This review and rating is for the full ASOIAF series, not just this book.
As a fan of the TV show, I was disappointed overall by the books. I gave up rThis review and rating is for the full ASOIAF series, not just this book.
As a fan of the TV show, I was disappointed overall by the books. I gave up reading the printed books after the second one, switching to the audio book for the remaining three (or five, depending how you count), as I didn't want to spend month after month reading nothing else.
I love the world that Martin has created. It's fantastically detailed, and has a rich history that that spans thousands of years. The cultures of the various peoples are diverse and shine through. I really applaud the effort and creativity that has gone into creating such a rich and detailed world.
The character and story arcs were often compelling, but just as often (especially in the later books) they they seemed to lose their way, coming across as ad-hoc and unplanned. Now, I don't expect characters to follow well worn paths or conform to cliched archetypes like "hero" or "villain". I'm not troubled by not having a character to "root" for. I like complex characters, characters who change for better or worse. I like being wrong about a character, and being surprised. But there is so much thrown in here seemingly without consideration for the reader. Whole storylines that span for hundreds of pages, only to end in a whimper, with little or no effect on any of the other activities that are going on.
I thought many of the changes they made in the TV show were for the better. In the books, often characters would act in ways that didn't make much sense, and I think there were times that this was changed as it would have been much more obvious on the screen.
Martin clearly enjoys writing about the world he has created. But he needs to learn to edit and cut. Particularly from the third book onwards, we start to see the story digress into a confused mess. Especially in the fourth book, we hear endlessly about characters that are wholly uninteresting and have absolutely no relevance to the larger story at hand.
I thought that the single-character-per-chapter perspective approach was a mistake. It seemed limiting as it didn't allow any good exploration of the motives of side characters (Some examples - Littlefinger and Varys, Grew Worm and Missandei) who were much more fleshed out and interesting in the TV show. The limitation of structure may also have been a reason as to why so many new characters were introduced - Martin was stuck to the format he had chosen.
Martin's writing style, while not terrible, is generally pretty bad. I know this is highly subjective. As I mentioned, he really needs to learn to edit. Everything is so long winded, and not in a productive way - it's often formulaic and repetitive. He leans a lot on crutch words and phrases. "Little and less", "much and more" - we cannot hear about smoke unless it "rises in columns". I understand a lot of this generates an internal frame of reference that strengthens the feel and culture of Westeros, but a lot of it is just lazy writing (and poor editing).
Sometimes points of fact or plot were just repeated again and again for no reason. I noticed this especially in the last book. Nobody is picking up A Dance With Dragons without having read the previous books. And if they are, it's not going to help them much to be reminded a few trivial facts here and there. So please assume that the reader knows what is going on, four thousand pages into a series. Just progress the story rather than remind us again who is related to whom, and that the vows of the nights watch mean that they can take no wife.
One thing that may be a personal peeve, but that really irritated me, was Martin's use of adverbs to describe colours: "The fire shone redly". Redly, pinkly! Why not just use the word that describes the colour, rather than some clumsy adverb? And why not just describe the sound of the horn, rather than actually write out the word, "TOWWWOOOOO", or whatever it was.
Oh, and did we need that damn crow repeating words in every scene involving Commander Mormont or Jon Snow? How about describing the crow, reminding us of it now and then, but letting it sink into the background of our imagination. Don't let it interrupt the dialogue constantly! "Snow! Snow!", said the crow. Oh, did it? Did you really need to remind us again that the goddamn crow is there? It is annoying and adds nothing. Cut, cut, cut. Give this damn thing to an editor.
The more I think about it, the more I am annoyed by Martin's writing. It's not all the time - I think he might be very readable if he were to cut, edit and rewrite a lot more than he does. Often it feels like you are reading a mediocre early draft.
A note on the audiobooks - It's a pretty significant achievement reading over 4,000 pages of text aloud, into a microphone, always engaged, never drifting off. So as far as I'm concerned, Roy Doltrice deserves praise for this feat alone. And overall he does a good job of making it interesting. Having said that, I have two criticisms:
The first is that he selects accents and voices seemingly at random, without consideration of the background or birth of the character. When he randomly gets one right, it works well. But often the characters sound like varying shades of pirate - especially Danaerys, who for some reason is a drunk Irishman.
The other criticism is that he doesn't act out the dialogue well. By this I mean he reads the words without the appropriate intent or inflection. For example, a character may clearly be saying something in anger, but he reads it in an apologetic tone. It may be too much to ask to act out such a large amount of dialogue, but this definitely detracted from the story.
All in all for ASOIAF, A+ for the imagination, C- for execution. If you enjoyed the TV show, I would recommend reading the first one for some interesting background and detail about Westeros, then calling it a day. Sometimes I enjoyed it, sometimes I pushed myself through it. But honestly, I'm glad it's over. I will probably read the next one when it comes out (hey, I've come this far), and I look forward to the next season of the TV show (which is awesome)....more