to assess  Joffrey’s current fashion trend.

One more thing that I found puzzling more than annoying was trying to understand how the Night’s Watch works. John Snow joins the Night’s Watch by choice. Most people are taken there because they are given the choice of the Night’s Watch or death. Now, if you choose to join, does that mean you are allowed to keep your pet wolf? I wouldn’t have expected the Night’s Watch to be the kind to allow pets. Certainly no other recruits have this luxury so why is John Snow allowed to keep his direwolf with him at all times? It isn’t even restricted to kennels - it sleeps with him in his room! It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me but I’m sure it’s okay because it’s necessary to drive the story. In case you can’t tell the previous sentence is sarcastic.

I would recommend reading A Game of Thrones even if you have watched the series. I’ve heard the argument previously of ‘there’s no point reading what you can watch on TV.’ But this statement is bollocks at the best times and even more so in relation to these books.

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin was published by Voyager in 1996. RRP £8.99 (Paperback) 

The version I wish I owned