A Feast for Crows: The Country Left to Bury Its Dead

A review of A Feast for Crows 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.

The battle has moved elsewhere. The broken household has to remain where it is.

That is the uncomfortable territory of A Feast for Crows. After the concentrated upheaval of A Storm of Swords, Martin turns towards damaged places, compromised institutions and the people trying to live among the remains. Victory has produced accounts of who prevailed. It has not supplied a reliable dinner for the survivors.

The book’s structure makes a considerable demand. Several central viewpoints, including Jon, Daenerys and Tyrion, are absent; much of their material belongs to the companion volume, A Dance with Dragons, whose chronology initially overlaps this one. A reader arriving for an immediate continuation of every major thread will feel the interruption.

THE BOOK

A Feast for Crows

Author
George R. R. Martin

First U.S. publication
November 8, 2005

Series
A Song of Ice and Fire · Book 4

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That frustration is understandable. It is also worth allowing the novel to establish what becomes visible when those familiar sources of momentum are removed.

Brienne’s search for Sansa is its most affecting example. The reader has information that makes parts of her search seem unlikely to succeed, but treating the journey only as a failed delivery system for a reunion overlooks its purpose. She crosses a country in which the words knight, soldier and protector have become unreliable guides to a stranger’s behaviour.

Her determination to keep an oath can look impractical beside the flexible arrangements other people call survival. Yet the people she encounters have already experienced what happens when armed men decide that their obligations can be set aside.

The journey gives the violence of the earlier books a geography. Ruined settlements and frightened travellers cannot be tidied away by announcing a change in military advantage. Men who are insignificant in a lord’s account of a campaign can be the deciding terror in someone else’s life.

Brienne’s courage gains force from this scale. She cannot repair the country, and she has no reason to expect that doing the decent thing will bring recognition. Her willingness to intervene remains valuable to the person standing within reach of her.

Cersei’s chapters move through a very different kind of isolation. She occupies the centre of power while becoming less capable of receiving information she does not already want. Flattery passes for loyalty; contradiction becomes evidence of conspiracy. The reader can watch her convert warnings into offences.

Her position as a woman in a deeply unequal system is real. So are her choices within it. Martin’s most interesting work here refuses to make either fact erase the other. She has been traded, underestimated and controlled, but those experiences do not make her treatment of other vulnerable people generous.

Arming the Faith Militant demonstrates the danger of mistaking a useful transaction for lasting command. She expects an institution to remain an instrument because she has helped restore its strength. Her eventual captivity exposes how badly she has misunderstood the bargain.

The writing sometimes presses her errors so insistently that the irony becomes less subtle than it might be. A more consistently formidable Cersei would make some failures more frightening. Nevertheless, the accumulating distance between her confidence and her actual position gives the court chapters a compelling, airless quality.

Jaime’s work in the riverlands tests his emerging intentions against the habits and privileges of his house. Wanting to become a different man does not give him a clean position from which to act. The threat behind his negotiations remains recognisably Lannister, even when he prefers an outcome without further slaughter.

The new attention to Dorne and the Iron Islands broadens the struggle over inheritance. Arianne and Asha confront traditions that make female authority conditional, while competing men offer very different accounts of what strength should look like. These sections add necessary political texture, though the number of new names and ambitions can slow an already dispersed book.

Sam’s journey supplies a less theatrical form of duty. His responsibility for Gilly, the child and Maester Aemon brings large historical questions into contact with illness, fear, money and the difficulty of getting someone safely from one place to another. Knowledge must be carried by bodies that can become tired and die.

The novel’s patience is both its distinction and its limitation. Some stretches repeat the experience of travelling through ruin after the point is clear, and several endings defer rather than complete their immediate movement. Calling all of that deliberate does not make every delay equally rewarding.

But the book asks something important of a reader trained to wait for the next decisive confrontation. Who will look after the country while the claimants move on? Who will remember a dead person who never had a banner?

Brienne keeps walking through those questions. Her progress is uncertain, but the attention the novel gives her changes the scale on which its war can be judged.