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 Feast for Crows

So - moving on to book four of A Song of Ice and Fire and the book with the most misleading title so far. The storyline doesn’t venture to the wall so the reference to Crows, or the Night’s Watch, feels a little wasted.

We are introduced to many, many, many more perspectives and it is another monster of a book coming in at 776 pages. It was so long, in fact, that when I got to the end, I had to reread the first chapter again as the book has framing. In my opinion it seems a bit silly to frame a book of this magnitude, and if I’m completely honest, I still have no idea as to the relevance of Pate’s opening and his cameo appearance at the end, but I’m sure it will become relevant in some later book.

I also felt that the book was too long and makes the same errors as The Sword of Shadows series in that a chapter would get me interested in a character and as soon as I’m hooked, the perspective would change to another character that I wasn’t as interested in.

By now, we already have an established base of characters, most of which I enjoy, with the notable exceptions from my previous review. So I didn’t see the need to introduce yet more characters and also using generic titles such as, The Captain of the Guards. I’m also pretty sure (although it’s a little fuzzy) that a few of these characters only make the one contribution and I have to question the point of this. It seems that the author is keen to tell us every angle of the story whereas some readers would probably like to use their imagination and try to work out the bits they don’t know for themselves.

I don’t understand why the Greyjoy side of what’s going on is documented from three different perspectives in the book. I personally didn’t like this because I think the Ironborn side of it is boring. They seem to be a bunch of people living on a small island who think they are better than everyone else despite having nothing to show for it. If you honestly think drowning someone and then resuscitating them is a good way of making sailors, then you are clearly mental. Their saying, ‘What is dead can never die. But rises again harder and stronger,’ is stupid. What is dead is dead. And doesn’t rise again, unless it is a zombie. Or you are North of the wall.

Other than that, A Feast for Crows is an excellent book in an excellent series and I can’t wait to get stuck into the next one. A Dance of Dragons deals with the other half of the characters and chronologically runs alongside Feast. So that means no Ironborn (maybe) and the return of Tyrion Lannister!

A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin was published by Voyager in 1998. 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 Clash of Kings

So on to book two and another 873 pages of fighting, politics and... fighting and politics. There is nothing wrong with that at all. Quite the opposite in fact; it is a testament to how much a fantastic writer Martin is, as he has managed to develop so many interesting and exciting characters. And some real masters of hypocrisy as well. But I’ll get to that later.

However, my first stopping point was on page 16 when Stannis, Davos and a few others are having dinner. Two women are being discussed and Davos says ‘her.’ I had to read the paragraph several times to work out that Davos was actually talking about Stannis’s wife and not the evil witchy Melisandre. I was thinking that, in a book of over 800 pages, a few extra words to clear this confusion up wouldn’t have hurt.

On page 54, we switch from not explaining enough to stating the clearly obvious. Tyrion lying is like a fish swimming. It doesn’t need to be drawn attention to. In fact, this sort of thing should be left to the reader. Readers would get more satisfaction out of working out whether Tyrion is lying than having the author use unnecessary exposition to tell them.

The next thing is something I’ve been wanting to discuss for a while –the use of ‘a’ and ‘an’ and when it is appropriate. First off, on page 121 the sentence reads, ‘...what a honor it is...’ which is correct on a technical level, however, if spoken it should be ‘an honor’. I’m not sure if this is down to my English background (that’s my being English, not my study of the language) but the use of ‘an’ before most words being with h is encouraged but is not something I wholly agree with. There are only four words beginning with h where it is appropriate to use ‘an’ as a prefix, of which ‘honor’ is one of them. Incidentally, most words that begin with a vowel should be preceded by ‘an’ except for the word ‘eunuch’ which appears as ‘an eunuch’ on page 166.

There are a few other small typing errors, which are to be expected in book of this magnitude, however there is one more punctuation mishap that caught my attention. On page 168, Theon is talking about some inane bullshit, the way that he does, but there was no closing speech mark and then someone else started talking, but the punctuation led me to initially believe Theon was still prattling on.

All that aside it is a fantastic book and one that generated a lot of emotion in me especially towards Catelyn Stark. She made me laugh whole heartedly when she thought to herself, Is there any creature on earth as unfortunate as an ugly woman? I couldn’t help but think of her dead husband or maybe her young crippled son who would never walk again. But no, to Cateyn, Brienne is most unfortunate creature alive because she is ugly! Brienne can kill pretty much anyone in single combat but she is more unfortunate than Catelyn’s own crippled boy who can’t ride a horse unaided and will never be able to walk again.

I found it a rather poor decision that when Robb rides of off with most of the North in tow, Catelyn decides that the best place for her is by his side rather than looking after her two youngest sons who are effectively alone, without any parents, knowing their father is dead, in Winterfell. She is the equivalent of an 18 year old mother of two who leaves her children with her parents so she can go out and get pissed.

So in summary it’s an excellent book with a few minor mistakes in the early pages. Once hooked, I couldn’t put it down and charged straight on with the next one.

A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin was published by Voyager in 1998. RRP £9.99 (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

     

Chris Kuzneski - The Secret Crown

I have to say, The Secret Crown is one of the best book I’ve read in a while. The two lead characters are fantastic and the way interact often verges on real conversations – albeit the closest I’ve seen to real dialogue. There are several instances where they go off on tangents that don’t necessarily drive the story but they do develop the characters. Their personalities come across almost straight away which is a difficult thing to do.

The story itself is also pretty solid, although it feels quite short. There is a lengthy action sequence in the middle of the book and no last minute showdown when it really feels like there should be. All in all, it feels kind of... easy. The hardships the characters face are more like mediumships except for the one gunfight.

There is one major writing issue that kept bothering me. There are a few telephone conversations throughout the 465 page book. These conversations are always – as they should be – from the perspective of the main characters. This should mean that we shouldn’t be made aware of the facial expressions being used by the person on the other end of the phone. It feels a bit lazy. If you are going to have telephone conversations in a book, one of the sacrifices you should make is removing this kind of description, especially if you’ve already proved your dialogue is strong enough without it. You can emphasise the feelings of the other character through the dialogue or even the intuition of the main character.

There are a few other minor inconsistencies. During some scenes in an old bunker in the mountains there are several doors that are hard to spot and open. However, we get the impression that these giant stone doors have been opened recently so it doesn’t make sense that our experienced protagonists struggle to locate the door and even more, cannot open them.

Also these doors appear to be made of stone with no handles and there is no description given of how to close them which surely must have happened before our protagonists arrived.

On the positive side, there are also some real gems in the narrative. On page 111 there is a joke about Mother’s Day cards and what greetings are not used in them which not only broke the forth wall but was also quite funny. Towards the end of the book there is a dig at the Twilight saga in context which, as you can probably tell from previous reviews, is always welcome.

However, the best bit is the author’s note at the end. Chris shamelessly asks readers to buy 10 plus copies of his book to discuss in reading groups. It is a self-deprecating joke and comes across really well.

To sum up, it’s a solid book, very nearly well written with likable characters and a likeable author. So much so that I ordered his back catalogue when I finished reading simply to learn more about his characters – and he won me over with his author’s note.

The Secret Crown by Chris Kuzneski was published by The Penguin Group in 2010. RRP £6.99 (Paperback)

Michael McInyre – Life and Laughing: My Story

Life and Laughing: My Story was a Christmas gift from 2010. As stated on previous reviews, namely Frank Lampard’s trip to McDonalds, I do not agree with autobiographies being written by celebrities prior to the end of their career or even their fortieth birthday. Such is the case for Michael McIntyre – at the time of publishing he was the ripe old age of 34.

This is of course okay if Michael McIntyre’s career had died at the end of his 2009 tour. However, the news tells me that this is not the case. 2012 was his biggest year. He played to lots of people a record for performances at the 02 Arena. I can’t find this information in his autobiography. Why? Because it was written before it happened.

He does make a good point towards the end of the 295 page story of his life so far, in that he didn’t write about after he became successful because it is boring to him. Also the audience probably know all there is to know because why would they buy the biography if they didn't know who he was? This should mean that we won’t see a follow on autobiography, but only time will tell.

Anyway, enough of my personal autobiographical opinion and on to the book itself.

The first thing I noticed was the Americanisation of the book. Now after experimenting with my own word processor, it does not pick up criticising as a misspelt word. Nor does it pick up criticizing either. Whereas neither is recognised as a spelling mistake, I believe that McIntyre, as an Englishman, should be using the English version of the word. Incidentally, when publishing this on here, it highlights 'criticising' as incorrect and also misspelt.

During the first few chapters, the book reads as if he is speaking and feels a lot like his stand up material. This is quite entertaining and would have been really good had he managed to keep it up for the length of the book.  Unfortunately he doesn't and the narrative falls into standard prose interspersed with jokes, some of which fail to work on paper.

The first one of these occurred on page 29 when he starts talking about the countdown theme and how Alan Hawkshaw gets paid for every time the theme tune is played.  There are several problems with the attempted joke;

1. The theme tune is played more than once during the show.
2. The countdown clock doesn’t reset if a contestant incorrectly guesses.
3.  I’m going to guess that Alan doesn’t get paid by the second as my other two point lead me to believe that this joke is a joke for the jokes sake to try to funny as opposed to actually being based in truth.

This isn’t the only time this happens. On page 75 McIntyre describes his old home town of Golders Green as having the following shops; C&A, Wimpy, Cecil Gee, Woolworths and Our Price. This joke is aimed at the fact that all these stores have gone out of business. However, just by chance, there is a Wimpy in my home town of Newton Abbot. Wimpy still exists, it has just reduced the amount of stores it owns. I’m being a bit picky here but my point is that whereas these jokes would probably work as part of a sketch, when they are on paper, they do not work as well as they otherwise would.

There is another example of this when he tells about his wedding on page 257. He says there are no horses coming to the wedding, but they have a horse drawn carriage to take them away from the chapel. It’s another technicality but I would expect a little bit more thoughtfulness to go into this seeing as the author is one of Britain’s best comedians.

Not even Michael McIntyre can make interior decorating funny. He still tries though on two occasions and, in my opinion, fails. It feels a little too much like filler that is trying too hard to be funny.

That said, there are a few golden moments, one of which stood out to me but again, I think it’s poorly placed in a novel. On page 100, McIntyre makes reference to the Andrew Sachs, Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand saga by saying, ‘I’d like to add that Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel, is a very fine actor and I’d like to wish him and his family well,’ following on from the events of October 2008. It is quite funny but wouldn't be relevant in ten years time as, I think, many people would not know what this was referring to and as such, it would no longer be relevant.

The book is very targeted in that anyone who is a big fan of Michael McIntyre would want to read it and for this, it is very good. However, as a writer, he goes off on a lot of tangents and this makes the book hard to follow in places. However, it did encourage me to re-watch his Royal Variety performances, which allowed me to forgive the few writing faux pas’ he makes in this book.

Life and Laughing: My Story by Michael McIntyre was published by The Penguin Group in 2010. RRP £20.00 (Hardback)