Review of A Feast for Crows
I recently finished George R.R. Martin's A Feast for Crows. In many ways I was disappointed. When I read a book, I mostly read it for the characters, because I care about them and have some investment in their fate. Martin has always been brutal to his characters. The Stark family, the noble family from the north who form the central cast of this story, has been scattered, the patriarch unjustly executed and the eldest brother betrayed and murdered. Most of the others are presumed dead. When it comes to the wide and varied cast of characters, the Starks are the ones I most care about, and the ones we hear the least about in this book.
Martin found that the book he had written was too long and unwieldy, so he divided it in two. A Feast for Crows is one half, while A Dance with Dragons will be the other. Rather than divide it chronologically, however, in the first half he wrote about certain characters, who are active in a certain region, while in the second half, he'll talk about the concurrent activities of the rest of the cast. In this slice, therefore, we only learned about two of the Starks, the sisters Arya and Sansa, who have gone their separate ways. Sansa's part I found the most interesting, as she has grown up a lot, while Arya... she just plain creeps me out. She's become quite the little assassin. I wish her well, as long as she kills the bad guys, but I can't like her. Those two made up only a small part of the book, maybe a fifth in all. The rest of the story was about minor characters and the enemy, the Lannisters, the family that's stolen the throne and tried to destroy the Starks. Some of the Lannisters are all right--Tyrion, the scorned dwarf, and even Jaime have some sense of honor and justice, even if their loyalty to their family puts them on the wrong side. Tyrion ended up killing his own father, but I can't hold that against him, as Tywin needed killing. I'd like to hear more about his activities, but he doesn't appear in this book. Jaime appears a lot, and his point of view wasn't too annoying. Cersei's was awful. Cersei, Jaime's and Tyrion's sister, is the queen regent, ruling for her son Tommen, and she's nowhere near as clever as she thinks she is. In fact, she's a fool, and an evil one, and reading about her was painful. Tyrion and Jaime I liked even when they were on the wrong side of the conflict, but I wanted Cersei to die. There were a couple of minor characters who were important in this book, such as Samwell and Brienne, but they didn't do a whole lot. Now, if I really cared about Brienne and Samwell, they could have spent the whole book at a feast and I would have enjoyed reading it. To be honest, I like them, but I couldn't get too attached. As I mentioned before, Martin is brutal to his characters, and that makes it difficult to care much about characters who may not last long. Those who don't die for no good reason often fall from grace. Sometimes both. Arya has become a little monster, and her mother, Catelyn, was raised from the dead to become something worse, less than human and more than cruel. If she were to kill just Lannisters and Freys (the family who betrayed the eldest Stark brother, Robb), then it wouldn't matter so much, but she no longer seems able to tell friend from foe.
There's something to be said for being willing to kill off important characters. It gives the work greater emotional impact, the readers a stronger sense of risk, but with Martin it's reached the point where it's hard to invest in the characters knowing that they might be snatched away at any moment. I found myself calculating their probability of survival, and weighing my emotional investment based on that. The ones whom I think will survive, for a while, anyway, are Sansa, Arya, Bran, and Jon, the younger Starks who've had significant roles thus far, although Sansa isn't a sure thing. Then there's Tyrion, the dwarf Lannister who seems decent. And Daenerys, the Targaryen heir who should be queen, even if I don't like her much--she seems to want to wipe out the Starks as much as the Lannisters do. Of those, only Arya and Sansa had lengthy parts in this book. The rest of the book was about people I didn't dare get too attached to, assuming I didn't actively want them dead.
Here's hoping that the next book will be mostly about people I care about.
