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A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin (Read in 2015)

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I’m happy for you.

This is book four of the Song of Ice and Fire. Cersei descends into paranoid madness, reinstating a religious army, an act she would come to rue as it backfires spectacularly. Jaime and Brienne meet up again in the Riverlands, after Jaime had solved a few issues there. The Iron Islands feature much more prominently, with all of the Greyjoys—Euron, Victarion, Aeron and Asha—getting in on the action. In Dorne, intrigue abounds, with plot built on plot and the Red Viper’s brother machinating to maintain the power balance with King’s Landing and the upper South. Quentyn Martell has traveled East with his friends to try to join Dorne to the Targaryens through Daenerys. Arya arrives in Braavos and apprentices at the House of Black and White. Jon maintains a balance between Stannis’s demands—and those of Melisandre—as well as arming to fight the Others from the North. Samwell travels with Gilly and Aemon around the periphery of the Seven Kingdoms by boat, to get to Old Town and train at the Citadel.

Citations

Cersei descends into paranoid madness. Here she encounters the new High Septon.

“Lord Tywin had given him that crown to replace the one that was lost when the mob killed the previous High Septon. They had pulled the fat fool from his litter and torn him apart, the day Myrcella sailed for Dorne. That one was a great glutton, and biddable. This one … This High Septon was of Tyrion’s making, Cersei recalled suddenly. It was a disquieting thought. The old man’s spotted hand looked like a chicken claw as it poked from a sleeve encrusted with golden scrollwork and small crystals. Cersei knelt on the wet marble and kissed his fingers, and bid Tommen to do the same. What does he know of me? How much did the dwarf tell him? The High Septon smiled as he escorted her into the sept. But was it a threatening smile full of unspoken knowledge, or just some vacuous twitch of an old man’s […]”
Page 113
“To both our queens!” he chirruped. “To the young queen and the old!””
Page 201

That’s lovely: he doesn’t refer to the new queen and the old, so the intended mean is to call Cersei old rather than former.

More evocative writing on Martin’s part, an excellent use of metaphor:

“His desire was as deep and boundless as the sea, but when the tide receded, the rocks of shame and guilt thrust up as sharp as ever. Sometimes the waves would cover them, but they remained beneath the waters, hard and black and slimy.”
Page 213

Or here, where the master of the multi-faced God in Braavos tells Arya of the history of his temple:

“The tale of our beginnings. If you would be one of us, you had best know who we are and how we came to be. Men may whisper of the Faceless Men of Braavos, but we are older than the Secret City. Before the Titan rose, before the Unmasking of Uthero, before the Founding, we were. We have flowered in Braavos amongst these northern fogs, but we first took root in Valyria, amongst the wretched slaves who toiled in the deep mines beneath the Fourteen Flames that lit the Freehold’s nights of old.”
Page 360

Or this lovely passage on the futility of war and causes and justice from the view of a simple soldier. This was presented as an explanation for how formerly honorable soldiers and men could sink to such depths.

“They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water. “If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world … “And the man breaks.”
Page 421
“The lady of the castle was a Lannister by marriage, a plump toddler who had been wed to his cousin Tyrek before she was a year old.”
Page 446

We recoil from this notion on instinct, calling arranged marriages barbaric. But are they really worse than the modern singles scene? It’s as if we seize on this issue because it offends our sense of direct freedom but sit back satisfied that we’ve thrown everyone together into a system that is quite probably equally barbaric, but whose barbarity is hidden behind complexity and randomness, and therefore somehow better.

““Plant,” said Jaime, “and pray for one last harvest.” It was not a hopeful answer, but it was the only one he had.”
Page 450

The man who’d asked had been hoping for a better answer than that. It’s not that he’s grasping for handouts from his betters, but that he has invested in their society, accepted his station below them and expected something back. When this arrangement tells him to fuck off, it loses him forever. If society—e.g. the lions of Lannister—cannot protect him from the wolves (in a metaphor, perhaps banks and insurance companies), then what good is it? The citizen is not lazy or ungrateful for turning his back. This part resonated in particular because I was watching Treme at the same time and noticed parallels between how the high and might lords of Westeros treated their smallfolk and how the government of New Orleans treated (treats?) its citizens. They all act as if the hierarchy is God-given and cannot be changed by anything. Those on top are just as fooled as those below, failing to note the precarity of the situation.