Dunk and Egg (novellas 1-3)

After the last couple of Song of Ice and Fire books, the question that’s been mostly occupying me regarding George RR Martin is whether or not he can tell a story with a good ending. Because for all this world-building is compelling, his main novels have become a great sprawl with no end in sight – and when that end comes, will it satisfy? There are so many characters to root for who will ultimately be enemies…‘Is it all going to end with a whimper?’ I ask, trying to avoid directly quoting TS Eliot. And so I came to the (currently) three Dunk and Egg novellas, short stories from the same world, a little under a hundred years before Game of Thrones. The first made me think that yes, Martin knows how to craft a good, solid ending. The others made me wonder. After all, The Hedge Knight was kept so exaggeratedly simple it was almost cartoonish – and the others were more ambitious, but soon began to sprawl themselves, and now the larger tale feels very much unfinished.

What is remarkable about the stories is just how intricate Martin’s world-building is. These characters are mentioned in the main series, especially by Maester Aemon, who knew them, but what’s impressive is more subtle – characters talk of the entire era, of the political situation and the power struggles, of how men compared one king with the next, and the quirks of the men around the royalty.

Focusing on just one point-of-view character makes for neat, compelling storytelling – as long as there is a decent setting, which the two stories with tournaments have – and I very much liked Sir Duncan and his relationship with the cocky but still childlike squire with a secret. I care about them. I’m interested in Bloodraven and how he becomes what he is in the main series. Though we already know the ultimate end for Dunk and Egg, I quite possibly want to know what happens to them next more than any of the characters in the man series. These novellas had their flaws, but they still very much engaged me. 

A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire book 5, by George RR Martin

A Dance with Dragons is essentially part two of the half-book that was A Feast for Crows, although long enough that it has been split in two for its paperback release, confusingly enough. With a few little exceptions like chapters for Jaime and Cersei, it fills in the story of all the characters conspicuously absent from the previous book – Tyrion, Daenerys, Arya, Jon Snow, Bran, Davos and a certain Ironborn thought dead. As the first two tended to have the chapters I found most interesting in the first three books, I looked forward to this, and while it was indeed a rather more interesting book than its predecessor, I have to say that it chiefly featured more treading water and unnecessary padding. It began in an interesting fashion – Reek is the most iconic development in a long while, and it was good to see what happened to Tyrion – but then the book went as flat as its predecessor. Daenerys’ story really stalled when she decided her dragons had to be locked away underground, and until the last few chapters I was worried that her story would not get out of that rut at all. Even when it did, the aftermath slowed back to a crawl again. Tyrion remains an interesting character but apart from the little irony of Dany saving him without knowing it and the clever way Mormont enters his story, the way he drifts about meeting uninteresting new characters is frustrating. Arya’s story arc has her just having to train very hard at this juncture, so little of much interest happened there, and Bran was in a similar position: they in particular were noticeably given chapters that were noticeably just stalling any interesting action.

Essentially, I’m finding these books frustrating. This isn’t what I hoped for when I eagerly got the second book to continue the story. I thought that four books later, characters would be very far from where they began. I didn’t expect Bran to have only just met his three-eyed crow, or for Jon to be interminably trying to please different factions while nothing of any interest at all happens at the Wall. I didn’t expect the Lannisters to just be lingering and for any possibility of the Starks’ return to power to still be years and years off. I didn’t expect Dany to just be sitting around thinking about who to marry or shitting and bleeding all over the place in the wilderness with her return to her country potentially years off. And to be honest, I can’t see how almost the entirety of Westeros except perhaps The Vale will manage to escape mass death in the winter that is to come. As I said with the last book, it’s not actually in any way proven that Martin is any good at all at ending a story – it’s all taken on trust. Even this one didn’t end with a bang – just with the incipit return of a character I’d expected to remerge for the entire book (though admittedly for most of it I thought he was hidden amongst the Dany’s flatterers having changed his face enough that Ser Barristan didn’t recognise it). Well, we’ll have to see.

And I’ll likely be waiting a long while. It’s been taking Martin long and longer to write his books, and this is the first time I’ve been there for one of the looooong gaps.

The Fry Chronicles, by Stephen Fry

It’s been quite a few years now since Stephen Fry’s first volume of autobiography, the excellently-titled Moab is my Washpot - though apparently in light of the fact nobody got it, this new release has a simpler name. It was released to great fanfare about being the first book to be released in so many ways – in bookshops, as ebook download, as an iOS app etc – and shot to the top of the non-fiction charts. And I was well-pleased, because Stephen Fry is amongst my favourite public figures, being educated, eloquent, and also very funny, a non-threatening example of what much of modern England seems to have grown to fear and resent, yet also remains venerated by thousands who are perhaps less vocal about it. I thought him superb in Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster, better in Wilde and read most of his novels. I love QI despite occasionally being annoyed by it, and his is one of only three Twitter accounts I follow. I like that he represents the old world but is so tech-savvy. I like that he is vulnerable and happy to talk about his flaws and that he is also very much an aspirational figure, and have read most of his novels, which while really no classics were well-written and highly memorable.

So though I was far from a day-one reader, I was very interested in this release once I was reminded it existed, and even put other books on hold for it, which (Anna Karenina – which I have read on and off for years now – aside) I rarely do. I had been very eager for this book after finding Moab is my Washpot so compelling yet stopping short of the most interesting parts of Fry’s life. Maybe it is because I had been so eager that I was so disappointed.

I wanted to read about Fry’s realisation that he was bipolar and his infamous disappearance. I wanted to hear about how his first love made him feel and the fear and the desire of beginning a first serious relationship. I wanted to know how his public school sexual experiences affected him later. I wanted to know about his creative process and his struggles to write books. I wanted him to talk about why almost all his books have pretty boys in their early teens in pseudo-innocent sexual situations. I wanted to hear about the rebellious side of his life at Cambridge. Instead…where the first book seemed to have Fry bear his soul about his difficult adolescence, this one seemed very much to be keeping up a screen, despite the times he consciously says that he is revealing more than, perhaps, he would like to. Oh, and it said ‘autres maeurs’ instead of ‘autres moeurs’.

It’s a short book, and there are some very pleasant anecdotes about Emma Thompson, about Alan Bennett and about Douglas Adams, all drawn in the shorthand needed for such public figures. There’s some interesting little paragraphs about Blackadder and I derived some personal satisfaction from seeing how similar Fry’s attitude to his Cambridge education was to my own, except when it came to writing exams: he apparently developed a winning essay that he could bend to answer any question, largely based on an Anne Barton essay (my own wonderful old skeleton of a supervisor as an undergrad).

But by and large, this book was dull and totally lacking in insight. Some anecdotes had been told on QI. Others were covered in documentaries about Blackadder. All were the sort of thing suitable for those platforms – light, entertaining and at arm’s length from the actual man and his actual beliefs. His endless hand-wringing and emphasising the fact that he knows he’s very lucky and doesn’t want to come over as a prick but inevitably will gets very tiresome, too.

Perhaps it’s time to expect the safe and sanitary from Fry. But I wanted so much more than a book full of the padding of funny little stories and the repetition of the fact he really just got very lucky writing a play for Edinburgh, being in Footlights at the right time and getting an agent out of it, with everything else just tumbling out of that. This felt like an inflated encyclopaedia entry written by the subject. I wanted to know not just what happened, but how it felt.

Well, there’s still another volume to come – or even, perhaps, two. I will still read them, but my keenness has faded.