A Dance With Dragons

By George R. R. Martin


A Review by Eric Allen

George R. R. Martin is considered by many to be the Tolkien of the modern day. If you don’t know what that means, please go read Lord of the Rings like everyone else on earth, you’re probably the only one that hasn’t. Martin is well known for being able to craft extremely realistic worlds and characters, and for not following generally any story archetypes, preferring to come up with stories that might actually have happened in real life long, long ago. He is also famous for ruthlessly killing off main characters in rather pointless ways to illustrate that no one person is any more important than any other, be he king or beggar. This adds a further sense of realism to his books, because in real life even those important to the story of your life are not immune to death.

Like many grand fantasy epics A Song of Ice and Fire began as a trilogy, but A Dance with Dragons was book five in said numerically challenged trilogy, and there is no end in sight. Whilst writing book four, Martin realized that the story he had outlined for that book was far too long to fit in a single volume. And so he decided that he could either write half of the story for all of the characters, or write the whole story for half of the characters. Eventually he decided on the latter, taking most of the characters I didn’t care for and bundling their stories all into one book. This made for a rather painful reading experience, though it did bring me around to one or two characters that I previously had no love for.

After a six year wait, book five has finally been released, the second half of the story that was to be part of book four. I cannot tell you how long I have been waiting for this book to come out. All of my favorite characters in the series that were woefully absent from the last volume are back, and none of the characters I disliked make an appearance at all. It was almost worth the wait.

A Dance with Dragons takes up where book three left on in the lives of Davos Seaworth, Jon Snow, the various Greyjoys, Daenerys Targaryen, Stannis Baratheon, Bran Stark, and Tyrion Lannister. Some plotlines introduced by characters in book four continue on during this book. This book is not a what happens next in the series sort of thing, it’s what is happening with the rest of the characters during the previous book.

Jon Snow grapples with being Lord Commander of the Knight’s Watch, and guarding the wall while King Stannis tries to undermine his authority and take what he needs from the Watch to continue his war for the rightful claim to the throne. Winter is coming, and with it the Others and their undead servants the Whites. Food is scarce, money is even scarcer, civil war tears the seven kingdoms apart and none can hear his calls for aid. He is forced to take the Wilding people from beyond the wall to help man it against the Others. He lets the ancient enemies of the Knight’s Watch, those who have fought against and killed many of his friends on the wall, through to help man it against their common foe, but his own men whisper that when the crisis is averted they will be surrounded by enemies in their own strongholds.

Tyrion Lannister has many misadventures fleeing the Seven Kingdoms after murdering his father, plotting to return and kill the rest of his family as well. He seeks to join with Daenerys as she gathers her forces to protect the city she’s taken as her own to learn how to rule before returning to the Seven Kingdoms to take the throne that is hers.

King Stannis gathers the forces of the North to march on Winterfell to rescue the girl whom he believes to be the last surviving child of Eddard Stark from her marriage to Ramsy Bolton. Elsewhere the young prince, grandson of the former king who was overthrown fifteen years ago reveals himself with an army to conquer the lands that should rightfully be his. He was reported dead as an infant during the rebellion that brought down the monarchy, but through treachery managed to be hidden away in safety awaiting the chance to reclaim what was taken from his family.

And north of the wall, Bran Stark finally comes to the home of the fabled Children of the Forest and the Three Eyed Crow who has called to him since he lost the use of his legs.

The good? After the last book, which had only one character I liked in it, A Dance with Dragons had all of my other favorite characters and only my favorite characters. The world that George R. R. Martin has created for this series is extremely realistic and well thought out. His sparing use of magic as more of a superstitious sort of thing that only undesirables seek after is a refreshing change from fantasy books where magic is the solution to every problem. His grasp of politics and his extremely realistic characters make for a very believable civil war, and illustrate enmities between characters perfectly. Every one of the characters is distinct, with different personalities and goals. His female characters tend to think and act like real women, rather than like how men think women act.

The bad? The cast of characters for these books is huge. There are literally hundreds of named characters, each with his own history that Martin will give once and expect you to remember. To further confuse matters many characters also have the same name, or are named after historical figures or places in his world. For example. There are two men named Pike, a place named Pike, and a Battle of Pike, all of whom are referred to simply as Pike. You’re left to figure out on your own which one he means by the context, and it is not always clear from the context which he’s talking about.

There is a lot of rather harsh language, including the F word and the S word, as well as quite a few other offensive terms for genitalia, and other such things. Practically every single one of the characters in this series says or thinks at least a few words of harsh language during the course of the story.

There is a lot of sex and crude talk of sex. The actual sex scenes are typically not graphic, but the language the characters use to speak of it usually is. HBO recently made a miniseries out of the first book in the series and—surprise surprise—it has more nudity in it than any other TV show or movie ever created outside of pornography. If these things offend you, you might want to steer clear. However, don’t get the idea that this entire series is about nothing but sex, cursing, and nudity. That’s really a very small part of the overall story. I would say read one of the books for yourself and be the judge of whether it’s too much for you or not.

George R. R. Martin has a strange sort of rambling way of telling a story. The way he talks about things is kind of like listening to a senile old man telling stories of his life that don’t have much to do with anything. However, if you’re not paying attention to pretty much everything during these ramblings, you’ll miss something important for when he tightens the strings and pulls the story together at the end in a way that makes all of the rambling make sense. Some people I know have a big problem with that style of writing and have a hard time getting through things that they feel are unimportant only to find at the end that they were incredibly important.

The ugly? This book is yet another in a disturbing trend amongst fantasy series of late, in that it doesn’t have a clear climactic ending. The first book I noticed this in was Crossroads of Twilight by Robert Jordan, but other authors such as Patrick Rothfuss, Terry Goodkind, Orson Scott Card, and now George R. R. Martin have begun to do this as well. The climax is arguably the most important element in the plot. Everything builds toward it until it all comes crashing down in an avalanche of awesomeness. It’s like the reward for finishing the book, you get a clear victory or defeat, something is resolved, and it’s usually in a grand, climactic fashion. Many authors, of late who are writing series seem to believe that since their book is in the middle of the series, it doesn’t need a climax to end with because it’s not the end of the story, but this is very wrong. Each and every book needs a climactic ending, and no, a simple cliffhanger is not a climactic ending. It’s just a lazy way of covering up that your book didn’t have a proper ending. I know that George R. R. Martin is capable of coming up with epic climaxes for his books. Game of Thrones ended with the splitting of the Seven Kingdoms and the Crowning of the King in the North. A Clash of Kings ended with the Battle of King’s Landing. A Storm of Swords ended with the Red Wedding and the Wilding assault on the wall. A Feast for Crows ended with Cersei’s plots falling apart, and the last supporters of King Robb being wiped out. All of those were epic climaxes to epic books, however, A Dance with Dragons basically just ended mid story with vague cliffhangers for each and every one of the characters rather than a clear climactic throwdown. Writers need to stop doing things like this. It takes a great deal of enjoyment out of reading their books when the reader doesn’t get anything to reward them for reading it at the end. The reason people read books is for the ending and this one didn’t have one.

The length between books in this series is ridiculous. I think the shortest time between any of them was four years. This one took six years to get out, and to make things worse, there was another book between this one and the previous one about these characters so the total wait time for the things happening in this book was about ten years. George R. R. Martin seems like he is a perfectionist and wants everything to be absolutely perfect before publishing a book. It takes him an extremely long time to do that as it is, but he also stops to write side projects and publish them. Between A Dance with Dragons and the previous volume in this series he published three other unrelated books. The message boards on his web site are full of basically nothing but people complaining about how incredibly slow he is at getting books in this series out.

And finally, my biggest gripe is that for all the waiting we had to endure for this book, and all the things that were built up in the previous two, nothing really happened that ultimately advanced the plot of the series. It was basically the writer saying "look, this is what the rest of the characters were doing while the important things were happening elsewhere" sort of book. Not much other than characters repositioning themselves for later events in the series happens at all, and, I hate to say this about Georgie boy's work, but you could probably skip most of this book and not be lost when the next one eventually comes out. And I know that George R. R. Martin has a very bad habit of making completely irrelevant seeming things hugely important later on, so I'll probably eat those words in the future, but right now it doesn't look as though the majority of the story of this book just didn't need to be told.

To recap, yes, this book does have its vices, and it is not for everyone. Many people do not like Martin’s style of writing. It didn’t have a clear climax at the ending and far too many cliffhangers. However, one thing that should be mentioned again is that this is half of the story that was supposed to be in a single book. Therefore the climax of the previous book was likely intended to cover this book as well. Martin will likely return to form with the next book in the series, granted that he does not split the next book into two as well. Despite the lack of a clear ending where something has happened, this was still an extremely enjoyable book to read, and finally getting to what happens next with all of the good characters was almost worth not having a clear ending for any of them.

I’m giving this book 4 out of 5 stars due to its lack of a climax, and the use of quite graphic sexual slang and language, as well as other bad language, and the gratuitous number of sex scenes. Martin is a great writer with great ideas, but he sure does have a filthy mind sometimes.

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