A Feast for Crows
Before we get into it, I’d like to plug Todd’s standalone sequel to The Call of Cthulu module The Haunting that’s available at Drive Thru RPG.
Also, the long-promised Table of Contents is now here.
If you want to catch up:
Your sister was the beautiful one and your brother was the glorious one. They shined bright but burnt out young.
You. The plotter and the schemer. The broken one, bound to his chair, to his palaces.
You surrounded yourself with beauty because of the pain. The gout. It always hurts. Like having joints full of shattered glass. Even the breeze brings stabbing pain. A bloated body full of tiny knives buried beneath the skin.
You have surrounded yourself with safety. Your palaces a comfort to keep you from collapsing inward at the horrors that have cascaded down upon your family.
For nearly twenty years you have nursed your pain, your vengeance. While the world sees a man removed from the world, hiding in beauty and comfort, you have been plotting and scheming. You have not forgotten your sister or those infants murdered alongside her.
And so, quietly, secretly, you have begun a game. Armies and rumors are your pawns. All become pawns, including your own children, including the brother and sister of your murdered brother-in-law who should have been king. Who would have been king.
To make them suffer as they have made you suffer.
The secrecy you’ve cultivated has become a habit. More than that, your grudge has become your obsession. More than that, it has become the reason to cling to life, despite the pain crippling you, torturing you. As much a private diary as a plot to shake the politics of a continent, throwing it into a different civil war—not one of five kings—of your own design. A civil war to restore the Targaryens and pull the Lannisters down.
How does one open up to another? How to share that secret so fundamental to life with another?
Even if the people who must know—your children—are the most important pieces on the board for this game you’ve spent nearly two decades devising.
When your brother went to King’s Landing, you feared disaster. Disaster came. And now his bastard daughters threaten to throw your own safe refuge into its own civil war. They attempt to drag you down, kill you, just to wage the same war you’ve been planning for so long.
But they’re missing the crucial pieces. They don’t even know those most important pieces exist.
And so, to keep yourself and the plot safe, you locked them up.
And then your daughter—
It is too much to bear. You should have told her. Had every opportunity. Needed her to know, not only to keep her from fucking it up, as she has, but because you need a confidant. You need someone to understand.
You need her to understand.
And now, as she approaches, you wonder if it’s too late. If her reckless attempts to start the same war you have been plotting for so long will lead to the death of everyone you have left.
I’ve mentioned often already that I loved this book when I read it in 2011. Over the years since reading the series, it’s slowly become my favorite of the series. Which, if you ask almost anyone, is an insane opinion to have.
Especially after the wild, wonderful ride that is A Storm of Swords.
After all that’s happened in the first three novels, this novel comes to a necessary point in the narrative. A civil war has raged across the continent for two or three years. Devastation is the name of Westeros here. People have had their lives burnt down and destroyed by would-be king after would-be king.
All they want is a bit of stability. A bit of safety.
And what do they get?
Well, what they get is none of that, so what do they resort to?
Vengeance. Spite.
And that’ll do just fine.
This novel creates the fullest picture of the devastation of war and how it impacts regular people. As the narrative fans out in many directions, we encounter more and more people who have suffered at the hands of knights and nobles jostling for status with whoever the next king may have been back when there were five of them galloping about.
This is something that struck me powerfully at the time. It struck me again on this reread. George Martin is known for his big moments, his twists, but it’s this that I most appreciate about his novels. He is always interested in people. Always focused on the little details that make up life.
Of course, this is partly the problem people complain about with regard to these final two novels.
The way it keeps spreading wider and wider has left old George with an unwieldy mess that’s taking him more than a decade to figure out how to grapple with.
His problem is not that he got caught up in the big plot at the expense of his characters. If anything, it’s the opposite. He didn’t want to just summarize entire plots so that he could keep his focus tightly where it seemed to matter most. Rather, he leaned into those subplots. Filled them out with luscious, gourmet filler that’s simply too good to quit.
Should he have detoured into Dorne here?
Maybe not. Ultimately, the whole series may have benefited from Dorne being summarized. But, man, that’s still one of my favorite parts of the novel. I would read a whole seven book series just about Dorne.
There are two things that I love in stories, which will probably make you understand why I love this novel.
Failure
Uncertainty
This is, perhaps, the best way to sum up A Feast for Crows. Hilariously, some of you reading this now would probably consider this novel a failure!
In many ways, this entire series is about failure. Well laid plans that run nosebreakingly into walls created by their rivals. We saw it with Ned and Robb and, really, all the Starks. We saw it with Theon and Jaime and Tyrion. This is a series obsessed with the ways we fail.
And here we get the failure we’ve all been waiting for: Cersei.
I didn’t really enjoy this narrative the first time around. In part, no doubt, because Cersei is hard to like or empathize with. But I did find it compelling to watch her continually misstep so confidently.
On reread—damn. This is just mesmerizing. Every choice she makes, we understand how and why, and even knowing—as I did—where this all goes, I still couldn’t blame her for her choices. She is terrified yet ambitious. Intelligent yet without humility. Strong yet uncompromising.
Just the worst mix of personality traits.
I love it.
Perversely, I loved watching her fail even as I empathized with her more and more. Perhaps it’s becoming a parent or just because I’m now closer to her age than I was to, say, Jon Stark or whoever. But I found myself just wholly captivated by the way she surrounded herself with what she felt was safety.
Idiots, sycophants, and desperate climbers.
I mean, what could be safer than those who fear you, love you, and want to be you?
Then there’s Brienne who has one of the most interesting trajectories in the novel. Essentially, she’s become a private detective in a world without reliable information. And I loved it. I love the many conflicting reports, which made knowing anything nearly impossible. And so she chased rumors and hunches that led her right up to the edge of death, sent on a different quest by the person who sent her on the original quest.
She accomplishes nothing, really. She witnesses and listens to the brutality of the aftermath of all this war from hundreds of different people, from the powerful to the powerless, and while we, the reader, learn a lot of useful information, she learns nothing that helps her.
And then there’s the chaos of Dorne.
Plans that have been in motion for decades destroyed in a matter of weeks by a daughter who does not understand her father. And while we could see this as the failure of the daughter, it’s very clearly the failure of the father.
Every criticism of him is both true but incomplete. He has failed to get vengeance. He has allowed Dorne to be walked over. He has allowed distrust and enmity fill his kingdom while he moves his chess pieces into position.
Decades of moving pieces into position. All so he can drop a three-headed dragon sized hammer down upon the Lannisters.
I just love this. I love the moment between father and daughter when understanding crystalizes, when emotions buried for decades threaten to break you, the reader, down to tears.
Economic writing is not what Martin’s known for, but what he does with Dorne is so concise and thrilling and treacherous and, strangely, beautiful.
It has haunted me for a decade. Doran Martell, Prince of Dorne, plotting his vengeance quietly for decades. So caught up in his secret plans, he doesn’t even reveal them to his children who must play such an important role in his vengeance.
Fear. For them. For what he must make them do.
But also just simple failure.
His grand scheme is such a private thing, as much a reason to live as anything else, that to share it is to lose part of himself.
And so his own plans balance on a single thread.
To be human is to fail. To fail is to be alive.
Failure is life. It is love. It is hate and spite and greed and lust.
I have always found A Feast for Crows one of the most beautiful novels. One of the most human novels I’ve ever encountered. And it’s here, in the stark devastation, in the calamitous failures, that I found pieces of me I didn’t know I needed to find.
Whoah! Thanks for the plug Eddy!
I always felt FfC was where the series started to go off the rails because Martin's editors could no longer contain him due to his fame (a trap many famous authors fall into). This wonderfully written piece could almost make me think I'm wrong. I mean, I'm not, but it could almost do that. :)