A good friend, V, finished A Dance with Dragons over the weekend, and since I’m the one who turned her on to the series, she shared her thoughts with me. She felt it was very up-and-down, and while she liked it, she also felt disappointed. I had read the book as soon as it was released, and while I certainly loved quite a bit of it (and was infuriated with some of it), I understand her reaction. That’s because I think Dance suffers from a number of glaring problems.
1. V felt that not a lot happened in the book, which is accurate to a degree. As I understand it, GRRM had simply written too much, and the book was simply at the point of becoming unbindable. As a result, a number of plots had their resolutions cut and pushed back to Book #6, The Winds of Winter. Unfortunately, the result is that there are a lot of cliffhangers in A Dance with Dragons. It’s hundreds of pages of build-up with very little release. If only one or two of the cut resolutions had been left in Dance, I think it would have been a much stronger and satisfying book.
2. Quite a bit of awesomeness that is A Dance with Dragons is so subtly woven into the book that most people miss it. There are a number of Oh My God moments if you catch what GRRM has done, and you can’t help but admire the brilliance and patience of the setup and execution. However, the flip side to that is that GRRM refuses to spell them out loud.
Compounding this is the length of time it’s taken him to write the books. There’s a breathtaking realization halfway through Dance, dealing with the fate of several Frays, that completely hinges on a story that Bran told in A Storm of Swords, which was published in August 2000, or eleven years before Dance with Dragons. If you read Storm back then, odds are you’ve forgotten that story, unless you’re a very obsessive fan. Granted, there are quite a number of obsessive fans in the world now, and that number is only growing thanks to the HBO series. GRRM spends a lot of time hanging out with those folk at conventions and parties, and listening to their theories. They all know the books backward and forward and, of course, they got the subtle references. However, they’re the minority. I think a lot of casual readers missed this stuff.
(Disclaimer: I’m one of the obsessives. In 2005, I had the privilege of being invited to a party at Lodey’s house in the San Francisco area, where GRRM unwound after a particularly long day on his book tour. We ate pizza, drank beer, and sat around George as he told us stories. Who’s Lodey? Well, he’s the first fan listed in the dedication to Dance.)
3. For the love of god, George, you need to make Dunk and Egg more available to the world, because they’re playing an increasingly important role in the series, yet I know a ton of readers who don’t even know they exist.
Dunk and Egg is a series of prequel novellas that GRRM started writing after A Clash of Kings. Generally, he writes one Dunk and Egg novella between each major book now, and they’re published in fantasy anthologies, so they’re hidden in amongst a dozen other short stories by other authors. As novellas, they’re wonderful, and I absolutely love the first one, which made me cry at one point. And, prior to HBO arriving on scene, they were the great hope of the fandom to be adapted into some kind of television series or movie.
They’re set about 80 or 90 years before A Song of Ice and Fire, and they provide a riveting history and backstory to the series. The Targaryen reign is Shakespearian in scope, stuffed with intrigue, civil war, and deaths (accidental and intentional) by the dozen. It’s the history of England, only way cooler.
The problem is that he’s assuming that we’ve all read them. I literally swore out loud at the reveal of Bloodraven in A Dance with Dragons. However, if you’re wondering who the hell is Bloodraven, well, there’s the problem, George. The payoff is there for your die-hard fans, but it’s completely over the head of everyone else.
I know that once he’s finished with the Dunk & Egg novellas (there may be as many as six remaining to be written), GRRM will likely bind them together into a collection, much like his Tuf Voyaging stories are now available in one book. However, that’s years in the future, by which point the main series will have been completed, and learning who Bloodraven is after you’ve read Dance is sort of like going into Empire Strikes Back knowing that Darth Vader is Luke’s father. There’s no emotional impact. GRRM’s publishers simply need to do something to make the novellas more widely available. Publish the existing ones separately as ebooks. Anything.
If you’re intrigued about Dunk and Egg and haven’t read them, whatever you do, don’t wiki them, because you do not want to be spoiled. Just find yourself copies of the Legends I and Legends II anthologies, edited by Robert Silverberg. Or the Dreamsongs, Volume 2 anthology if you’re looking for the first one. The third Dunk and Egg is in the Warriors anthology, edited by GRRM himself. There are graphic novel adaptions of the first two novellas, but try and find the actual novellas, because while the graphic novels are good, they miss out on a lot of GRRM’s memorable prose. See, you’re confused already, right? I rest my case, George.
Like I said in the beginning, I loved Dance, but as an obsessive fan I’m willing to admit it’s a very flawed book. But do yourself a favor, read the Dunk and Egg stories, then go back and reread the books when you find you’ve got a week or two to kill. I absolutely love this series more than any other for a reason.