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marinessNote: To be all mysterious for a moment, some of you have asked me to comment publicly on a couple of things that happened over the weekend. I am....mulling over my public response to both things, and let's just leave it there for a moment, ok? Generally speaking, and anaisis will back me up on this one, it's rarely a good idea for me to blog about stuff that can be emotionally painful until I've slept on it for a bit. I feel certain that she would tell me to sleep on these posts for a bit longer.
With that said, the actual post!
***********
I am – almost – ready for A Dance With Dragons.
Oh, I'm emotionally ready. More than ready to find out what's happened to certain characters not heard from in years. I've read the sample chapters, but that's not enough.
And I want to know about the dragons.
But where I'm not ready is in the details. Specifically, remembering them. So I started rereading the series – and then realized, given that I'd be rereading them anyway, I might as well blog about them here, one post per book. These won't be particularly organized essays, just mostly random thoughts that hit me as I go through each book, especially since I only have a week to get the next three posts written/posted.
Note 2: I have been somewhat spoiled for a couple of plot bits from Dance With Dragons, but I am leaving those spoilers out of these blog posts. Since most readers of this blog have not had the opportunity to read the book yet, I'd ask those that have to keep this a Dance With Dragons spoiler free zone until at least July 13.
Warnings: This post ended up very long, and although I focus on the first book, I also discuss a MAJOR spoiler from Book 3, Storm of Swords.
The main thing that hits me, reading this:
Catelyn Stark is a terrible mother.
Oh, certainly she loves her children. That's apparent, if not so much in this book. But you can love a child, and still be a terrible parent. Consider, in this book alone, Catelyn:
1) Abandons all of her other children for a single-minded focus on Bran, starting the path that is going to be turning little Rickon into an uncontrollable force of anger accompanied by a fierce wolf.
2) After watching Bran attacked by an assassin, she decides to leave him (not to mention her other two sons) to travel down to King's Landing. She is not the only available person. Ser Rodrik could go. The blacksmith could go. Hell, Theon could go – frankly, the way things ended up going with him it might have been better to send him, make him feel trusted and wanted or at least less of a hostage. The septon could go. All of these, with the exception of Theon, would also have been less noticeable and less likely to get caught than Catelyn. But, no, she decides she's the only one who can go, and trots off with Ser Rodrik (see, he could go), leaving her already neglected son Rickon and her just nearly killed son Bran and her son Robb who, as we are going to find out, desperately needs some instruction on the "look, nobles don't get to marry who they want to. We really need to talk about this a lot and drum it into your skull bit."
3) She's not particularly kindly to Jon. Sure, he's a reminder of her supposedly noble husband's infidelity and his lack of trust in her (at least about this), and sure, she thinks of him – with reason – as a threat to her own sons. (I suspect Catelyn grew up hearing tales of the Blackfyre Rebellions and the Ninepenny Wars, thus her terror of the political power of bastards.)
(And in the next book, we learn that she was never particularly kind to Theon either. Sure, he was a hostage, and the son of a rebel and a traitor. At the same time, she and Ned missed their chance to turn Theon into an ally.
I realize that part of this is Theon's "Oh woe is me!" attitude, and I would take it with a grain of salt – but his anger and resentment feel very real, and are about the only reasons I can think of why he sticks in Winterfell instead of leaving right after its capture, Bran and Rickon in hand as hostages, and when you combine his observations with Jon's, Catelyn comes off as distinctly cold to those not her children. If we ever get a Jayne Poole point of view chapter – possible, since she's off to marry the horrific Ramsey Bolton, which is also Catelyn's fault, thank you very much – I'd be interested in seeing her memories.)
4) But the worst part, the very worst part, is what she does, or rather does not do, with Sansa. She and Ned both.
Look, Catelyn knows that Sansa and Arya are heading down to a court which is sheltering at least one murderer and assorted other people with sordid and questionable histories and people with excellent reason not to like the Starks. The very building where Sansa's grandfather and uncle were killed not all that long ago.
Does Catelyn ever, once, say, "Sansa, sweetling, be careful. The court may seem like a tale, but it's filled with very dangerous people and liars."
Whether or not Sansa would have believed this is debatable – she's 11, after all, and convinced that she's considerably smarter and more adult than she actually is because of all that book reading and praise from Septa Mordane. And saying, "Hey, Sansa, we think the last Hand was murdered, be careful, ok," is a surefire way to get Sansa to chatter with Jeyne Poole and others.
But SOME sort of warning. Any sort of warning. Allowing an eleven year old girl to head down to a castle containing untrustworthy people, some of whom are known to have killed children, and one of whom you suspect of murder, and not one word of, "Sansa, be careful. Nobles do not mean what they say."
Instead, Sansa's education in this comes visually and painfully from the sociopath Joffrey, proving that looks aren't everything; Cersei (more in the next book); Littlefinger; Sandor Clegane; the drunken Ser Dontos, and to a considerably lesser extent, Garlan Tyrell and Shae. With the decided exception of Garlan Tyrell and possibly Sandor Clegane, these are not good people to be learning this sort of stuff from, even if all of them, except Joffrey, do seem to have Sansa's best interests more or less at heart. Well, in Cersei's case, I catch a flash of (correct) perception that if Sansa doesn't start learning something soon, it will not bode well for Cersei, but, still, her advice to Sansa is frequently spot on and considerably better than what Catelyn and Ned told Sansa.
I repeat: CERSEI is doing a better job of helping Sansa than her parents.
And this is just Catelyn's PARENTING. On top of this, we have Catelyn urging her husband to take a job that he correctly feels unsuited for, leading to his death; her decision to leave Winterfell, for all intents and purposes, in the hands of a 14 year old with a couple of elderly advisors; her negotiations with the Freys, which in this reading I realize take on an even WORSE aspect since, at the time Catelyn is bargaining with the Freys and promising to marry Arya to one of them, she doesn't even know if Arya is alive or dead. Admittedly, I can live with the Freys suffering and feeling cheated, but, as will become readily apparent, the Freys can't, and Catelyn damn well knows this.
And finally, the kidnapping of Tyrion and the decision to take Tyrion to her sister, who has absolutely no jurisdiction over this and quite correctly points out that bringing Tyrion to the Eyrie was one very bad idea. When Lysa is the voice of reason, you have a problem.
It's fairly clear that the realm was trembling on the brink of war in any case, and a number of characters – Varys and Littlefinger, for their own reasons, Cersei and Jaime with all the incest and throwing Bran out the window – share the blame for starting the civil war. But the main spark was lit by Catelyn.
I liked Catelyn when I first read the book. I still feel some of that same liking now. But reading this book now, and realizing that her decisions are about to lead to the deaths and abuse of some of her children, and the deaths and torture and displacement of tens of thousands of people, makes liking her very difficult. At least Cersei and Jaime were attempting to be discreet.
Having said that, kudos to her for having the guts to stand up and say, look, they killed my husband and kidnapped my daughter and are setting the Riverlands on fire – but war is evil and I don't want it. It's nice to have the rare voice for peace.
Off the subject of Catelyn for a moment:
1) I'm impressed with how many quiet hints of Sansa's actual intelligence are quietly dropped in the book – with Arya and others noting that Sansa can, at 11, write poetry, learn anything not involving mathematics quickly, and speak on her feet. Tyrion makes a similar observation in the third book.
This is, I admit, hard to see on a first reading – Sansa's "oooh Joffrey, you're so WONDERFUL" is not exactly proof of higher intelligence and insight. And after her father's death, she's in shock and fear and severe depression, under constant threat of severe beatings, all only worsened when she hears about the deaths of her brothers. And just as she's recovering from that – the Lannisters marry her off to Tyrion.
So, given her age and what's been happening with her she has not exactly had much of a chance to shine intellectually. But I think – I think – that those little hints mean something.
Still on the subject of Sansa – Martin also notes that she occasionally dreams of Lady, or Lady's ghost. Losing her wolf may have made her less a Stark, and Sansa is the one Stark child who doesn't seem to be warging into various animals. But these occasional visions of Lady make me wonder what else might be happening with Sansa in the future.
2) Some of the bits that initially annoyed me have become favorite moments. For instance: all of those various seemingly random conversations about the seemingly tedious subject of the fostering of little Robert Arryn and who exactly was going to foster him. When I first read this, I was like, ok, Lannisters, evil, even to the point of lying about this….
….it took a second read to realize that in the mouth of Walder Frey, who has no reason to lie about this, Martin has just dropped the second major clue to the murder of Jon Arryn.
It's subtle, it's beautiful, largely because neither of the characters involved in that conversation have any idea that they've just essentially solved the murder of Jon Arryn. And yes, this read clarified, yet again, that the mystery can be solved in the first book: take Lysa's obsession with her son, Varys explaining that the poison was obtained by an Arryn retainer, and Walder Frey's annoyed "NOBODY wants to foster their sons with ME" speech, and you have motive, opportunity and your murderer. Nicely done, Martin. This is one of the best examples of obvious clues right in front of you that I can think of short of the genius of Agatha Christie (whose best example of doing just this is the calendar in Hercule Poirot's Christmas). Again, nicely done. As someone still working to master this (and clearly missing with most readers with Trickster, sigh) it's something that I can only study and try to learn from.
3) Other subtleties: the various small characters and names that Martin later draws from. I was alert enough to guess that the Greyjoys had to be important, else why keep the annoyance that is Theon around. (Theon, not incidentally, is my least favorite character in the entire books, because, say what you might about Ser Gregor Cledane, hands down winner of Most Evil Person in Westeros despite some serious contention from Ramsey Bolton, at least his murder, rape and arson gets stuff accomplished. And he doesn't whine about it. Theon….yeah. My rare moments of sympathy for Theon – and yes, I have some – tend to get quickly squashed.) The Martells intrigued me for no reason I could tell you: simply that they were there, quiet, and I was certain – correctly so – that they must be plotting something.
But those two houses are obvious. What's striking are little touches like the Boltons, barely named here and easily left out of the first season of the show with no detriment to the plot, but already established as terrifying, with their joy in flaying skins and Robb's immediate comment, "That man scares me." And me too, although I admire his boldness in wearing pink. An ideal color choice for a villain.
3) On the other hand, on this reread I started noticing more of the inconsistencies – most notably in Dany's storyline. In one chapter, she admits to herself and Jorah that her brother will never take the Iron Throne….and then in her very next chapter, there she is, arguing that he can take the Iron Throne. This is the sort of thing usually caught by an editor, and given that this book came out well before Martin's huge New York Times bestsellerdom – if after multiple Hugo/Nebula awards for other work – it's a rather odd thing to leave in.
anaisis will back me up on this one, it's rarely a good idea for me to blog about stuff that can be emotionally painful until I've slept on it for a bit. I feel certain that she would tell me to sleep on these posts for a bit longer.With that said, the actual post!
***********
I am – almost – ready for A Dance With Dragons.
Oh, I'm emotionally ready. More than ready to find out what's happened to certain characters not heard from in years. I've read the sample chapters, but that's not enough.
And I want to know about the dragons.
But where I'm not ready is in the details. Specifically, remembering them. So I started rereading the series – and then realized, given that I'd be rereading them anyway, I might as well blog about them here, one post per book. These won't be particularly organized essays, just mostly random thoughts that hit me as I go through each book, especially since I only have a week to get the next three posts written/posted.
Note 2: I have been somewhat spoiled for a couple of plot bits from Dance With Dragons, but I am leaving those spoilers out of these blog posts. Since most readers of this blog have not had the opportunity to read the book yet, I'd ask those that have to keep this a Dance With Dragons spoiler free zone until at least July 13.
Warnings: This post ended up very long, and although I focus on the first book, I also discuss a MAJOR spoiler from Book 3, Storm of Swords.
The main thing that hits me, reading this:
Catelyn Stark is a terrible mother.
Oh, certainly she loves her children. That's apparent, if not so much in this book. But you can love a child, and still be a terrible parent. Consider, in this book alone, Catelyn:
1) Abandons all of her other children for a single-minded focus on Bran, starting the path that is going to be turning little Rickon into an uncontrollable force of anger accompanied by a fierce wolf.
2) After watching Bran attacked by an assassin, she decides to leave him (not to mention her other two sons) to travel down to King's Landing. She is not the only available person. Ser Rodrik could go. The blacksmith could go. Hell, Theon could go – frankly, the way things ended up going with him it might have been better to send him, make him feel trusted and wanted or at least less of a hostage. The septon could go. All of these, with the exception of Theon, would also have been less noticeable and less likely to get caught than Catelyn. But, no, she decides she's the only one who can go, and trots off with Ser Rodrik (see, he could go), leaving her already neglected son Rickon and her just nearly killed son Bran and her son Robb who, as we are going to find out, desperately needs some instruction on the "look, nobles don't get to marry who they want to. We really need to talk about this a lot and drum it into your skull bit."
3) She's not particularly kindly to Jon. Sure, he's a reminder of her supposedly noble husband's infidelity and his lack of trust in her (at least about this), and sure, she thinks of him – with reason – as a threat to her own sons. (I suspect Catelyn grew up hearing tales of the Blackfyre Rebellions and the Ninepenny Wars, thus her terror of the political power of bastards.)
(And in the next book, we learn that she was never particularly kind to Theon either. Sure, he was a hostage, and the son of a rebel and a traitor. At the same time, she and Ned missed their chance to turn Theon into an ally.
I realize that part of this is Theon's "Oh woe is me!" attitude, and I would take it with a grain of salt – but his anger and resentment feel very real, and are about the only reasons I can think of why he sticks in Winterfell instead of leaving right after its capture, Bran and Rickon in hand as hostages, and when you combine his observations with Jon's, Catelyn comes off as distinctly cold to those not her children. If we ever get a Jayne Poole point of view chapter – possible, since she's off to marry the horrific Ramsey Bolton, which is also Catelyn's fault, thank you very much – I'd be interested in seeing her memories.)
4) But the worst part, the very worst part, is what she does, or rather does not do, with Sansa. She and Ned both.
Look, Catelyn knows that Sansa and Arya are heading down to a court which is sheltering at least one murderer and assorted other people with sordid and questionable histories and people with excellent reason not to like the Starks. The very building where Sansa's grandfather and uncle were killed not all that long ago.
Does Catelyn ever, once, say, "Sansa, sweetling, be careful. The court may seem like a tale, but it's filled with very dangerous people and liars."
Whether or not Sansa would have believed this is debatable – she's 11, after all, and convinced that she's considerably smarter and more adult than she actually is because of all that book reading and praise from Septa Mordane. And saying, "Hey, Sansa, we think the last Hand was murdered, be careful, ok," is a surefire way to get Sansa to chatter with Jeyne Poole and others.
But SOME sort of warning. Any sort of warning. Allowing an eleven year old girl to head down to a castle containing untrustworthy people, some of whom are known to have killed children, and one of whom you suspect of murder, and not one word of, "Sansa, be careful. Nobles do not mean what they say."
Instead, Sansa's education in this comes visually and painfully from the sociopath Joffrey, proving that looks aren't everything; Cersei (more in the next book); Littlefinger; Sandor Clegane; the drunken Ser Dontos, and to a considerably lesser extent, Garlan Tyrell and Shae. With the decided exception of Garlan Tyrell and possibly Sandor Clegane, these are not good people to be learning this sort of stuff from, even if all of them, except Joffrey, do seem to have Sansa's best interests more or less at heart. Well, in Cersei's case, I catch a flash of (correct) perception that if Sansa doesn't start learning something soon, it will not bode well for Cersei, but, still, her advice to Sansa is frequently spot on and considerably better than what Catelyn and Ned told Sansa.
I repeat: CERSEI is doing a better job of helping Sansa than her parents.
And this is just Catelyn's PARENTING. On top of this, we have Catelyn urging her husband to take a job that he correctly feels unsuited for, leading to his death; her decision to leave Winterfell, for all intents and purposes, in the hands of a 14 year old with a couple of elderly advisors; her negotiations with the Freys, which in this reading I realize take on an even WORSE aspect since, at the time Catelyn is bargaining with the Freys and promising to marry Arya to one of them, she doesn't even know if Arya is alive or dead. Admittedly, I can live with the Freys suffering and feeling cheated, but, as will become readily apparent, the Freys can't, and Catelyn damn well knows this.
And finally, the kidnapping of Tyrion and the decision to take Tyrion to her sister, who has absolutely no jurisdiction over this and quite correctly points out that bringing Tyrion to the Eyrie was one very bad idea. When Lysa is the voice of reason, you have a problem.
It's fairly clear that the realm was trembling on the brink of war in any case, and a number of characters – Varys and Littlefinger, for their own reasons, Cersei and Jaime with all the incest and throwing Bran out the window – share the blame for starting the civil war. But the main spark was lit by Catelyn.
I liked Catelyn when I first read the book. I still feel some of that same liking now. But reading this book now, and realizing that her decisions are about to lead to the deaths and abuse of some of her children, and the deaths and torture and displacement of tens of thousands of people, makes liking her very difficult. At least Cersei and Jaime were attempting to be discreet.
Having said that, kudos to her for having the guts to stand up and say, look, they killed my husband and kidnapped my daughter and are setting the Riverlands on fire – but war is evil and I don't want it. It's nice to have the rare voice for peace.
Off the subject of Catelyn for a moment:
1) I'm impressed with how many quiet hints of Sansa's actual intelligence are quietly dropped in the book – with Arya and others noting that Sansa can, at 11, write poetry, learn anything not involving mathematics quickly, and speak on her feet. Tyrion makes a similar observation in the third book.
This is, I admit, hard to see on a first reading – Sansa's "oooh Joffrey, you're so WONDERFUL" is not exactly proof of higher intelligence and insight. And after her father's death, she's in shock and fear and severe depression, under constant threat of severe beatings, all only worsened when she hears about the deaths of her brothers. And just as she's recovering from that – the Lannisters marry her off to Tyrion.
So, given her age and what's been happening with her she has not exactly had much of a chance to shine intellectually. But I think – I think – that those little hints mean something.
Still on the subject of Sansa – Martin also notes that she occasionally dreams of Lady, or Lady's ghost. Losing her wolf may have made her less a Stark, and Sansa is the one Stark child who doesn't seem to be warging into various animals. But these occasional visions of Lady make me wonder what else might be happening with Sansa in the future.
2) Some of the bits that initially annoyed me have become favorite moments. For instance: all of those various seemingly random conversations about the seemingly tedious subject of the fostering of little Robert Arryn and who exactly was going to foster him. When I first read this, I was like, ok, Lannisters, evil, even to the point of lying about this….
….it took a second read to realize that in the mouth of Walder Frey, who has no reason to lie about this, Martin has just dropped the second major clue to the murder of Jon Arryn.
It's subtle, it's beautiful, largely because neither of the characters involved in that conversation have any idea that they've just essentially solved the murder of Jon Arryn. And yes, this read clarified, yet again, that the mystery can be solved in the first book: take Lysa's obsession with her son, Varys explaining that the poison was obtained by an Arryn retainer, and Walder Frey's annoyed "NOBODY wants to foster their sons with ME" speech, and you have motive, opportunity and your murderer. Nicely done, Martin. This is one of the best examples of obvious clues right in front of you that I can think of short of the genius of Agatha Christie (whose best example of doing just this is the calendar in Hercule Poirot's Christmas). Again, nicely done. As someone still working to master this (and clearly missing with most readers with Trickster, sigh) it's something that I can only study and try to learn from.
3) Other subtleties: the various small characters and names that Martin later draws from. I was alert enough to guess that the Greyjoys had to be important, else why keep the annoyance that is Theon around. (Theon, not incidentally, is my least favorite character in the entire books, because, say what you might about Ser Gregor Cledane, hands down winner of Most Evil Person in Westeros despite some serious contention from Ramsey Bolton, at least his murder, rape and arson gets stuff accomplished. And he doesn't whine about it. Theon….yeah. My rare moments of sympathy for Theon – and yes, I have some – tend to get quickly squashed.) The Martells intrigued me for no reason I could tell you: simply that they were there, quiet, and I was certain – correctly so – that they must be plotting something.
But those two houses are obvious. What's striking are little touches like the Boltons, barely named here and easily left out of the first season of the show with no detriment to the plot, but already established as terrifying, with their joy in flaying skins and Robb's immediate comment, "That man scares me." And me too, although I admire his boldness in wearing pink. An ideal color choice for a villain.
3) On the other hand, on this reread I started noticing more of the inconsistencies – most notably in Dany's storyline. In one chapter, she admits to herself and Jorah that her brother will never take the Iron Throne….and then in her very next chapter, there she is, arguing that he can take the Iron Throne. This is the sort of thing usually caught by an editor, and given that this book came out well before Martin's huge New York Times bestsellerdom – if after multiple Hugo/Nebula awards for other work – it's a rather odd thing to leave in.