In fact, here is a summary of the entire book:
- Cersei ad nauseum. Making one stupid decision after another in Kings Landing. Not interesting stupid, just boring, incompetent stupid.
- Brienne on a completely pointless quest for Sansa, never coming within 1000 miles of her. Her story ends on a lame made-for-tv cliffhanger.
- Jaime mopes around wishing he had two hands and being mad at Cersei. He starts training with his left hand but doesn't get any good.
- Sam is on a boat. There's a storm. He gets laid. He also apparently can't tell one baby from another since Aemon has to tell him about the baby swap.
- Sansa continues her compliant relationship in the Eyrie with Petyr and his creepy mother-daughter fetish. Their trip down the mountain is described in such intricate detail I was sure Sansa was going to crack it and push Robert off the edge (I wanted to), but instead, surprise! Nothing happens.
- Arya picks up what promised to be an awesome new training montage with the Faceless men, but, amazingly, it also turns out to be boring.
- Arianne of Dorne has a gutsy plan to start a war. It doesn't work.
- A bunch of minor characters you don't care about get their own one-off point of view chapter to do something that is of minor importance to the story.
The tragedy of this book is that it is brilliantly written, and could have been amazing if there had been some significant plot developments. Sure the iron men needed a new king, and the church's rise to power was important to the story, but those points and more could have been covered in a lot less than 1000 pages. I initially hated the chapters about the ironborn, since it was a bunch of new characters I didn't care about. However, I was won over to some extent by Aeron Damphair's character and his drowned men, literally drowned and resuscitated, and I hope we see him again in the story. My favourite quote from this part of the book was from Lord Rodrik 'The Reader':
"Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?" "How else? Though not till I'm done reading."
Looking back over the rest of my notes, they were all complaining about stuff so I'll skip listing them all here and leave with one final whinge. In the first couple of books I loved the use of 'much and more', but it has been so overused I'd now give much and more to never read it again.
2.5 stars
While I agree that Feast is disappointing in comparison to A Storm of Swords in general and certainly in terms of action, I think your opinion may change a little on a re-read.
ReplyDeleteFor me, Feast is all about the details. Cersei is indeed a blundering idiot, but Qyburn isn’t, and there he is in most of her chapters feeding interesting information that she dismisses but the reader shouldn’t. Brienne’s activities were boring as, but what about her story arc? She was so judgemental of Jaime who tried to explain that not everything is black and white and sometimes a knight’s oaths conflict, but look at the situation she's in at the end.
Other exciting details include the gravedigger on The Quiet Isle, Alleras The Sphinx, finally meeting Maester Marwyn who has been mentioned since A Game of Thrones by the likes of Mirri Maz Duur and Qyburn, Maggy The Frog grandmother of Jeyne Westerling, what happened to Cersei’s childhood friend Melara Hetherspoon, and the reappearance of Jaqen.
Did not like the Ironborn or Dornish chapters although they also have similar little details.
Hate Sam but again, interesting revelations for the Prince That Was Promised/Azor Ahai Reborn prophesy.
Admittedly these things are really only of interest to extreme fans, and certainly don’t make it a 5 star read or even 4 stars. Those looking for an entertaining read will be disappointed by Feast. It also has a lot of annoying and lame things about it which you mention.
Hey Seer! I was wondering if I would get a comment from you on this series :)
ReplyDeleteCersei's head-in-the-sand felt fairly contrived to me. When she discounts widely reported and corroborated news of dragons I felt like Martin was exaggerating her incompetence so you don't miss the obvious mistake she makes with the church.
It's funny you mention the Quiet Isle, for some reason having a *second* island/fortress only accessible by a secret causeway/path ala Queenscrown really grated on me :)
I totally missed the whole Jaqen/Pate thing until I read about Pate in the wikipedia article when I was writing the review....If this thing ever gets finished I'm going to need you to explain all the subtleties I missed, cuz there is no chance in hell I'm re-reading :)
I agree Brienne's lesson in reality was a great exercise in character development, but, god, what an incredibly frustrating way to get there.
Just a few brief notes, since I just got reading the 4th book basically all in one day and I'm now incoherent, but:
ReplyDelete- I felt like the Cersei stuff was actually pretty plausible. Everything we've seen of her *is* that she's quite incompetent -- just look how most of the second book is Tyrion acting to check that incompetence in his role as Hand, and what extremes he has to go to to stop that.
If you look at Cersei, there's no reason to expect that she'd be good at running things. She was born beautiful and rich, and accustomed to getting her way in the world -- generally a bad combination when you couple it with a background and a world where is basically one where monstrous impulses often get you ahead. The other crippling vice is that she's spent her life in fear of a prophecy from her youth -- it introduces an inner insecurity that leads her to do escalating-ly horrible things as more and more pieces of it come true.
She reads like any number of (insecure) people in power, who get caught in a vicious cycle of insecurity and lashing out.
- Good catch on the Pate thing. When I saw him at the end, I was like, 'Ah ha, that alchemist killed the boy and took his place!', but I didn't catch the alchemist's description as matching Jaqen's.
- Brienne's lesson really seems like the same as Sansa's from Littlefinger: Life really isn't a song.
I would say the lesson about honor is more muddled -- honestly, it's hard to read her as breaking any oaths at all, other than the surprise gotcha of, 'Oh yeah, the woman you swore to is now back from the dead as some sort of vengeful zombie'.
- Man, it's like someone challenged GRRM to write a book with his least interesting characters, or moderately interesting characters in boring, repetitive situations.
So many good characters to pick from, at least pick one who's out doing something awesome.
- So little happening in so much space
We do learn a lot about the world (which is great), but after book 3, it's a let down to get such a snorer. I understand after a big climax, you need to set up the pieces again, but...
Well, I'm interested to see how they could do book 4 as a TV season without any of the leads really in it. I suspect they'll have to mash up 4 & 5, which is what probably should have happened anyway.