Cliffhangers Cliffhangers Everywhere and Not a Plot to Think, Or: Why A Dance With Dragons is the Worst Book in A Song of Ice and Fire

A Song of Ice and Fire Book Five: A Dance With Dragons was the greatest disappointment since my son.

No, wait. That's been taken.   

A Dance With Dragons is, however, a terrible disappointment. Why is that? Well it'll take me a little while to explain but basically the answer is "everything."

Part One: I Love This "Knot."
To begin with, readers' expectations were built up for six years because George R. R. Martin took his sweet time writing the book.  The official explanation for the delay was that he was sorting out something called the "Meereenese Knot." See, he had all these characters journeying to the city of Meereen, and by extension Daenerys Targaryen.  He had Quentyn Martell, Tyrion Lannister, Victarion Greyjoy, and... was he counting Jon Connington?  And he didn't know which order they'd get there. Now, I could poke at him for not being, say, J. Michael Straczynski and not having the entire plot worked out beforehand, but I'll let that slide. I would imagine a great many writers think "oh, I'll work that out somewhere down the line."

The problem is this: the "Meereenese Knot" was given as the reason that this book was delayed. And so you bought the book and you opened it to page one and figured that Martin had sorted out the problem and you'd see how he got all the characters to Dany.  And then what happens?

1. The only character who actually gets an audience with Dany also gets roasted by dragonfire. 
2. No sooner does the second character show up than Dany flies away. Talk about moving the goalposts.
3. The third (and fourth) characters don't even make it to the city by the time the book ends.

The entire book thus feels like a thousand-page holding action while we wait for the actual plot to begin.

By the way, "a long holding action" is a pretty good description of all the Dany and Jon chapters in the entire series up until this point. 

Part Two: A Dirge of Cold Water and Embers
See, it's called A Song of Ice and Fire, and so We the Readers can make certain assumptions.  Like, that Ice and Fire will come into play at some point.  You'd be forgiven for thinking that the first three books are a dissertation on Westerosi power-mongering with the occasional cutaway to a princess in exile or a surly bastard freezing his ass off on Hadrian's Wall writ large.  But we kind of assumed that at some point in the story the King's Landing politics would begin to peter out, and the Jon and Dany plots would be brought to the fore. In other words, the focus of the books would look something like this:

Now A Feast For Crows accomplished its half of the deal.  Brienne and Jaime are sent into the wilderness, and Cersei pretty much single-handedly wrecks the political foundation her father left in place.  So King's Landing politics are receding from the spotlight.

But Jon's chapters have always been just marking time until the Wall comes down (yes there's some character development in there), and Dany's chapters have always just been marking time until Dany finally makes her way to Westeros (yes there's some political subtext in there).

And that is precisely what their chapters are in this book as well. I don't know which editor told George "Hey, you know those characters that you keep cutting away to in order to mark time or build dramatic tension in the King's Landing plot? Why don't you cut them out of Feast entirely and then do an entire book about them?" Write an entire book about marking time.  Brilliant!

Let's look at Dany, because her plot is so much weaker than Jon's.  At least with Jon's you can say that he is making preparations for the inevitable onslaught of the Others.  Dany was supposed to stay in Meereen at the end of A Storm of Swords in order to learn how to be a Queen. Did she learn how to be a Queen? No. She let George wax political about foreign occupations, married some asshole, and then flew away on a dragon. What did she accomplish? Did she move the plot forward? Nope! Was there any character development on her part?

No, there wasn't.

Speaking of character development...

Part Three: Mutilation =/= Rehabilitation
There are a number of reasons why the rehabilitation of Jaime Lannister in A Storm of Swords helped elevate that book to the number-one position on my list. In fact, you could say that Jaime's plot accomplished that... single-handedly.  Hur hur hur. But Theon's "rehabilitation" is a pale shadow of that.

Yeah it's pretty tragic that there are such awful, awful bastards out there like Vargo Hoat and Ramsay Snow Bolton, and while I might feel sorry for Theon, he's what TvTropes calls an Asshole Victim.  Oh, you got brutally tortured for a while and now you're a good guy? Not buying it.  See, one of the main reasons why Theon's rehabilitation fails is because we already knew what kind of guy he was.  He was a POV character back in Clash, long before he was maimed.  And in case you forgot, he was an asshole. Now, yeah, Jaime was kind of an asshole too, but 1) he was Out of Focus until Storm, and 2) right from his first chapter, there were signs that he was a good guy.

1. Out of focus is pretty easy to explain. Whereas we knew exactly what kind of guy Theon was because we saw him through his own eyes, we didn't really know Jaime beforehand (hur hur hur).  He shows up in a handful of chapters in Game before becoming a prisoner for all of Clash. As soon as he becomes a POV character - and not when he loses his hand, which happens at the end of his third chapter - our assumptions are immediately challenged.
2. Whereas Theon spends every POV chapter in Clash being a backstabbing turd, Jaime proves very quickly to be more than just a stereotypical fantasy villain.  At the end of his first chapter, he has the opportunity to smash Brienne in the face with an oar, leave her to drown, and carry on down to King's Landing by his lonesome. (This scene's absence from the TV show, incidentally, is probably why the order of the Mummers' rape attempt and Jamie's amputation are reversed - like Martin, Benioff and Weiss wanted to show Jaime did have a spark of goodness in him before he was maimed.) In his second chapter, we learn how the whole Kingslayer thing messed up his life. Even before he lost his hand, a lot of assumptions we had about him from the first two books are torn down.  In direct contrast, we were with Theon when he committed his worst atrocities; there is no after-the-fact mitigating factor in his favor.

Also, let's not forget the symbolism of what each character lost. Jaime was a swordsman. The loss of his hand immediately destroyed everything that he was, but he's still the same person. With Theon, he's brutally tortured and mind-raped to insanity and back... to the point where you're left feeling "Okay, Ramsay killed Theon.  This burnt-out shell left in his place certainly deserves our pity, but it can't redeem Theon because that character is gone." 

Furthermore, A Storm of Swords actually gives Jaime a number of chances to prove that he has become a better person.  He's clear and free on his way to King's Landing, but he decides to turn around and jump in a bear pit to save a woman who, were I in his shoes, I'd partly blame for the loss of my hand.  Later on he has the chance to duck out of the Kingsguard and succeed Tywin as Lord of Casterly Rock - and given that there's nothing left for him in King's Landing with his relationship with Cersei falling apart, we'd expect him to do the pragmatic thing and take that opportunity.  Instead he decides that the oath he swore actually means something, and he's going to stay and straighten out the Kingsguard.  Dance never gives Theon any choices like this, because Dance simply isn't a complete book.

Part Four: Where Are the Last Ten Chapters?
So imagine if The Empire Strikes Back ended like this: Leia, Lando and Chewie are chasing after Boba Fett, but he succeeds in putting Han Solo in his trunk and then blasts off.  Close-up on Leia's face, and bam, smash to credits.

Would you feel like you'd gotten a complete film, or would you feel cheated?

All Our Heroes are still in jeopardy, we haven't learned the big secret about the protagonist's parentage yet, and the story just ends. 

If you're among the people who wouldn't feel cheated by that, I'm amazed you're still reading this, because you probably enjoyed a book that did the exact same thing.

Here's another way to think of it: what was your favorite moment in A Dance With Dragons?  What was That Moment That Will Stick With You?  In A Game of Thrones it was when Ned lost his head.  In Clash, you had Tyrion being a boss on the Blackwater.  Storm gave us weddings, duels, more refrains of "you know nothing, Jon Snow" than anyone needed, and game-changing revelations up the wazoo in the last few chapters.  Say what you will about Feast, Jaime breaking the siege of Riverrun and Cersei's plan falling apart in front of her will stay with me.  There wasn't really anything like that in Dance.  Jon made some unpopular decisions and got a severe case of Ides of March for it. Dany made some stupid decisions and then flew off on a dragon when the author couldn't think of another way to get her out of it. Barristan was a fun POV to read, but it was way too late in the narrative. Tyrion and Victarion accomplished diddly.  Davos and Bran both disappeared off the face of the earth about halfway through the book.  So what big thing did Dance lead up to?

Well, all the cliffhangers. All fifteen of them.

Part Five: Let's Talk About Aegon VI
Why is he in this book?  What is going on?  It's treated as some big earth-shattering revelation that he's alive, and then he does diddly-squat for the rest of the book.

But then the doing diddly-squat thing is true of every character.

Still the fact that George is still introducing new plot elements instead of snipping off some plot threads and beginning to funnel his story towards its grand conclusion suggests to me that it's highly unlikely a) that the series will be wrapped up in just two more books, or b) the next book will be at all coherent.

I'm done. A Dance With Dragons was an overloaded, cumbersome, disappointing mess.