Dance with Dragons - a review

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This is a wicked, horrible book. Do not read this series.

I don’t know why I finished it. Can’t resist plots of political intrigue, I suppose.
And I wanted to see what the culture was in such a tizzy about. But looking into this cesspool is indeed nauseating.

The last in his Game of Thrones 5 volume series, yet still unfinished, Martin satisfies only salaciously. He cannot finish a story, or convey meaning with his world building, because his worldview is nihilistic. The only thing that really matters is power. “Words are wind” is a repeated theme, though better minds know that the world was MADE with words.

Soaked with crass vulgarity on nearly every page, Martin seeks to shock, and it’s closer to X than R rated, on the movie scale. This isn’t just sexual innuendo – it’s in your face gratuitous violence and sex, meant to make you think that life is just meat and flesh, and then it’s done. Materialistic despair, run amok, seeking to soothe it with whatever power and pleasure you can get.

Interestingly, Martin is deliberately non-egalitarian. Jaime is a better knight than others. Tyrion has more wits than most around him, and so survives and advances though he is a dwarf. Rulers who are humble like Jon Snow, and less arrogant or cock-sure like Cersei Lannister get on better.

This nausea-inducing series paradoxically gives me hope. I see more clearly now how despairing people are, apart from Christ. They are desperate for hope, though most Martin readers are probably like the dwarves in The Last Battle, who will refuse to believe in the opposite good, true Story, even when it’s shown to them clearly in the face.

At least I know a little better now, how to speak to them the Gospel of hope, the antidote to this nihilism.

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