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damerell at 06:41pm on 07/09/2012
damerell at 06:41pm on 07/09/2012After a comment from Jack, I think, annoyingly, I've realised what's wrong with the books. Ignorance is bliss and all that.
I actually think the indiscriminate character death is quite effective, although I'm becoming less and less a fan of the "X is dead... surprise, they aren't!" mechanic. What I think it's meant to do is not just as a cheap stunt to emphasise the horrors of the civil war, but rather its futility.
We know there's at least two problems building that mean the civil war is pointless squabbling; the undead^W Others and Daenerys and her dragons. The intermingling of civil war and bits about those two problems is quite effective.
But the fundamental difficulty is that it has taken us an awful lot of words to get this far, and furthermore we're being told that a lot of those words are, in the grand scheme of things, irrelevant. I reckon I'm at least two-Lords-of-the-Rings in, and by now... Stannis Baratheon has turned up to prepare to fight the Others, but hasn't started yet, and Daenerys is just settling down for a spot of lunch before maybe thinking about going to Westeros some year. The real plot's just getting started, and there's already been enough book for JRRT at his most verbose to wrap up the entire thing and knock off for tea.
This isn't a Robert Jordan-esque exercise in writing novels where nothing happens, but it is a persistently glacial pace. Each chapter's eminently readable; as it were, GRRM is still writing very well at a tactical level, but strategically it's rather lacking.
I actually think the indiscriminate character death is quite effective, although I'm becoming less and less a fan of the "X is dead... surprise, they aren't!" mechanic. What I think it's meant to do is not just as a cheap stunt to emphasise the horrors of the civil war, but rather its futility.
We know there's at least two problems building that mean the civil war is pointless squabbling; the undead^W Others and Daenerys and her dragons. The intermingling of civil war and bits about those two problems is quite effective.
But the fundamental difficulty is that it has taken us an awful lot of words to get this far, and furthermore we're being told that a lot of those words are, in the grand scheme of things, irrelevant. I reckon I'm at least two-Lords-of-the-Rings in, and by now... Stannis Baratheon has turned up to prepare to fight the Others, but hasn't started yet, and Daenerys is just settling down for a spot of lunch before maybe thinking about going to Westeros some year. The real plot's just getting started, and there's already been enough book for JRRT at his most verbose to wrap up the entire thing and knock off for tea.
This isn't a Robert Jordan-esque exercise in writing novels where nothing happens, but it is a persistently glacial pace. Each chapter's eminently readable; as it were, GRRM is still writing very well at a tactical level, but strategically it's rather lacking.
(no subject)
And sometimes he can take several chapters on a digression where it could realistically have been dealt with in a couple of pages.
(no subject)