AFFC #2: Lots of Talky, Talky, Talky.
Okay, so my first post on AFFC had to do with the silly nicknames. A small point, to be sure, but still a valid one. But today, I want to get down to brass tacks.
As mentioned before, much, if not all, of what I write about in this review of AFFC will be old news to many of you. However, much like a monkey with a microphone, I’ve got everyone's attention, and your job is to read this crap I write, and then point out how wrong I am.
Today’s facet of my series, newly-entitled Authorial Masturbation: How AFFC Stained My Fingers with Printer’s Ink and George’s Jizz, is a big one: namely, let’s talk about all the talky, talky, talky that is going on in AFFC, and as a result, how this book basically goes nowhere.
Now, one of the arguments I hear a lot when I complain about a book in a series being boring, or slow, is “Ooh, but he’s clearly setting stuff up for the next book!” That is a bullshit argument. Writing boring crap is not acceptable under any circumstances. You ever read Silas Marner in high school? Well, I don’t care if Silas Marner 2: The Reaver of Raveloe comes out, and it’s all about how Eppie grows up to be a pscyhotic vigilante, and spends the entire book burning down wealthy homes and cutting the throats of local landowners with a blade forged from her father’s golden stash. In fact, I don’t care if she does all that while riding a spectral horse made of mist and starlight, a horse that allows her to ride between dimensions and wreak havoc on the denizens of the afterlife. In fact, I don’t even care if it spawns a 120-page graphic novel, with page after page of gouged eyes and gaping wounds splashing buckets of crimson death, all gloriously illustrated in full color by the reanimated corpse of Jack Kirby.
Why don't I care about any of these things? Because none of them excuse Silas Marner from being a completely boring and stupid book. Get the picture?
These arguments remind me of a conversation I had once with a friend of mine about the Wheel of Time series, which I gave up on around book 7 or so, but which he bravely continued on with. And when I asked him how the most recent book was going (probably Crossroads of Twilight, or Overpasses of Disenchantment, or something crappy like that), he summed the experience up nicely:
Him: “Remember how in the first few books, people went all these cool places and did all this awesome stuff?”
Me: “Yeah?”
Him: “And then, in the next few books, people didn’t really do anything interesting, but just moved around from place to place?”
Me: “Uh-huh?”
Him: “Well now, they don’t even do that. They just sort of sit around and talk about going places and doing stuff.”
And thus, it is the same with AFFC. I do not want to hear that it is “setting up something big,” because in all honesty, nobody cares, especially me. People are just moving around and talking about stuff. This shit is dull.
To start, let’s talk about Arys Oakheart and his idiotic ride to oblivion. I see this moron off and on for three books, guarding Joffrey and generally hanging around. Then I actually get put inside his head for what, two or three chapters in AFFC, just so I can be privy to his last thoughts when he rides into certain death like an ADHD-rattled twelve year old with a shiny new sword? I mean, aren’t the Kingsguard supposed to have some semblance of intelligence? I know Cersei and her brood stacked the deck a little bit in regards to whom they put in the white cloaks, but in general, this seems like a retarded ending for a guy who has been hanging around since AGOT. Why bother even giving these characters names, if they serve absolutely no real function? Do I really need to read three chapters about this douchebag pining away for Arianne Martell and being obsessed with her large, responsive nipples (more on AFFC and sex in another post) just so he can serve essentially no purpose whatsoever? Christ, George, just start with Arianne being tossed in the cell and be done with it.
And speaking of useless plotlines, we obviously have to talk about Brianne Brienne (insert edit where necessary, I feel lazy). I have to read eight chapters, eight fucking chapters, just for this woman to be a patently obvious plot device. Not sure what I mean? Then let’s examine the James Bond-style, final-showdown-with-the-villain-esque conversation between Brianne and Shagwell at the Whispers, where Shagwell reveals absolutely every necessary piece of information before he dies. When I re-read this book, I honestly couldn’t believe this section. It basically reads something like this:
Shagwell drew his sword, a wicked, nicked blade of rust-pocked iron. “Ready to die, bitch?”
Brianne squared her shoulders, her hands damp on Oathkeeper’s hilt. “Come get some.”
“Oh, I will, you filthy whore. But first, have I mentioned that the Hound has Sansa Stark alive?”
Brianne gasped. “Really? Tell me more!”
“Oh, indeed!” said Shagwell proudly. He hopped over a tree trunk and sat himself down upon it. “Sansa is alive, and they’re going to Maidenpool.”
Brianne sheathed her sword and sat next to him, unrolling a piece of parchment from her satchel. “Could you point it out on a map? I’m a bit lost.”
“Oh sure!” said Shagwell, pointing. “And by the way, did you know Gregor Clegane cut up Vargo Hoat into little pieces?”
“Eeew…” replied Brianne. “Sounds gruesome.”
“Oh, it was,” agreed Shagwell. “It would have made a great scene for any fantasy novel. You know, two major characters together, one of them suffering greatly at the hands of the other. Especially those two, since they’re both such cool and violent characters.”
“Hmmm…” said Brianne skeptically. “I don’t know, I much prefer a scene with two unimportant characters, with one of them just recounting the story after the fact. It seems much less exciting.”
“True,” agreed Shagwell. “A Feast For Crows eschews excitement for pointless meandering and long passages of blatant exposition.”
“Sounds almost as painful as my blade in your throat!”
“Gack!” choked Shagwell, and he died regretting that he never got to tell Brianne that he also knew where to find leprechauns.
And that’s about it. Brianne spends half the book traveling to a completely arbitrary location, with randomly assigned characters, just so she can encounter some other barely-relevant characters who will reveal a bunch of information to her (and us), and then head back to where she came from. And then die. What a monumental waste of my time.
And since I am in full-bore discussion of wasting my time, who wants to talk about Sam? Anyone? Anyone? I can’t imagine why not. After all, if you read AFFC, then that means you just experienced five heart-stopping chapters of a fat kid babysitting an old man and a whiny girl. On a boat! And if that’s not all, he also gave us some great action, what with him slapping a singer around and falling into a moat. And what useful information or advancement of the plot did we, the readers, get from this character? Uhhhhmmmm…. Oh wait, Sam ran into Arya, and he didn’t even know it! Oooh, tres clever, Monsieur Martin, to have your characters cross paths like that. I’m sure everyone who was reading it was thinking the same thing: Sam, you fool! It’s Jon’s sister! Oh my GOD this is thrilling plot manipulation!
Unfortunately, Sam and Arya crossing paths, much like the rest of Sam’s adventures in this book, had nothing to do with anything. Instead, Sam got to be a kind and quiet listener (much like Brianne!) as Old Man Targaryen blathered on and on about Danerys and dragons and prophecies, and the captain of a war galley explains absolutely everything that is happening with the ironmen, and snooooooooooooooooooooozzzzzzeeeee. Sam started out as a somewhat entertaining foil for Jon, with his bumbling cowardice played off of Jon’s skill, and his ass-backwards method of killing an Other helping in the fight against the creatures. But now, Martin has taken a fat and inept character, saddled him with a couple of other inept characters, and tossed them all on a ship for some reason that I cannot actually fathom, except for pure plot exposition and manipulation. Make the first Sam chapter in AFFC a Jon chapter, toss out the rest of the Sam chapters, and replace them with Jon chapters, and problem solved. When ADWD starts, you can have Sam at the Citadel learning to be a maester, if that is at all important to the story.
So in the end, you get the picture. Instead of actually having things happen in AFFC, we had people talking. And talking. And telling us things that we didn’t care about. And telling us stories that we much would have rather seen happen in front of us. Maybe some of you give a shit about the goddamn comet, but honestly, I don’t give a crap about the prophecies or the dreams or any of that garbage. I find all of it entirely overused in GRRM’s saga, to the point where the dreams and prophecies act less like subtle, occasional hints at future events as much as they are hamfisted bludgeons that GRRM beats over our heads, either to deliberately confuse us or to make sure that we GET IT, because maybe his other forty or fifty dreams and prophecies weren’t enough to satisfy us.