A Feast for Crows

"Disappointing" barely begins to describe A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in the otherwise fantastic series A Song of Ice and Fire that I've been reading so fanatically all summer long. I had been warned by the Internet at large before beginning this 970-page snoozer that it was a serious let down, particularly as it came on the heels of the best book in the series to date, and that all expectations should be greatly tempered. I was therefore pretty well prepared for a lackluster novel, but it still managed to fall well short of the much-lowered bar I had set for it.

So what the hell went so wrong with this one? The answer is actually pretty well documented. George R. R. Martin intended for his beloved series to contain two separate trilogies set five years apart. So when he began writing the fourth book, he had given himself the task of bringing the reader back up to speed by exploring the five years gone by. He tried to do this in several ways - a very lengthy prologue, a bunch of flashbacks within the pages of the story itself, and even just allowing five years to have passed without any real events occring - but Martin wasn't satisfied with any of them. Eventually he scrapped the five year gap, but by that point he'd already come up with story threads for all kinds of new characters and left many of these in the story anyway. Meanwhile, he struggled with certain characters' timelines and the way they should all be pieced together. He realized after spending a few years on the book that it was well over the length of the (1200-page) third book, and that he wasn't even close to finished writing everything yet, let alone trimming it back down and editing it. So in 2005, a full five years after the third book had been released, Martin released A Feast for Crows, the fourth of what would now be seven planned books. Rather than cut the original fourth book's story in half temporally, though, Martin decided instead to focus only on half of the characters. His logic was that he'd rather tell "all of the story for half of the characters" than "half of the story for all of the characters."

This was the fourth book's fatal flaw. Martin's logic is fine, but in practice it failed for two key reasons. For one thing, the characters he chose to include in this book were far less interesting and meaningful to the overall series than the characters he omitted. In fact, the three most compelling characters by the end of Book 3 are entirely absent here in Book 4. More importantly, also absent were compelling stories for the characters Martin did include in the narrative. What's the point of telling "all of the story" for half of the characters when the story isn't interesting or climactic in the least and the best characters are missing? The frustrating part is that through the entire book, Martin remains an extremely talented writer, displaying mastery of the third person limited narrative style once again and bringing an imaginary world to life with apt descriptions and attention to detail. The individual sentences and paragraphs were as well-written as ever before, but the book's overall flow suffered thanks to go-nowhere plots and unfamiliar characters.

I wanted to like this book, and I guess it'd be unfair to say that I disliked it overall. But the extent to which I enjoyed reading it came almost entirely from the good will Martin had built up with that nearly flawless original trilogy. If I wasn't familiar with most of the characters and the overall story arcs going into the book, nothing about the book would have enticed me to go back and read the other books in the series.There's just too much wheel-spinning going on here, and too much of it occurs from the viewpoints of minor characters who are only given one or two chapters. If the author can't be bothered to develop some characters beyond a chapter or two, why should I the reader be invested in said characters?

The fifth book in the series, A Dance with Dragons, unfolds in parallel with this fourth one, and at least in theory it should focus on all of the main characters this book ignored. That gives me hope. Still, I'm worried. After banging out the first three books in 1996, 1998, and 2000, Martin had to spend eleven years writing the fourth and fifth books, which, again, were originally intended to be just one book. At this new rate, the final two books in the series will come out in 2017 and 2021 respectively. That's a long time away! Hopefully Martin gains steam and confidence as he barrels toward the series' ending and can manage to get the next two books out by 2016 or so. (We'll see.) Either way, I've got Book 5 to get through first, and a small break from the series before starting that one. I'm serious about that break this time around because I do not at present own a copy of the book.