Book Review: A Feast for Crows
A Feast for Crows, Book 4 of the Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin.
It’s a good book, but it’s long and it wanders a bit, pointlessly sometimes, it seems. I found out from the Wikipedia link above that Martin had originally written too much to be published, so he divided it into two books, with half the characters in Feast and half in Dance of Dragons, their storylines happening co-currently. That makes sense, as well as why he probably put the weakest book first. When you’re on book 4, your readers are hooked and you might as well put on a stronger finish (although I know Dance of Dragons isn’t the last book) than a weaker one.
The end of the book was loaded with cliffhangers -
[Very, very mild spoiler alert]
Is Arya still messed up? Is Brienne alive? What will happen to Circe? Will Jaime save her? What about Gilly? And none of that addresses things like 'where the fuck is Tyrion?' The dragon-chaining we saw on TV hasn't happened, either. Nor anything about Brand (or Rickon, not that I care about him, but I do care about Osha who was with him).
From the wiki article, the events in the North and East, like Jon Snow, Brand, and Danaerys will be covered in the next book, so that explains them. I can only hope that Tyrion will be featured, too. I now understand why the next season on HBO might address events of both book 4 and 5 simultaneously. The TV show is full of neat stuff not in the book. They compliment each other quite well, yet both are stand-alone storylines in their own right.
Rather than charge ahead to Dance, I think I’ll pick up the hard copy (my ex had purchased all the published books and I have them now) and read what I missed at the end of book 3. Then I might listen to one of the audiobooks for Jack Kerouac and see if I like his work. It was recommended by the author of Art of Learning. That, and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. They’re all fairly short at 6-7 hours. One of Martin’s books clocks in at a more intimidating 30+ hours, so I’ll take a short break before diving back into Dance of Dragons.
Martin does something in this book that Rowling did in her last one - it’s the long, frustrating wandering scene of the hero(es). While I understand why it happens and the realism of it, it’s very boring to read. Even with an author of Martin’s skill or characters as beloved as Rowling’s, it’s still tedious. I know in my own writing I’ve more than once written out a few thousand words of what the characters do to get from point A to B. Once written, I could move on to the exciting stuff at point C. Then on revision, I mention point A and say something like ‘after much struggle, the characters arrived at point C’ and with a single stroke of the delete key, I improve my story 300%. When I saw Rowling make the mistake of leaving in all that boring hiding around in the woods, I thought it was the fault of her reasonable decision not to have an editor for her last book, given the security leaks and high pressure environment. I don’t know what Martin’s excuse was. But really - just because you’ve written something (or something happens to the characters) you don’t have to include it in the finished product. Sometimes the story is all the richer for having the character reflect on little bits of the sections you’ve cut, without ever dragging the reader through the exercise of reading the whole thing. I remember three or four pages in Shattered Salvation that I replaced with ‘the negotiations were tedious’ and then had Gabriel summarize the results for Peter. I don’t recall what I did with the actual negotiations - the long, written-out back-and-forth between a half dozen characters, most of whom weren’t integral to the story but all of which had their own individual agendas and goals. I don’t believe any reader missed it in the story, or even cares. It was important for me to write it out because I had to see how the negotiations would turn out - what the result would be. But the reader only needed to know the result.
Similarly, Martin engages in a couple sections that I feel would have been better summarized than subjecting the reader to the full version. He needs to remember that the ‘delete’ key is as much his friend as his penchant for murdering characters.