| Author: George R.R. Martin | Series: A Song of Ice and Fire |
| Rating: 8.5 | Reviewer: Scott Andrews |
| Genre: Fantasy | Publisher:Bantam |
| Pages: 784 | Orig Pub Date: 2005 |
| Binding: Hardcover |
In the five years since the third volume in his Song of Ice and Fire saga, George R. R. Martin has become the most popular and the most respected author in epic fantasy. As a thirty-five year veteran writer with a bevy of Hugo and Nebula awards, he deserves every bit of it. But the fanfare and expectations have attracted stringent scrutiny to the fourth volume in the series, A Feast for Crows. This novel does continue the saga in Martin's uniquely brilliant style, but it suffers from an expanded scope and a truncated cast of characters.
As Martin remarks in the Afterward, his planned story for this book grew too long, so he split his cast of characters along geographic lines and kept half of them back for the next book. A Feast for Crows only covers events in the central and southern regions of his world. This includes such point-of-view characters as Jaime and Cersei Lannister in King's Landing, and Sansa Stark in the Eyrie, but it leaves out many of the most popular characters, like Jon Snow on the Wall, Tyrion in exile, and Daenerys across the sea.
After the frenetic and brutal tone of the last two novels detailing the war, the slower pace of peacetime events in A Feast for Crows feels welcome. New post-war conflicts emerge, including restless religious orders. Several of the point-of-view characters' plot threads cover travel to new locales, and one follows a character's vow from the end of the previous book. Yet only half of the plot threads continue the general thrust of the previous novels--the struggle between the Houses of Lannister and Stark, within the larger war for the throne. The others cover new, peripheral plotlines.
Two of these new plotlines detail political machinations in the southern province of Dorne and the Viking-like Iron Islands. These locales are filled with Martin's trademark vivid descriptions and detailed world-building. But in his coverage of these plot threads, for the first time in this saga Martin rotates the points-of-view instead of using a single one. The lack of familiar characters and the shifting points-of-view in the same locale make these two plotlines feel disjointed.
With so many point-of-view characters, it's inevitable that the plots for some will move faster than others. Martin usually doesn't write chapters where little happens, so the characters with slower-moving plotlines end up with only three or four chapters in the whole book. These characters with less coverage unfortunately include almost all of the remaining point-of-view characters from the previous book. Here, A Feast for Crows clearly suffers from the decision to hold back half the characters.
Martin's prose is still second to none in the genre. The vividness of his descriptions, the realism of his characters, and the detail of his setting all completely immerse the reader in the novel, all the way down to the subtle touches of medieval vocabulary and diction.
The scope of the Ice and Fire saga has widened with every book, making each one longer and expanding the endless appendices of knights and nobles. But more troubling, this expansion has shifted the focus of the saga away from the initial characters that charmed readers in the first place--the Stark family. A Feast for Crows includes only two of the four remaining Starks. They have only a few chapters each, and they both assume new identities so deeply that Martin symbolically changes the character name titles to their chapters. Their rivals, the Lannisters, continue to grow more interesting through the added point-of-view of characters from that house. But the peripheral characters, the slow Stark plotlines, and the decision to split A Feast for Crows have all but squeezed the Stark characters out of this novel.
A Feast for Crows does include a welcome sign of the epic scope possibly starting to narrow--several political factions seeking to find Daenerys across the sea. Hopefully this consolidation of plot threads will continue as Martin moves through the proposed next three books to the conclusion of the saga.
Fantasybookspot - fantasy book reviews and fantasy book author interviews
Buy it now at Amazon! | View/Post Comments(1)
Other Reviews of works by George R.R. Martin
