astro
June 19, 2016, 8:28pm
42
Re the quality of his writing there’s no question it fell off a cliff. This review is from: A Dance With Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5): Book 5 of a Song of Ice and Fire (Kindle Edition)
A few observations.
1: The book was well written stylistically, but I’m beginning to see traces of author fatigue where he’s re-using the same characterizations over and over. There are no fewer than three separate characters in ADWD that have “hands as big as hams”.
2: I get the impression on some level he really did not want to write this book. It’s so overwritten and meandering in parts it really does feel like something he attacked little by little, begrudgingly over time. I really don’t get the “parts of a whole” feeling I got with the first two books of a narrative sweep and flow to the story. You can almost feel him chafing as he wrote it.
3: While I can appreciate there are multiple POVs this book actually exhausted me with the clicking Viewmaster approach to the storyline with so many character perspectives. It gets to be something of a mess at some point.
4: While Danerys and Jon are written from a somewhat “right thinking sympathetic hero” perspective most of the time they really are kind of stupid in many of the long term strategic decisions they are making and their political opponents are correct. In addition I’m also having trouble with their interior dialogs coming from a 16 year old and an 18 year old. It just doesn’t true.
I may be out of line here, but I got the feeling from the last 1/4 of the book or so that some of the set pieces (Cersi’s naked walk and the Varys kids all coming out of the woodwork as examples) were being deliberately set up with an eye toward the television series.
In the end I enjoyed it insofar as it moved the story along and I enjoyed the character dialogs. His conversational flow between characters has actually gotten better over time. As far as the story structure goes it was kind of a mess. I get the feeling that artistically he really is pretty much done with this story, and the fan demands are what keep it going with like a re-animated corpse.
As an aside once an author is super successful can he effectively work without editorial supervision? This book could really have used some major pruning.