Review: A Dance With Dragons
As stated in my previous post, the book doesn't really pick up until around page 562--which is the end of a chapter. And by "pick up" I mean "the endless repetition stops, and events actually start HAPPENING."
Regrettably, most of these events take place offscreen and end in pointless cliffhangers.
It's as if there are two books which have been jammed between two covers. There's the first book, in which GRRM proves that he can write a travelogue just as tedious as the notorious camping trip from Hell. Everyone is walking or sailing somewhere, the weather is bad, no one has any money or any men, and there are no end of scenes mentioning every food and beverage available. Oh, and pissing. Can't forget the pissing. GRRM never does.
Dany and Tyrion's personalities appear to have been surgically removed. Remember the strong and determined khaleesi who walked through fire to hatch her dragons and who recognized that bloodlines weren't enough and that she needed to learn how to be a queen? Remember the proud, intelligent, self-deprecating man who used his mind and his sarcastic tongue as weapons and who was one of the most politically capable characters that we've seen?
Yeah. They don't exist any longer. The replacement Daenerys Targaryen is indecisive, confused, easily led, spends most of her time thinking about clothes, boys and marriage--I'd call her Targaryen Princess Barbie if it weren't for the fact that she's also NEGLECTING TO TRAIN HER DRAGONS. Why? Because she doesn't know how. Never mind that two books ago, she figured out how to train Drogon, Viserion and Rhaegal to respond to the word meaning "freedom." Now--well, the dragons are too big, so she's going to just shove a couple of them in a dark pit for the entire book, because that won't make them angry or anything.
And the replacement Tyrion? Well, he's still sarcastic but not nearly as bright. He spends most of his time focusing on food and the fauna of the river that he's traveling on. He's insecure, confused and--weirdly--acting as if being a jester to be ridiculed is something to be embraced. He's become obsessed with his father's last words, and treats his whole escape from Westeros as if he's not a fugitive patricide but a passenger on a pleasure cruise.
Jon Snow actually does stuff in this--or tries to do stuff, because, like most of the book, Jon's chapters suffer from creeping inertia. Jon is thwarted in his attempts to protect not just the Watch and the people down south but also the wildlings by both his brothers in the Watch (who can't quite wrap their minds around the concept that wildlings are PEOPLE) and by Queen Selyse (who thinks that it would be much better for the wildlings to die off and be reborn as R'hollr's worshippers). No one save Jon seems able to face the concept of "The dead aren't STAYING dead, and if we don't protect the wildlings, we'll have that many more undead wights to fight."
The first half of DwD also includes a lot of scenes which appeared in the previous book from another character's point of view. This can be used to great effect if the two characters in the scene are seeing what's happening in two completely different lights. However, in this case, there is little difference. GRRM has effectively just C & P'd "Alaric said" in place of "Bob said."
And speaking of Bob--Dragons is crammed with "As you know, Bob" dialogue and narrative. Davos' and Daenerys' chapters are particularly bad; oftentimes I felt as if I was at a review site, reading a recap of the four previous books. The last chapter summarizes Dany's entire history, even though it's been mentioned at least seven or eight times prior to this. Tyrion's story, too, gets recapped. Oh, and we're reminded a few billion times that Tyrion killed his father. Just in case we forgot or anything.
Catchphrases, too, are over-fondled. These show up frequently:
"Where do whores go?" (Tyrion's chapters.)
"Reek, Reek, it rhymes with [rhyming word]." (Reek's chapters.)
"The night is dark and full of terrors." (Jon's chapters and Melisandre's chapter.) The ritual of R'hollr's nightfires, copied and pasted in its entirety ad nauseam, sounds dramatic at first, but it gets repeated so often that it starts to sound silly. Barring lands with midnight suns, most nights aren't known for being light.
And then there's the second book, which starts two-thirds of the way in and in which all the questions that people have been asking for years start getting answered very fast. It's as if someone pointed out to him that the book was just puffery and that the fans were going to want to find out SOME things they'd waited six years to learn. Some fairly key scenes get skipped over, too.
Also, practically every "answer" scene ends on a cliffhanger, or what's intended to be a cliffhanger. They could not scream, "You'll have to buy the next book to find out what happens!" any louder.
I've been going through everything with a mental red pen, too. At least 90% of the first 500 pages could have been cut down to a manageable size--from several chapters to one chapter, from one chapter to a paragraph or two. I have a feeling that GRRM fought the editor on this one. A LOT.
There are also a fair number of inconsistencies. Before, the silent sisters were described as the equivalent of contemplative nuns who take a vow of eternal silence. In this book, we're overtly told that a father saying to an eleven-year-old girl, "I'll give you to the silent sisters and then you'll never speak again" means that he was telling his daughter that she'd have her tongue cut out. Greyscale was one word before--now it's "grey scale." Before it was an illness that killed some children in the cradle and disfigured others, like Stannis Baratheon's daughter, Shireen. Now it's the Westeros-and-Free-Cities equivalent of leprosy, a disease which slowly transforms people into stone--such an illness does exist in the real world, but I think that Martin was just trying to come up with something that fit Shireen's scars. In fact, greyscale, or grey scale, is now so feared that one sufferer dares not reveal his illness lest his friends turn against him and even those who have the scars are shunned. It was stated before that Tywin Lannister's father, Tytos, so extravagantly wasted the Lannister fortune on a string of whores as to leave Tywin with a hatred for prostitutes and a horror of being laughed at; now Tytos had one mistress that he treated like a wife. And so on. Martin may be trying for unreliable narration, but frankly, it doesn't come off that way.
Rape comes up in this book quite a bit. It is not handled well. One female character who likes power and who was raised in a society where one rape would be enough to rob a woman of power nevertheless plays rape fantasy games with her lover--and in a way that doesn't indicate immediately that this is a game and not the real thing. The character starts out fighting the "rapist" tooth and nail--and then starts behaving as if she likes being raped.
Yeah. Just a LITTLE problematic.
But that's typical. The rape of women is treated by every male character (and a fair number of female ones) from every culture, no matter how different those cultures may be, no matter how favorable toward women the characters or the cultures have been shown to be previously, as something that just inevitably happens to women, whether there's a war or not. There are perhaps two or three nobles who geld or hang men for committing rape, and they're considered very strict for even considering that rape is a crime deserving of punishment. (And since one of those "strict lords" told a character in the last book that she needed a good raping and was probably going to get one...well, I'm not convinced he's all that disapproving.)
It's also stated overtly that rape is a crime of lust--and a female character says this. Here, have a quotation. You'll see what I mean about recapping and problematic ideas:
On the day Myrcella sailed for Dorne, the day of the bread riots, gold cloaks had been posted all along the route of the procession, but the mob had broken through their lines to tear the old fat High Septon into pieces and rape Lollys Stokeworth half a hundred times. And if that pale soft stupid creature could incite the animals when fully clothed, how much more lust would [she] inspire?
For the record, Lollys Stokeworth is canonically thirty-three, unattractive and simple-minded. Definitely not someone who inspires lust in anyone who looks at her.
Men are also raped in this book and also get blamed for driving men to rape them (generally by being clean and by having a slender build rather than a muscular one), but their rapes are treated very differently from those of women. One man is told that if he tries to flee captivity, the captain of the ship he's on will "give his ass" to the sailors. Another poor guy gets gang-raped repeatedly, asks one character to help restrain the rapists and is given a dagger instead. The implication is clear: women are just supposed to accept rape as inevitable, while a man is supposed to kill his rapists and then kill himself from shame.
Given that that's the attitude toward homosexual rape, you'd probably guess that homosexuals don't come off too well in this book. And you'd be right. A former gay hooker who's serving on the Wall is loathed by the thieves, rapists, murderers, soiled knights and the rest of the wretched refuse that comprises the Night's Watch because, horrors, the kid was once a gay hooker! Jon Snow tries repeatedly to point out that the boy is bright, brave and a good archer, and that all crimes are wiped out when a man comes to serve at the Wall, but the bigots aren't having any. Exactly why this is worse than any other crime that gets men sent to the Wall, and why anyone would care, given the fact that there isn't enough food, the Wall is insufficiently manned, and they're going to end up fighting undead corpses and Others, I couldn't say.
Male sex slaves--slaves who have been bought by a brothel, so what they do and where they're going isn't their choice--don't fare any better. They're chained together and drowned in the sea. Why? Because they're "unclean." Their killer never gives them an option NOT to be slaves or hookers, but to him, that doesn't matter.
Is this IC for their killer? It's...hard to tell. Last time, he seemed like a fairly reasonable and not at all showy man. Now he's burning female prostitutes alive and drowning male ones as holy sacrifices. Even though his desire to appease the gods is explained internally, it still doesn't explain why he sees people who have no choice in their livelihood as "unclean."
And then there's the equally problematic view on slavery, expressed by a character sold as a slave:
There has never been a slave who did not choose to be a slave, [he] reflected. Their choice may be between bondage and death, but the choice is always there.
Is it me, or does that sound a LOT like blaming the victim? It's not those who capture or sell slaves, the owners, the overseers, the guards who pursue escaped slaves, the threats of non-lethal but permanent punishment from owners, or the culture that mandates that slaves exist. It's the SLAVES' fault that they're slaves?
And this comes at the end of the book and presented as a serious revelation to the character about slavery and about himself.
Now, do I have anything good to say about this book? Yes. I do like the answers to questions, cliffhangers or no; some are satisfying. Martin's depiction of mutilation, torture and the resultant Stockholm syndrome was exceedingly well done. It was horrifying and unpleasant to read, but it was portrayed with painful, all-too-believable clarity. Jon Snow, my all-time least favorite character, improves dramatically. I enjoyed most of the chapters with female characters, especially Arya's. Once Martin finally gets going, he tells the story pretty well.
But this isn't enough to outweigh the problems.
I do not blame the editors for this. Martin announced that he was done on April 28, 2011. The book was released on July 12. I suspect that the editors did not have the time to edit this 1016-page novel the way it needed to be edited. Also, given how long fans have been waiting for this book, the publishers and the editors may have been reluctant to ask Martin to spend any time rewriting, as the delay caused by a massive rewrite would have thrown the publishing schedule off--and would have further convinced the fans that this book would never be published.
But I do blame Martin. He had six years to complete and polish this book. It didn't have be padded, bloated, repetitious, lacking in continuity or problematic. He can write far better than this, and has.
Regrettably, most of these events take place offscreen and end in pointless cliffhangers.
It's as if there are two books which have been jammed between two covers. There's the first book, in which GRRM proves that he can write a travelogue just as tedious as the notorious camping trip from Hell. Everyone is walking or sailing somewhere, the weather is bad, no one has any money or any men, and there are no end of scenes mentioning every food and beverage available. Oh, and pissing. Can't forget the pissing. GRRM never does.
Dany and Tyrion's personalities appear to have been surgically removed. Remember the strong and determined khaleesi who walked through fire to hatch her dragons and who recognized that bloodlines weren't enough and that she needed to learn how to be a queen? Remember the proud, intelligent, self-deprecating man who used his mind and his sarcastic tongue as weapons and who was one of the most politically capable characters that we've seen?
Yeah. They don't exist any longer. The replacement Daenerys Targaryen is indecisive, confused, easily led, spends most of her time thinking about clothes, boys and marriage--I'd call her Targaryen Princess Barbie if it weren't for the fact that she's also NEGLECTING TO TRAIN HER DRAGONS. Why? Because she doesn't know how. Never mind that two books ago, she figured out how to train Drogon, Viserion and Rhaegal to respond to the word meaning "freedom." Now--well, the dragons are too big, so she's going to just shove a couple of them in a dark pit for the entire book, because that won't make them angry or anything.
And the replacement Tyrion? Well, he's still sarcastic but not nearly as bright. He spends most of his time focusing on food and the fauna of the river that he's traveling on. He's insecure, confused and--weirdly--acting as if being a jester to be ridiculed is something to be embraced. He's become obsessed with his father's last words, and treats his whole escape from Westeros as if he's not a fugitive patricide but a passenger on a pleasure cruise.
Jon Snow actually does stuff in this--or tries to do stuff, because, like most of the book, Jon's chapters suffer from creeping inertia. Jon is thwarted in his attempts to protect not just the Watch and the people down south but also the wildlings by both his brothers in the Watch (who can't quite wrap their minds around the concept that wildlings are PEOPLE) and by Queen Selyse (who thinks that it would be much better for the wildlings to die off and be reborn as R'hollr's worshippers). No one save Jon seems able to face the concept of "The dead aren't STAYING dead, and if we don't protect the wildlings, we'll have that many more undead wights to fight."
The first half of DwD also includes a lot of scenes which appeared in the previous book from another character's point of view. This can be used to great effect if the two characters in the scene are seeing what's happening in two completely different lights. However, in this case, there is little difference. GRRM has effectively just C & P'd "Alaric said" in place of "Bob said."
And speaking of Bob--Dragons is crammed with "As you know, Bob" dialogue and narrative. Davos' and Daenerys' chapters are particularly bad; oftentimes I felt as if I was at a review site, reading a recap of the four previous books. The last chapter summarizes Dany's entire history, even though it's been mentioned at least seven or eight times prior to this. Tyrion's story, too, gets recapped. Oh, and we're reminded a few billion times that Tyrion killed his father. Just in case we forgot or anything.
Catchphrases, too, are over-fondled. These show up frequently:
"Where do whores go?" (Tyrion's chapters.)
"Reek, Reek, it rhymes with [rhyming word]." (Reek's chapters.)
"The night is dark and full of terrors." (Jon's chapters and Melisandre's chapter.) The ritual of R'hollr's nightfires, copied and pasted in its entirety ad nauseam, sounds dramatic at first, but it gets repeated so often that it starts to sound silly. Barring lands with midnight suns, most nights aren't known for being light.
And then there's the second book, which starts two-thirds of the way in and in which all the questions that people have been asking for years start getting answered very fast. It's as if someone pointed out to him that the book was just puffery and that the fans were going to want to find out SOME things they'd waited six years to learn. Some fairly key scenes get skipped over, too.
Also, practically every "answer" scene ends on a cliffhanger, or what's intended to be a cliffhanger. They could not scream, "You'll have to buy the next book to find out what happens!" any louder.
I've been going through everything with a mental red pen, too. At least 90% of the first 500 pages could have been cut down to a manageable size--from several chapters to one chapter, from one chapter to a paragraph or two. I have a feeling that GRRM fought the editor on this one. A LOT.
There are also a fair number of inconsistencies. Before, the silent sisters were described as the equivalent of contemplative nuns who take a vow of eternal silence. In this book, we're overtly told that a father saying to an eleven-year-old girl, "I'll give you to the silent sisters and then you'll never speak again" means that he was telling his daughter that she'd have her tongue cut out. Greyscale was one word before--now it's "grey scale." Before it was an illness that killed some children in the cradle and disfigured others, like Stannis Baratheon's daughter, Shireen. Now it's the Westeros-and-Free-Cities equivalent of leprosy, a disease which slowly transforms people into stone--such an illness does exist in the real world, but I think that Martin was just trying to come up with something that fit Shireen's scars. In fact, greyscale, or grey scale, is now so feared that one sufferer dares not reveal his illness lest his friends turn against him and even those who have the scars are shunned. It was stated before that Tywin Lannister's father, Tytos, so extravagantly wasted the Lannister fortune on a string of whores as to leave Tywin with a hatred for prostitutes and a horror of being laughed at; now Tytos had one mistress that he treated like a wife. And so on. Martin may be trying for unreliable narration, but frankly, it doesn't come off that way.
Rape comes up in this book quite a bit. It is not handled well. One female character who likes power and who was raised in a society where one rape would be enough to rob a woman of power nevertheless plays rape fantasy games with her lover--and in a way that doesn't indicate immediately that this is a game and not the real thing. The character starts out fighting the "rapist" tooth and nail--and then starts behaving as if she likes being raped.
Yeah. Just a LITTLE problematic.
But that's typical. The rape of women is treated by every male character (and a fair number of female ones) from every culture, no matter how different those cultures may be, no matter how favorable toward women the characters or the cultures have been shown to be previously, as something that just inevitably happens to women, whether there's a war or not. There are perhaps two or three nobles who geld or hang men for committing rape, and they're considered very strict for even considering that rape is a crime deserving of punishment. (And since one of those "strict lords" told a character in the last book that she needed a good raping and was probably going to get one...well, I'm not convinced he's all that disapproving.)
It's also stated overtly that rape is a crime of lust--and a female character says this. Here, have a quotation. You'll see what I mean about recapping and problematic ideas:
On the day Myrcella sailed for Dorne, the day of the bread riots, gold cloaks had been posted all along the route of the procession, but the mob had broken through their lines to tear the old fat High Septon into pieces and rape Lollys Stokeworth half a hundred times. And if that pale soft stupid creature could incite the animals when fully clothed, how much more lust would [she] inspire?
For the record, Lollys Stokeworth is canonically thirty-three, unattractive and simple-minded. Definitely not someone who inspires lust in anyone who looks at her.
Men are also raped in this book and also get blamed for driving men to rape them (generally by being clean and by having a slender build rather than a muscular one), but their rapes are treated very differently from those of women. One man is told that if he tries to flee captivity, the captain of the ship he's on will "give his ass" to the sailors. Another poor guy gets gang-raped repeatedly, asks one character to help restrain the rapists and is given a dagger instead. The implication is clear: women are just supposed to accept rape as inevitable, while a man is supposed to kill his rapists and then kill himself from shame.
Given that that's the attitude toward homosexual rape, you'd probably guess that homosexuals don't come off too well in this book. And you'd be right. A former gay hooker who's serving on the Wall is loathed by the thieves, rapists, murderers, soiled knights and the rest of the wretched refuse that comprises the Night's Watch because, horrors, the kid was once a gay hooker! Jon Snow tries repeatedly to point out that the boy is bright, brave and a good archer, and that all crimes are wiped out when a man comes to serve at the Wall, but the bigots aren't having any. Exactly why this is worse than any other crime that gets men sent to the Wall, and why anyone would care, given the fact that there isn't enough food, the Wall is insufficiently manned, and they're going to end up fighting undead corpses and Others, I couldn't say.
Male sex slaves--slaves who have been bought by a brothel, so what they do and where they're going isn't their choice--don't fare any better. They're chained together and drowned in the sea. Why? Because they're "unclean." Their killer never gives them an option NOT to be slaves or hookers, but to him, that doesn't matter.
Is this IC for their killer? It's...hard to tell. Last time, he seemed like a fairly reasonable and not at all showy man. Now he's burning female prostitutes alive and drowning male ones as holy sacrifices. Even though his desire to appease the gods is explained internally, it still doesn't explain why he sees people who have no choice in their livelihood as "unclean."
And then there's the equally problematic view on slavery, expressed by a character sold as a slave:
There has never been a slave who did not choose to be a slave, [he] reflected. Their choice may be between bondage and death, but the choice is always there.
Is it me, or does that sound a LOT like blaming the victim? It's not those who capture or sell slaves, the owners, the overseers, the guards who pursue escaped slaves, the threats of non-lethal but permanent punishment from owners, or the culture that mandates that slaves exist. It's the SLAVES' fault that they're slaves?
And this comes at the end of the book and presented as a serious revelation to the character about slavery and about himself.
Now, do I have anything good to say about this book? Yes. I do like the answers to questions, cliffhangers or no; some are satisfying. Martin's depiction of mutilation, torture and the resultant Stockholm syndrome was exceedingly well done. It was horrifying and unpleasant to read, but it was portrayed with painful, all-too-believable clarity. Jon Snow, my all-time least favorite character, improves dramatically. I enjoyed most of the chapters with female characters, especially Arya's. Once Martin finally gets going, he tells the story pretty well.
But this isn't enough to outweigh the problems.
I do not blame the editors for this. Martin announced that he was done on April 28, 2011. The book was released on July 12. I suspect that the editors did not have the time to edit this 1016-page novel the way it needed to be edited. Also, given how long fans have been waiting for this book, the publishers and the editors may have been reluctant to ask Martin to spend any time rewriting, as the delay caused by a massive rewrite would have thrown the publishing schedule off--and would have further convinced the fans that this book would never be published.
But I do blame Martin. He had six years to complete and polish this book. It didn't have be padded, bloated, repetitious, lacking in continuity or problematic. He can write far better than this, and has.