Book report: A Feast for Crows

In the reviews of the previous three books I repeatedly mentioned, that while they are intricately and expertly plotted, the literary quality of the series performs a leap with the next two books, which together form the "Feastdance". We can see this quite clearly with "A Feast for Crows", which, when it was released in 2005, created some consternation. After the flurry of endings and payoffs that was "A Storm of Swords", this book seemed like a letdown to many, not following up on the breathless quality of its predecessor. That is understandable, as it began its inception as a written-out version of the ill-fated five-year-gap.

However, payoffs, massacres and murders aren't everything the series is about, even though I enjoy them as much as the next reader. No, in "A Feast for Crows", Martin undertakes the daring exercise to slow down and to look at the fallout of big payoffs and resolutions, which is not something happening often in media. I don't want to belabor that point too much, as it's not intended as the focus of this book report. Instead, I want to shed a spotlight on mirrors, as in the literary device of mirroring themes and characters to heighten our understanding of them by going through the POVs as per usual.

 

Let's start off in King's Landing. Here, we get Cersei as a new POV, and in the first third of the novel, we get her twin Jaime as a counterweight. There's not much as mirror-y as twins, and we can see that here. Whereas in the first three novels, both of them used to proclaim how the other was a mirror image of the other, how they're "two hearts that beat as one", here we see their relationship fracture in fast-forward-mode.

 

Cersei rages against the limitations of her environment, consciously trying to emulate Tywin. As so often when history repeats itself, it does it as a farce, and so with Cersei. Notwithstanding her manifold proclamations in her head that she's doing what Tywin would have done, this distorted mirror image inhabits all the bad traits of her father, without any of the redeeming features.

 

Jaime, meanwhile, is distancing himself more and more from Cersei, but more because he sees unravelling what was always there and because he's become just a bit more introspective. He's the last restraint on Cersei, and by the point he leaves King's Landing, she's not only mirroring Tywin, but Aerys II. Jaime leaves with the queasy feeling of having helped the second incarnation of what he once murdered on the throne.

 

However, he lacks the introspective to really analyze what he's doing, as becomes evident on his "peacemaker" tour through the Riverlands, where doesn't manage ever come to terms with the rotten regime he's serving or his own past, despite been given ample opportunity to do so. The narrative provides him with mirror after mirror in which he could recognize himself, from Kevan to Lancel to Devan to the Blackfish. Instead, he duels Ilyn Payne in the moonlight, whose pox scars seem so deep as to be craters in which he loses himself.

 

Arya, in the meantime, is over in Braavos, providing a perfect mirror image to her sister by learning to complete give up her identity and become an assassin, whereas Sansa, caught up in the Eyrie, learns to play a part while keeping to her identity and to wield the powers of courtly politics. It's a relationship seperated by hundreds of miles and completely differering objectives, and yet it's pointed to the same end: an existential victory in reclaiming their Stark identity, a repudiation of the toxic ideology they're being fed and an attempt at a better world.

 

The same is true of Brienne, who, as a woman, is uniquely suited to mirror the knightly ideals we've seen broken over and over in this series (even better than her ancestor, Duncan the Tall). Her quest is doomed from the start, since we know that Sansa is in the Eyrie and Arya in Braavos, but that's not what the quest is about. Instead, we get mirrorings of the knightly quest, we see the reflections and after-effects of the war and learn how to behave in the small where others failed in the big.

 

Meanwhile, the Iron Islands are a good place for reflection, too. From the unrealistic peace proposals Asha brings forward to Victarion's uninspired "more of the same" to Euron's "Make the Iron Islands Great Again", there's just nothing there to salvage from Balon's folly. The Kingsmoot especially is a masterpiece of storytelling, as the initial claimants all set up ideas that will be picked up later, such as the fantasy of deliverance by going big Farwynd exposes to the continuation of the war Edric Anvilhands proposes. In the end, all of it is hollow, as Aeron's attempts to hear the Drowned God in his visions, which are nothing than his own voice, superimposed on the sound of waves.

 

This storyline gets its mirror image in the Dornish plot, where there are also no good options out. The revenge the Martells crave leads them to all sorts of dangerous and unworkable plans with horrible side-effects, from the ill-conceived duel Oberyn engaged in in "A Storm of Swords" to Arianne's stupidty of a plan with Myrcella to the intricate plotting of Doran that can only lead to the burning of the Water Gardens and the death of children.

 

The whole novel oozes with reflections like that, forcing the reader to think hard about what to make of all of it. Bereft of any clear protagonist after the demise of the Starks, we're as adrift as Westeros, shuffling through the Feast for Crows that has been the most enduring legacy of a war whose fruits even for the winning side are already spoiled halfway into the next novel. What then, asks Martin, is there for us? The peacemaking efforts of this book can't even be called that, the ones done in "A Dance with Dragons" will collapse on themselves. This doesn't mean peace is futile, but it's the pearl without price, hard to achieve and harder to hold, and most characters in this book don't even try or are running up against impossible odds.