George R. R. Martin has been dubbed the “American Tolkien.” He’s been on every bestseller list out there. His first book recently became the new HBO series “Game of Thrones.” And, of course, he’s had fans alternately salivating for and cursing every missed deadline as they waited six long years for “A Dance with Dragons.”
He’s that good.
“Dance” does not disappoint. It is the sister book to “A Feast for Crows,” featuring events from parts of Martin’s world left out of “Feast” and some of the narrative thereafter. He seamlessly shuttles readers between such locations as The Wall in the north, which stands as a barrier against Westeros’s long winters and the otherworldly terrors such winters bring; the decadent continental cities where a young queen survives revolution by playing her suitors as deftly as did Elizabeth I; and the Red Keep, the royal palace where a child king’s puppet masters attempt to secure his throne against the many rival kings that threaten to rend Westeros once more into its ancient Seven Kingdoms. The politics are Byzantine, the stakes enormous and the characters liable to die in droves. Westeros is at war, and Martin never lets us forget it.
Martin excels at realism; he writes the horrors of battle, disease and death as well as, if not better than, he does pageantry and splendor. His characters are equally complex: there are no heroes, no Dark Lords, no idealistic teenagers who save the world. Some of his most beloved characters include a dwarf who kills his father, a knight who has sired children by his sister and a highborn tomboy who recites a list of the people she intends to assassinate every night. By the same token, he is ruthlessly true to his narrative when it comes to killing off his characters, especially those beloved by fans. In just about every book in the series, there is at least one death that tears at readers’ heartstrings, the death of a character so sympathetic, so real that it kills the reader to see him slain. (Yes, it happens in this one, too.) And yet we can’t help coming back for more.
It comes down to Martin’s skill as a storyteller: like Tolkien, he writes the history of the world he has created (one loosely analogous to Britain and the Continent during the War of the Roses) in such a way that readers are invested in the lives of the characters they’ve known for thousands of pages. Rather than naming him the Tolkien of our country, we should perhaps call him the Tolkien of our generation instead. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” is not a grand struggle of good and evil, of valiant and shining knights against the massed forces of darkness, of the English fighting the Germans in the two World Wars that Tolkien knew. It is a murkier tale of many sides fighting for land, for power and for their own survival – a story where little girls learn to kill, queens sell their maidenhood to buy armies and even the noblest and bravest of knights stain their hands and souls with the blood of innocents.
Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Welcome to the “Dance.”