I have mixed feelings about this book. It was mostly bad, but became much better towards the end. Nothing of importance happens till halfway through when George R R Martin decides to kill off two of the prime characters!
It was a big shock, and for that alone he deserves credit. I mean other authors have also killed main personalities like C S Friedman in “The Coldfire Trilogy”, but never ones who were this central to the plot. Martin kills someone who had their own POV story and all – I mean wow. Balls of brass.
He pulled the same stunt in the first book and hasn’t stopped his carnage since then. All three books till now are littered with the bodies of dead and important characters.
But I just got the feeling that he did it because the book was going nowhere. Right upto that point I just couldn’t care for most of the story. He stubbornly refuses to let separated characters meet. One poor girl called Arya comes that close to finally reuniting with her mother and brother, only to get pulled away again. The same happens with another set of brothers who would just love to know the other is alive, but Martin conveniently makes one of their closest friends take a secret vow not to reveal their existence. I mean wtf.
Finally, I understand that Martin is trying to be realistic and all, and that in real life the good guys don’t always win but they win once in a while dammit! Time and again the evil characters in the book outmaneuver the good guys who die left and right due to betrayal or just accident. After a while it gets depressing cause you catch on to Martin’s pattern. He just wants to keep killing everyone off without giving the protagonists a break. It’s as if he’s trying too hard to make a point that he’s a different writer from everyone else.
Like the previous books, this one too had a lot of fluff. Too many descriptions of clothes, castles, the landscape, what each person is thinking etc and too little plot development. It’s also a pain keeping track of the hundreds of house names. I just flip through those pages till I get to the meat of the chapter without missing much.
Moving onto the fourth and last book of “A Song of Ice and Fire”. The series hasn’t been completed yet. I really hope it’s more fulfilling than the previous ones and Martin manages to get a plot going without having to resort to murdering the book’s heroes.