Anticipating "A Feast For Crows" by George R. R. Martin (Nov. 9)

hmmm

finished the fourth book & still feel p let down by the series. i mean im happy that dance/dragons is finally coming out but the reread kinda just reminded me of all things i dislike abt the series particularly as an 'epic fantasy'. i think the thing that bothered me the most is the sorta hand-waving that goes on around the idea that theres a deeper level going on thing, which is sorta a dumm trope in general in i think implemented particularly badly here w/ the oldtown stuff.

also littlefinger as devious political tactician sorta wears thin - at one point he tells sansa that cersei was fucking things up faster than he had anticipated which a) seemed like a nod to his original idea that he could timeskip after book 3 and b) how did lf even know cersei wld end up in charge?

Tyrion covered his mouth and belched politely[... The first thing he had done after taking up residence in the Tower of the Hand was inquire after the finest cook in the city and take her into his service. This evening they had supped on oxtail soup, summer greens tossed with pecans, grapes, red fennel, and crumbled cheese, hot crab pie, spiced squash, and quails drowned in butter. Each dish had come with its own wine.

i think the thing that bothered me the most is the sorta hand-waving that goes on around the idea that theres a deeper level going on thing, which is sorta a dumm trope in general in i think implemented particularly badly here w/ the oldtown stuff.

what do you mean by this? i was under the impression that the "oldtown stuff" (i.e. the maesters conspiracy against magic? i guess?) was going to be explained in more depth in the next book?

i do think littlefinger's kinda getting lamer and lamer, i'd really like to see someone outsmart him for once (hoping its not some super obvious sansa-learns-how-to-be-a-schemer-from-him-and-then-disposes-of-him thing)

yeah the littlefinger/sansa stuff is pretty boring/stupid

This evening they had supped on oxtail soup, summer greens tossed with pecans, grapes, red fennel, and crumbled cheese, hot crab pie, spiced squash, and quails drowned in butter. Each dish had come with its own wine.

no olives, huh

'i wonder what a medieval feast would have looked like eh i guess i can just make some shit up'

tbf dude looks like he must've done meticulous research

ha i googled that phrase and it was on one of those 'open the book nearest to hand and type the xxth sentence of the yyyth page' threads in another place, and all they had glossed it with was 'fat author is fat'

what do you mean by this? i was under the impression that the "oldtown stuff" (i.e. the maesters conspiracy against magic? i guess?) was going to be explained in more depth in the next book?

in book 4 it felt like he started to make explicit a couple of intertwined plot threads that had sort of been undergirding a bunch of the action and more importantly his world-building but to me it felt clumsy & sorta thinly-realized? i think ideally these sort of 'ancient propechy'/secret cabal type of plotlines are supposed to reinforce some of the themes/ideas in the other plotlines or add a sense of mythic importance to the novel's goings on. but here they seem tacked-on from the best part of the series - the messy human politicking involved in the game of thrones, the personalities and the betrayals & the reversals. adding a for lack of a better word 'mythic' layer to the book sorta cheapens or at least minimizes the good stuff & exposes a lot of martin's weakness as a fantasy writer.

like in both of the oldtown chapters we're give a bunch of exposition that still fails to really explain much of anything, he sortof hints around abt some stuff we already know & then its like actually this whole conflict is really abt something else. which is like, blah.

oh i dunno i never got that "actually" feeling -- i liked the oldtown stuff (sort of -- it did feel tacked on) because the whole time im reading the series im thinking, you know, "the maesters dont make sense, why/how are they so apolitical, when their irl counterparts were not, these guys should be a separate power base from the aristocracy (& religion)." and then it sort of comes into focus -- theyre playing a different game, fighting a different battle or whatever.

& maybe i missed something but it didnt subsume the game of thrones stuff, it just was more of the kind of continual widening of focus that grrm has been doing since the first book. instead of being 'the conflict is really about this' it was like, 'heres a whole other set of conflicts that feed into the main conflict but you didnt even know about until now.'

but it seems like kind of a moot discussion till we get dance of dragons and can see where the citadel stuff actually goes

i guess - & i am probably not explaining this v well - my big problem was with the way the ideas presented in the oldtown chapters forcefully broaden the scope of the series. like wed been getting hints & insinuations that there were older/wilder/more magical forces at work in the war of the five kings, but i felt like he just sorta dropped things in our laps, w/o developing them or adequately foreshadowing them?

also i do think it does more than widen the focus or build his world or w/e - taken at face value the idea that danny represents a specfic & necessary force that will 'save humanity' changes the tone of the conflict. its no longer a war based on political necessities but prophetic ones. & i guess it begins to move the story from one of moral greyness to one thats more black & white? does that make sense? i guess i cld be reading too much into it/extrapolating too much from what we actually know...

i mean there are a lot of really good fantasy series that work w/in those parameteres & are in interested in looking in how salvation occurs in human terms, what the compromises are &c. but that doesnt seem to be the series that martin really wants to write, & im... less than enthusiastic abt reading him on it...

yeah if he takes that tack itd frustrate me too! & while i see how he could definitely push in that direction based on the citadel chapter, i didnt get the sense of inevitability that you did. though i may need to reread that bit.

trying not to read anything on the thread since i only just finished the second book but i wanted to rant for a second. i feel like martin took my need to have resolution re the lannisters from the first book (really for me, from the tv season) to propel me thru his second book without actually resolving any of the things i actually cared about. re robb v lannisters there is a remarkable lack of resolution on any kind of satisfying level and i'm not sure i want to read the third book w/ the hope that there will be some catharsis. even worse, i feel like the first 75% of the book does basically nothing to forward the action and then he crams all the major shifts in the last 1/4th. does this kind of thing get better in the 3rd + 4th books? i don't want to keep reading if it's going to be the same lack of progress stretched out. i always wondered how these fantasy authors can write thousands and thousands of shitty words in their books and now i kinda feel like (at least re: GRRM) it's bc nothing ever happens in them. argh, frustrating.

im not quite sure i understand what youre saying but theres not a whole lot of "satisfying" resolution at all in the series. are you saying that you wanted the stark and the lannister armies to come head to head and have a winner emerge? i think one thing that people like about martin is that he deliberately avoids that kind of dramatic confrontation. i mean if your inspirations are the wars of the roses or the 30 years war it kind of follows...

but maybe im misunderstanding what you dislike

I've been re-reading them in prep for the new one. I'm on Clash of Kings right now and am just loving every minute of it. Savoring every word even of story lines that made me impatient the first time I read it. I guess now that it's just about the journey (already knowing the destination), I am just enjoying his way with words and immersing myself in the world.

they don't necessarily need to come head to head but if i'm going to read a 900 page book i don't want the status quo to be basically the exact same in the end as it was in the beginning. those 900 pages should develop something. the daenarys storyline is mired in orientialism and obscurity, the big update in Winterfall is Theon taking control for a minute and a half (and even there, the most dramatic element -- bran + rickon's deaths -- turns out to be a fakeout), stannis is built up throughout the story only to fail anti-climatically during the battle at king's landing, the lannisters open w/ tenuous control of KL and end with only slightly less tenuous control of KL, etc etc. the biggest power shift in the book is the invasion at the very end and that takes multiple chapters of Jon Snow + the brothers wandering in the wastes with pretty much nothing going on. even the character arcs seem totally stalled. arya is pretty much the same character from beginning to end, as is sansa, jon snow, robb (who is barely even present), catelyn, jaime, cersei, joffrey -- really no one changes at all over 900 pages! in most of those cases, traits from the first book are just hammered home further in this one. arya is kinda a badass but out of place gender-wise in the first book? now she actually kills ppl and leads a revolt on that fort. sansa is damaged and tragic? now she's even more damaged and tragic. jon snow is honorable and a bastard? etc. etc. jaime spends all 900 pages in cuffs! i'm not asking for grrm to just have the two armies come head to head and resolve, but i would like some progress in what i'm reading. if you had asked me to extrapolate from the end of the first book till the end of the second one, i'd be pretty otm if i just had guessed everything would stay the same. sansa is still a captive. arya is still on the run. jon is still in the black. robb is still leading a war. jaime is still captured. joffrey is still on the throne...

oh, and definitely hate his way w/ words. i know ppl like to say he's not your average fantasy writer but there are so many lines in there that just scan to me like nonsense fantasy tripe. i mean, i love the show and i read the entire second book in a week so it's not like i'm totally immune to the pleasures of the series. i'm just finding it deeply unsatisfied now that i've finished Book 2.

oh i see what youre saying

yeah a lot of stuff changes in book 3

book 3 probably has the most 'progression' out of any in the series so far. its often ppl's favorite for that reason i think. also i think a lot of what happens in book 2 gets paid off in book 3/4, some of what looks like stasis is just slow gestation

but i do agree that martin isnt that great a stylist i think his reputation as a 'better writer' than many fantasy authors is sorta overblown and founded more on appreciation of stuff like his pacing & structure

hes not an awful stylist, but hes pretty readable; i think his real talent lies in plotting (which is why the books translate so well to tv), but mordy would seem to disagree.

what lamp says about "gestation" is right. jon snow doesnt really do much that affects the outside world in book 2, but you learn a _lot_ about the wall and night's watch and the wildlings--if all you are looking for is that the 'status quo' change, youll be disappointed, but if you can take pleasure in the slow release of information about the world of asoiaf it might swallow more easily

i'd be more impressed maybe if i felt the world building was really striking and original but it's more like he took a lot of classic tropes (the hardened sea-farers, the woodsy tough northerners, the exotic orientals, the decadent capital city inhabitants) and just smash them together. I've read all the DnD sourcebooks, I'm not that curious about the lore + legends of the ranger clan in the north.

Again, I don't want to sound really harsh. There are a lot of enjoyable things about the book and I think when GRRM is writing plot/dialogue it's very strong. It's just... thousands of pages long. That's a huge investment of time and energy and I'm not sure the payback has been sufficient yet. Maybe I'll try the third book tho and see how it goes. I may eventually just wiki every character and find out what ends up happening that way.

hmmm i dont particularly want to argue into liking the books but i think if youre going to dismiss the pleasure in discovering the mechanics of how the fantasy world works than you maybe just arent going to like epic fantasy much?

i mean max is right a big part of what book 2 is doing (and book 4 is concerned with this to an extent as well) is filling in the black spaces on the map & trying to give the reader a better sense of what this world is like, what the rules are. ill agree that martin's not the greatest or most interesting world-builder but hes got some interesting things going on & its still an important part of the genre, i guess?

i dont know that you want the information for some kind of pure pleasure in world-building so much as learning more about the specific political/power dynamic in westeros, and speculating about, or glimpsing, how it might affect the storyline otherwise.

i mean this is not "the way" to enjoy GRRM, just a suggestion to help you get thru the jon snow storylines!

i dunno, im trying to put myself in your shoes and then argue otherwise, cause i really dngaf that the lannisters still held kings landing or whatever. and i never really got the sense that the 'status quo' was the same! i mean, it felt like a ton had happened. but i read books 2 and 3 right in a row and confuse them sometimes so maybe i just dont remember

like generally in modern epic fantasy 'the world' is just as important a character as any of the actual cast, its not really considered a 'waste' to spend a bunch of pages furthering the readers understanding of that character obv lots of ppl arent that interested in this level thats ok (xp)

but i think if youre going to dismiss the pleasure in discovering the mechanics of how the fantasy world works than you maybe just arent going to like epic fantasy much?

you're not wrong. i delayed reading these books for years bc i had no interest in fantasy novels (despite lots of friends pushing them on me) and only picked them back up bc of the show. fantasy on tv = excellent. in books not so much. maybe i shouldn't be surprised that my prior hesitations were well-founded.

id argue anyway that whats interesting w/r/t to GRRM's world-building isnt the... specific people, or even the specific institutions, or whatever. its the way those people and institutions interact, i guess? martin is certainly not a historian or political science guy but he has, broadly, a good sense of politics "works" in a world like westeros. (this is open to debate, obviously, but let's just say this is true relative to tolkein.) the war of the 5 kings is interesting not because the 5 kings themselves have boss powers or interesting backstories but because it feels kind of... "real." messy and political and cruel and sad. and one way of looking at bk2 and the semi-unchanging status quo (i mean its kind of a HUGE deal that the martells showed up and pledged fealty to joffrey!) is that, like, thats how it works, sometimes!

id say do yourself a favor and read the 3rd book because there are at least 2 really major "game-changers" as they say

see, you say that it's a huge deal that the martells showed up and pledged fealty and i google them bc i can't remember who they are or why they were important.

heh

we can talk about this all night and its going to end with me shouting at you red-faced "YOU'RE JUST READING THEM WRONG" and then storming out

fair enough -- i'm not really looking to debate it. i was just curious about soliciting some other ppl's experiences to compare/contrast.

oh yea sure. like i said, my advice to you is to just read the 3rd one, its what like 10 hours of your life? and then at least youll have more evidence when you want to argue with people about it. i bet youll hate the 4th one but its shorter than the other 3

yeah i guess what i sd upthread about 3 still stands. it will probably be a more rewarding xp at least finishing that one and then giving up than leaving things here (xp: i guess what max sd).

id argue anyway that whats interesting w/r/t to GRRM's world-building isnt the... specific people, or even the specific institutions, or whatever. its the way those people and institutions interact, i guess?

yeah he obviously brings a lot of care and attention to detail when hes on the political maneuvering stuff & hes got a creates a good sense of this vast interplay btw all the different noble houses & other institutions that are part of the 'game' so im always disappointed that he doesnt seem to bother with them same depth for most of the other parts of his world. i mean i dont need to know the byzantine political history of asshai by the shadow but in many other fantasy epics youd get the sense the author does.

(i mean its kind of a HUGE deal that the martells showed up and pledged fealty to joffrey!) is that, like, thats how it works, sometimes!

― ☂ (max), Monday, June 27, 2011 1:49 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

heh, you mean the tyrells! helping mordy's case here possibly

i will say that i thought book 1 was the best-written book in terms of the story it told from beginning to end - its just a tight piece of work. and when i was in mordy's place (finishing book 2, getting into book 3) i sorta had this feeling like 'i'm digging this, i'm invested in the world, but i dont think the series is ever gonna reach the height of book 1 again' - but then shit got real again and it reinvigorated how i was feeling about the series

whoops lol

shouldve just stuck w/ "the reach"

i wonder if i avoided the ennui by just buying books 2/3/4 at one time and jumping rite into book 3 after book two. its a lil easier to stomach treading water if youve got actual plot coming up right away--i feel like in retrospect book 4 will seem less annoying when paired w/ dance into dragons

*knocks wood* *crosses fingers*

mordy somewhat otm, i dunno. it may help you to learn that in the original plan for the series (when it was a 2,400 page fuckin' trilogy) the first novel covered all of book one and half of book two, which goes a long way towards explaining why the plotting and pacing starts to go increasingly awry -- i feel like a lot of all the other books has the terrible feeling of "i have major unresolved structural issues preventing me from getting to the next bullet point, but i guess i can spin out another 200 pages on the mud vikings or the spainishmen or whatever"

i feel like everything we 'learn' about how the 'world' of westeros 'works' is fairly arbitrary -- it's my contention that he decided his medieval england analogue was actually the size of south america somewhere between books one and two --

martin is certainly not a historian or political science guy but he has, broadly, a good sense of politics "works" in a world like westeros. (this is open to debate, obviously, but let's just say this is true relative to tolkien.) the war of the 5 kings is interesting not because the 5 kings themselves have boss powers or interesting backstories but because it feels kind of... "real." messy and political and cruel and sad

see this is kind of a weird thing because tolkien is so emphatically not concerned with how politics works? i don't know. but there is basically a sign posted outside lotr saying THIS WAY FAIRYLAND, SUSPEND DISBELIEF ABOUT LOGISTICS PLEASE; a lot of fantasy fiction works this way; & yeah to anyone who says tolkien is bad because the politics don't work i reserve the right to go "YOU'RE JUST READING THEM WRONG" myself, not that i even like tolkien

anyway i think the reason it all feels totally arbitrary to me is that the war-of-the-roses stuff feels messy and real &c. until i stop and think about how this is meant to be an entire continent it's happening on -- like, you can't just scale up and expect it to work! medieval england was already nowhere near as monocultural as martin makes westeros. this is why i'm harping on the food thing upthread -- like he's just slapped on a 'spanish' texture pack.

also just .. the war of the roses is the least interesting period of history anywhere in the world ever

im not saying tolkein is bad because of politics!!

im anticipating criticisms (like yours) that grrm doesnt _actually_ get politics (which i think is true) by saying that were talking in a relative way here

and anyway youre obviously right martin isnt nearly the historian/sociologist/political scientist he or his most fervent fans would like him to be. i tend to be a little more annoyed at his insistence that history is shaped by the decisive actions of a handful of nobles and that dynasties are won and lost in a single instant than by his cruddy geo-cultural sense

yeah i think that would probably annoy me more too, except i have an incredibly pedantic mindset

i might stop complaining about the olives and start complaining about the ravens instead

i've read about 3.75 books and it is pretty clear to me that GRRM is not my kind of nerd? in that what gets GRRM off is court intrigue and genealogy and the word "ser" (see it's not england it has an E) whereas i am more of a grain prices guy. that aside though he writes good !!!!! moments (book 3 has The Big One) and if his characters aren't "complex" in the shakespearian sense they do refuse to be placed firmly in a column. or at least they die unexpectedly. and in a few cases (most of them girls, actually -- dany, sansa -- but also samwell and maybe littlefinger) i really dig the arcs, partly because of how slow and painful they are, and how many times they refuse to satisfy traditional fantasy-epic expectations; i love for example how samwell goes on a big globetrotting adventure without actually Finding His Courage.

the prose is bad but it's pulp fantasy. much worse exists. for what it's worth mordy i do remember 2 being the boring one.

i guess what i mean re: "refuse to satisfy" is that all the characters start as cliches (weary noble warrior! restless tomboy! bratty minor princess! fat coward! bitch!) but the books make a point of frustrating their ideas of themselves.

yeah, i think that's probably the series biggest strength. Obviously grrm hasn't performed a full "deconstruction" of the genre (whatever that would entail) but he subverts it in ways that make the series 1m times more enjoyable.