A Feast For Crows

It's been a while since I did one of these. This isn't because I've suddenly become lazy. It's more to do with the immense workload I've had giving me no time to read, let alone maintain something resembling a regular blog. Fortunately, I now have 30 minutes in which to write one. The bad news is that this 30 minutes should be spent editing a short story.

I finished A Feast For Crows on Wednesday night. It took me far too long. Granted, it's 900 pages, but as a rule that shouldn't be taking me much longer than a week, big workload or no. The reason it took so long is partly because it just failed to interest me for about 600 pages.

But despite that I can't criticise it as perhaps I should. Bear in mind that the book is the fourth in the Song of Ice and Fire series and that prior to this one there had been three outstanding fantasy novels to digest. All three were frenetic affairs, it's true, but they were compelling and complex and more exciting than virtually all other fantasy novels. After years of reading generic Tolkien derivatives, it was great to read something that wanted to break free of the fantasy stereotypes.

And by and large AFFC is a continuation of that. The magic content is still low, the body count still fairly high, the story still intense and the content suitably adult. But there's just too much missing to make it measure up to what's gone before.

Martin writes in his afterword that to write the book he wanted it would have been a 1600+ page volume. Simply too big for one book. So he split the content; this volume focusses on Westeros and the events relating to King's Landing, while events Beyond the Wall and in the Slaver Cities go untold until the next book. So there's a disappointing lack of Daenerys and the dragons. Jon Snow barely appears. Bran doesn't make an appearance. Tyrion is mentioned... but (you guessed it) doesn't appear in person.

Instead we get Cersei Lannister and her grip on the Iron Throne (complete with cliffhanger ending). There's the tale of Brienne of Tarth (complete with cliffhanger ending). Sansa and Arya appear. Jaime Lannister has a large chunk. I have nothing against these characters, but they're not as interesting as the ones left out. Daenerys in particular is a fascinating character, and her not being there seriously hampers the story.

The story itself makes this feel like a bridge book, aiming towards the final volumes of the series. The pace is slowed considerably despite the intensity, but it's more plotting than execution of the plans. There's blood and sex... but not as much as previously. And it's frustrating.

And it doesn't help that the writing isn't as smooth as usual. Martin isn't exactly Shakespeare at the best of times, but he is a functional writer (technically speaking) with a certain level of advancement, but in this one he regresses for whatever reason. It's clunky, to say the least.

But I'll get the next one. I've enjoyed the series to now, and I'm looking forward to the TV series and A Dance With Dragons.

A Storm of Swords

It's come to my attention that it's sunny outside for the first time since about 1997. As such, this is a short posting, so I can head outside with the laptop.

I finished A Storm of Swords last night. I have to say that it's a good book. It has its failings, but those failings are offset by the many strengths of the book. It's actually fairly strongly written, considering that George R.R. Martin's style is pretty clunky at times, and is among the better fantasy books for its standard of writing. It isn't perfect or even amongst the best-written - it has some way to go to top Robin Hobb's elegantly simple style - but it is decently written at least, which means that the story itself takes centre stage.

And what a rip-roaring tale it is. It's intense, it's melodramatic (but that's a good thing), it's character-driven, it's multi-threaded and, most importantly of all, it has a sense of scale. There's about 10 POV characters, and threads very rarely cross (in the sense of characters bumping into each other), which gives the thing the sense of scale mentioned above. Without particularly mentioning the size of his world, Martin makes it big.

In order to sum up the plot I'd have to summarise the previous two books, A Game of Thrones and the satisfyingly alliterative A Clash of Kings, which would involve summing up 1,600 pages in about 2 sentences. In short: people in power are pillocks who prat about for power. In slightly longer: there's a civil war on thanks to the fact everyone wants power and lots of blood is shed and families are torn apart. This is 1,200 pages of the same, with incest, sexual tension, regicide and woolly mammoths thrown in.

My biggest gripe in the end was that it was so long. It's been split into 2 volumes over here, and it's taken me 16 days to read (a period of time unprecedented since I read The Stand in about 3 weeks). Sometimes I got the sense that a scene could be cut out here or there and that would have made it so much quicker to read.

Roll on A Feast For Crows.

And since I started writing, the sun's gone in. Day on the PS3 it is, then...