REHupa

Last year, I wrote a post about Robert Jordan and how I had walked away from George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. I had not bothered to read the latest installment, A Feast For Crows when it came out in 2005. Well, I was in the library and saw it on the shelf two weeks ago and decided “What the Hell!” Hellish can describe reading this book that clocks in at 684 pages of text and about another 65 pages of appendices. Supposedly, Martin was going to jump twenty years from the events at the end of A Storm of Swords for the next book. Then he found he had to wrap up loose ends. The project ended up becoming too unwieldly to publish as one book. He broke up the story into two books with half of the character storylines in one, the other half in the next volume.

This latest installment struck me as being especially dialogue driven. Talk, talk, talk. Instead of telling the story, Martin has conversation driving the book. There is one brief sea battle in the book. That’s it! Maybe publishers want dialogue driven novels. For me, the whole enchanting aspect that makes fantasy unique is missing. You end up having a soap opera with costumes. What was covered could have been done in 150 pages typically in the hands of a writer 40 or 50 years ago. Worse, some of the characters that have chapters devoted to them are just plain boring. To me, that is a cardinal sin when writing fantasy fiction. Leo Grin mentioned to me that there is no poetry in the writing when you have all this dialogue. The writer is more wordsmith than poet. Truman Capote once said of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road that this was typing, not writing. I feel the same about this book. Fantasy is being strangled by these huge, door stop, corporate fantasy novels. There is no magic, sense of wonder, precious little adventure. Only drudgery while sludging through page after page of dialogue that could have been cut. You get my point by now. I thought Martin was going to follow up quickly with the other book but it appears that it will be easily three years if not more between novels. Martin should take a cold look at what happened to Robert Jordan and having an unfinished series. I don’t know if Martin could change style now if he wanted. Steve Tompkins is of the opinion that this series is now a brand name. To deliver anything other than a door stop book would be met with resistance. How about resistance from readers increasingly frustrated with no pay off? Go to Amazon and read the many reviews. A fair number of fans of this series are now former fans. People have grown up, gone to college, got a job, and started families since this series started. My advice to Martin is cut the dialogue, start telling the story in a more efficient manner, and get some action going again. How about a novel that comes in at 300 pages?

If you want to read something on the scope of A Song of Ice and Fire but with a better payoff, I would heartily recommend Paul Kearney’s The Monarchies of God books. Kearney got in, wrote the series, and got out. He shows how this can be done competently.