A Dance with Dragons: The Trouble with Staying to Rule

A review of A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin

By H.R. Zimmerer

Spoiler warning: This review discusses the complete novel and earlier books in A Song of Ice and Fire.

Content notes: The novel contains graphic violence, sexual violence, abuse and harm to children.

Winning a place creates a new problem: the people living there still need to eat tomorrow.

A Dance with Dragons is most interesting when it stays with the work that follows an apparently decisive act. Daenerys has broken the authority of masters. Jon has become Lord Commander. Neither achievement makes the next choice simple, and both discover that a title can enlarge their responsibilities faster than their ability to meet them.

The book initially runs alongside A Feast for Crows before carrying events further forward. That structure explains some of the delay in returning to familiar characters; it does not make the delay invisible. This is an expansive, frequently powerful novel whose refusal to finish several major confrontations is also a substantial weakness.

THE BOOK

A Dance with Dragons

Author
George R. R. Martin

First U.S. publication
July 12, 2011

Series
A Song of Ice and Fire · Book 5

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Daenerys’s decision to remain in Meereen gives her chapters their moral weight. Departing would preserve the image of a liberator while leaving the consequences to someone else. Staying requires her to confront resistance, hunger, violence and the economic dependencies her victory has disrupted.

Her compromises are uncomfortable because the interests involved cannot be separated into people who deserve consideration and people whose needs can safely be ignored. Peace may require terms that injure those she intended to protect. An uncompromising gesture may satisfy her sense of purpose while exposing those same people to another form of danger.

The dragons make the contradiction physical. They are the source of her exceptional power and creatures whose appetites do not obey the political meaning she gives them. Confining two of them does not settle what she owes the city, any more than riding Drogon away settles the city’s future.

These chapters are stronger when the people of Meereen possess claims that inconvenience Daenerys’s preferred story of herself. They are weaker when the accumulation of unfamiliar names and factional manoeuvring leaves those people feeling chiefly like complications placed around the central character. The book’s interest in government sometimes exceeds its willingness to give the governed equally distinctive inner lives.

Jon faces a related difficulty at the Wall. He understands that the dead make the quarrels between the living dangerously inadequate. Admitting wildlings is therefore more than a generous exception; it follows from his assessment of the threat.

Understanding a danger does not guarantee that he can bring his own institution with him. The Watch contains grievances, customs and fears that cannot be commanded out of existence. Jon makes practical arrangements, but his growing isolation reveals the limits of treating a correct strategic conclusion as sufficient political persuasion.

His response to the letter concerning Ramsay and Winterfell brings another conflict into the open. The role he holds requires a separation from family concerns that he cannot wholly sustain. The attack on him at the end grows out of these pressures, while leaving his immediate fate unresolved.

Tyrion’s chapters are harder company than the charm of his earlier appearances might lead a reader to expect. Following the killings of Shae and Tywin, his intelligence has not become wiser through suffering. It often becomes another means of hurting people or making his own misery available to them.

The distinction matters. A character’s experience of cruelty cannot serve as a permanent exemption from judgement. Tyrion’s darkest conduct should remain difficult to read even when his history makes it intelligible. The novel is stronger when it permits that discomfort than when a clever line threatens to make it merely entertaining.

Theon’s chapters offer a different and particularly severe examination of identity. Ramsay has made the destruction of a name part of his control. Small movements towards remembering who Theon was are therefore frightening rather than simply triumphant: memory restores obligations and guilt as well as the possibility of resistance.

The escape involving Jeyne Poole is crucial because her actual identity has been subordinated to the political usefulness of calling her Arya Stark. The person suffering beneath that imposed name matters whether or not the powerful have correctly recognised her.

The northern material gives the novel some of its richest atmosphere. Winter is a constraint on travel, supplies and the bodies expected to carry out a lord’s intentions. Loyalty has to endure weather, hunger and the uncertainty of who will still be alive when a message arrives.

Yet the late accumulation of cliffhangers makes the book difficult to judge as a satisfying individual volume. The battles it prepares do not receive the space their preparation leads a reader to expect. The political and psychological work is substantial; the sense of interruption is substantial too.

As the fifth published main novel, A Dance with Dragons therefore ends with an honest limitation: these character arcs remain unfinished. Neither speculation nor events from the television adaptation can supply the missing conclusions of the books.

What it offers at its best is an unsparing account of responsibility after the moment that looked like victory. Someone still has to open the gates, divide the food, hear the petition and live beside the people their decision has endangered.

Series status, checked November 4, 2026: Martin’s official bibliography lists five published main novels, with The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring forthcoming.