The fourth of the Ice and Fire books was the first one I didn’t read excitedly, or with any great desire to pick up again once I’d put it down. By this point the series was selling enough to top the New York Times bestsellers list, even without help of the excellent HBO series, but it would be a further six years before book 5 would come out.
And, as I found out at the end of this book, A Dance with Dragons is really this book, part 2. Even though the last one was big enough to need splitting into two for these shores, apparently that idea did not agree with Martin’s plans at all, so he wrote this book to focus on events in King’s Landing – with a few other strands thrown in – while the next will deal with Dany, Stannis, Bran and the rest.
I’m not sure whether it was because once the split happened this book needed padding or because Martin just has plans that require a lot of set-up here, but it really felt as though he decided to just tread water with this book. Far too much is given over to dull new (or previously peripheral) characters like the Krakens and the Dornish, without whom the central story would thus far be no different at all. Neither Jaime nor Cersei interest me all that much, and Samwell’s chapters are always very, very slow. This left only Brienne and a few chapters with the Stark daughters to spice up an otherwise turgid volume. The prose remains slightly painful, and there was one horrible attempt to make Cersei use some British vernacular that Martin got totally wrong – which I don’t believe was a printing error. I don’t mind there being Americanisms in a medieval England-style fantasy world – after all, it is a fantasy world – and the likes of ‘I wrote him’ I can happily let slide, but trying to have an English tone and getting it wrong ('He had bloody well think again') is in the realm of terrible fanfic. At least Martin has moved beyond using ‘merlon’ and ‘whicker’ every few pages, though.
After the fascinating cliffhangers of the last book, this was a real let-down. The hideous figure from the end of A Storm of Swords doesn’t even show up again until near the end of this one, the most interesting characters Tyrion, Bran and Dany are barely mentioned, and to add injury to it all, looking now at the Wikipedia, I see this is where Martin had intended there to be the time-skip I’ve been hoping for since the end of the first book, but he’s put it off because otherwise the next one would be all flashbacks.
It struck me at the end of the book, where Martin all but apologises to his readers for this, that while I’ve seen he can write great characters, great twists and great bits of political machination, I have no evidence at all that he can write a good, solid story with a powerful ending. Now I fear what the rest of the books will give us. Time to read something else for a bit.
