A Dance with Dragons

Have you bought my book yet? Want to read the first twelve chapters for free?

Also, doing a little experiment wherein I’ll be writing a 100 word story every day this month. It’s possible you’ll even be able to watch me write it in real time in gdocs if you time it right. If this kind of thing is interesting to you, you can click this link.

Since people voted to have me serialize a novel, I figure there may be some interest in my fiction writing. If this is the case, I may start setting up times where you can watch me write a story in real time on gdocs. I may even allow you to watch me as I write the serialized novel.

Or I may just finally write my Dojo Cat story where all the dialogue is Doja Cat lyrics. You know, just giving the people what they want.

Here’s your catch up:

• A Game of Thrones

• A Clash of Kings

• A Storm of Swords

• A Feast for Crows

• Fire & Blood

A novel where everything happens, despite its reputation for nothing happening. If anything, too much happens. This novel is massive and unwieldy, stretching over 100,000 words longer than A Feast for Crows.

It has much in common with A Storm of Swords, which is roughly the same length as this novel, both of them being, by themselves, nearly the length of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. In many ways, it has a whole lot in common with Lord of the Rings as well.

The Lord of the Rings is structurally very odd. It’s lobsided and stretches wide at places that maybe should have been pared back. Frodo’s story, especially, oscillates wildly. Then there’s Merry and Pippin who have a whole lifetime crammed into the final book of the trilogy, whereas they just kind of lmao for the first two.

A Dance with Dragons has a complicated reputation for this reason. It shoves three or four very different novels into the same binding and then leaves many of these threads hanging limply or in devastation.

Let’s do some figuring:

• Brienne of Tarth, as it turns out, is alive, but she’s leading Jamie to his death.

• Theon and Jane survive but are now in Stannis’ custody with Asha on the eve of his battle with the Boltons, which is one of the messier conflicts in the series.

• Jon has been stabbed to death.

• Daenerys has been captured by Dothraki.

• Tyrion is a member of a mercenary band.

• Barristan Selmy is Queen’s Hand and governing Mereen in Daenerys’ place.

• Quintyn Martell has been killed by the dragons he freed.

• Victarion is on his way to Mereen to capture Daenerys.

• Cersei is awaiting trial by combat.

And probably I’m forgetting a few narrative threads and where they’ve been left off. But a lot happens here! At least as much as A Storm of Swords. The difference is that A Storm of Swords is tightly focused, for the most part. A Dance with Dragons spraaaaaaawls, fella.

And had The Winds of Winter followed within the next few years, I think its reputation would be different. But, as it stands, this is where the saga has ended.

And this, more than any other book in the series, suffers from middle-book syndrome. Which is to say that it cannot satisfy, because it is essentially a bridge. Yes, it’s a gloriously luxurious bridge full of artistry and humor and thrills, but it’s still just a bridge. And making a bridge the capstone to the series is as satisfying as walking the most perfect bridge in existence and finding that it leads to a brick wall.

This is, I think, where the series really begins to drag. Martin’s editor should have been more aggressive here. I mean, I love much of this book. I love the weird directions and digressions it takes, but I also think someone should’ve said, “George, you need to cut 150 pages. I don’t care which 150, but they have to go.”

And maybe you’d be even more aggressive, telling him to pare it back by 200 or 300 pages. There’s no wrong answer here, because I think any tightening up would have benefited the novel. Because, as it is, this really is the first novel without a clear throughline.

A Game of Thrones has Ned to wrap the whole book around. A Clash of Kings can be wrapped around just about any of the narrators. In my review, I arbitrarily chose Theon, mostly because of my fondness for poor, ruined Theon. A Storm of Swords has Tyrion as its fulcrum, from glory to disaster. A Feast for Crows has Cersei, though I chose to write about the Martells in my review.

Who does A Dance of Dragon wrap itself around?

It’s harder to say. Daenerys is the easy answer, and probably the best answer, but this novel is as much Jon’s and Tyrion’s and even Stannis’.

But I’m going to break a rule of these reviews and start talking about the TV show.

We know where the series is heading. We know the journey to get there will be different and that some who died in the show will survive to the end and that some who survived in the show will shortly die, but we know that Daenerys will become a villain.

A terrifying dragonqueen.

And so since we know this is the endpoint, we can evaluate this novel under different terms. Because, I have to say, the first time I read this, I found Daenerys’ storyline the hardest to read. It all seemed so long and fruitless and frustrating. I still think this is accurate, but we know now why Martin twisted this narrative in the direction he did.

This is where Daenerys loses faith. Not in herself. Never in herself. In fact, if anything, this whole Mereen episode forces her to trust herself above all else.

She is an outsider in Mereen. Queen through conquest but surrounded by officials of the old regime who keep her government running. She came as conqueror, after all. She didn’t come with an administration or a team of officials who could navigate or create a legal code. And so, as an outsider, she finds herself relying on people who know the system and culture, but who she does not trust.

And she knows they don’t trust or like her. They fear her, which is useful, but they also want to destroy her. Plotting. Always plotting right in front of her.

It works for them, too. They get what they want, though it takes a long time and is full of frustration for them. But they get their fighting pits open. They get her dragons caged. They even get the slave trade up and running again, though technically not within Mereen.

This happens because Daenerys refuses to be ruthless. She wants peace. She wants love. She wants her people to love her and she wants to do right by them. But every choice becomes burdened by complicated consequences. The whole reason she’s still in Mereen is because of what happened in Astapor. If she frees the slaves and leaves, new slaves will be made as soon as she’s a day’s ride away. She sees that as a failure, an inability to see the consequences to her actions. A mistake she does not wish to repeat, but the quagmire sucks her down deeper, threatening to drown her.

Where the novel ends for her is a fresh beginning. Alone and friendless, dirty and bald (both queens in the novel, interestingly, lose their distinctive hair). Once again, powerless as she was as a child.

Or so it may seem.

But this must turn her eyes west, to Westeros. Especially when she hears of her nephew raising the Dragon banner to wage war against Tommen. And so she will return to Westeros.

Yet she will be a stranger. Her government will be full of functionaries of the old regime with complicated and even suspect loyalties and motivations.

The lessons of Mereen dig into her skin like tiny hooks. When she returns to Westeros as conqueror, will those hooks loosen or tighten? Will her army of foreign warriors be seen as salvation or apocalypse? When she rains fire down upon the Lannister and Tyrell armies, will this fill her allies with hope or fear?

And will it matter to her at that point? Or will Mereen be stuck in her teeth like a thousand popcorn kernel fragments that she can’t spit out?

There is so much to say about this novel, or that I’d like to talk more about, dig deeper into, but one thing that I find interesting is how much historical backstory rises to the surface through incidental conversations during this novel. Like, I came across a spoiler for The House of the Dragon in this novel!

The world’s history really doesn’t begin to fill out until A Feast for Dragons and this novel, which is structurally interesting. I also wonder how much of this has to do with Martin’s seeming shift in focus to the history of his world. In the eleven years since this novel was published, he’s written and published two enormous histories of his world, with a third coming soon. While the world has waited for the sixth novel in this series, he has written a million words of fictional history that function primarily as backdrop for his series.

It’s honestly pretty shocking! Also quite prolific, I think, despite the complaints that he hasn’t written anything in over a decade.

But rather than dig into all that, I’ll leave you all with this.

These novels are great. If you’ve never read them or have been timing your reread for the announcement of the sixth book, I say just jump back in. Yes, there are problems with these later two novels (though I will continue to insist, uselessly, that A Feast for Crows is the best one), but the experience of rereading these books has been enormously pleasurable. The series is often hilarious, always fascinating, and full of thrills.

Martin has the ability to write thousands of complicated characters with extreme economy. Wyman Manderly is a character I could spend an entire afternoon talking about. He seems like such a nothing character until he becomes utterly captivating and complicated. The same could be said of so many of the other seemingly random characters who pop up and boil to the surface of these last two novels.

I actually think this is the problem with the series. As I said last time, Martin’s obsession with the little stuff is what causes the length to explode and for digressions to become fully fledged narratives. Even someone as seemingly unimportant as Wyman Manderlay, who doesn’t even appear in the text of the entire series until, like, the second half of this fifth book, elbows his way into the book and starts demanding more and more space. And will his plots become incredibly important?

Who’s to say!

But it makes even this final quagmired novel fun and exhilarating. Yes, I wish it was shorter and I know it should be more focused, but I’d be hardpressed to tell him that he should have cut this Manderlay subplot or that maybe Davos didn’t even need to be in this novel or that Asha didn’t need to be a POV character or that, hey, maybe Tyrion’s exploits could’ve been five chapters instead of twenty. These things fill up and arguably overfill the novel, but it tastes so good when it goes in that it’s hard to consider how it’ll feel when you shit it all out later.

I hope the sixth book comes out someday. I’ll read it. I’ll probably love it.

The funny thing, too, is that I felt that I’d lost some of my enthusiasm for this world, but now I find myself eyeing that Targeryen history and whispering to myself, Yeah, get it, read it, love it.

And probably I will.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little guided tour through Westeros. I know I did!

Maybe I’ll do this with some other series in the future. Let me know if you have one you’d like me to stab.

Until then.

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Had another idea.

If you love these books and are looking for something similar to read, here’s a list of recommendations:

If what you like about Game of Thrones is the epic scale and depth of history, I'd say go with Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson.

If your favorite POVs were Jon Snow, Arya, and Daenyris then you might like The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb (she’s my favorite).

If you wish you had more Tyrion but also wish he had been crueler and more disfigured, go with The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie.

If you wanted to live inside a character who might be Joffrey Baratheon if he was raised as an Ironborn, check out The Broken Empire by Mark Lawrence.

If you enjoy the richness of the world, its history, its cultures, its myths, and its mysteries, check out Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey.

If you liked deconstructions of tropes and want to know how someone in Fleabottom might live their every day life, check out The Neveryon series by Samuel R Delany.

If you wish there were more dragons, that they could talk, and that magic was a bit wilder, check out the Earthsea Series by Ursula K Le Guin.

If you really wanted to see what Arya may have been like had she tried to become a maester and bard after the end of the first or third book, you may like The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss. This series is also currently unfinished.

If you wanted more monsters and otherworldly aspects with a world that gets downright strange, check out the Baslag Trilogy by China Mieville.

If you wanted the whole series to fit into one book, try out Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay.

If you wish the series had had more monsters and been from the POV of someone who kills those monsters, check out The Witcher Saga by Andrzej Sapkowski.

If you liked everything about Game of Thrones but wish it were PG/PG13 instead and had a lot more magic, check out The Wheel of Time or Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.

If you like the politicking and minutiae of government, check out The Long Price Quartet by Daniel Abraham.

If you wish there were more gay swordsmen and bitter infighting between petty aristocrats, check out the Riverside novels and Tremontaine by Ellen Kushner.

If you want a weirder, more violent kind of epic fantasy, check out the Worldbreaker Trilogy by Kameron Hurley.

If you wish the series had been a bit more Tolkienesque with an even deeper sense of history and myth and mystery, check out Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams. Martin describes this as a big influence on Game of Thrones.

If you wish all the fantasy elements were stripped out and it was told as a straight history, check out The Plantagenets and The War of the Roses by Dan Jones.

If you wish Sansa had a real advocate at King's Landing and that the series was about that person, check out The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Hopefully that helps give you some direction.