People have been waiting for Winds for a long while, and it’s showing.īut not everyone is down on the book. Levesley calls Martin’s “refusal” to finish that series “the scam of the century,” and Hugo Rifkind of The Times writes that Fire & Blood is “one long synopsis for about 50 books that he will never get around to writing, which itself has only been written because he can’t get around to writing the other two Game of Thrones books that his fans are waiting for.” I think these readings are, to put it mildly, uncharitable, but I can’t say they come as a great surprise. Then there’s the elephant in the room: beyond not liking the style, several reviewers are openly contemptuous that Fire & Blood isn’t The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth book in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. In this case, Martin has decided on his own accord to pack his text as full as he has and he doesn’t always curate the most focus onto the most important bits.” But at least the Roman Empire actually happened, and actually required that level of detail, and has repercussions for you and I who live in its shadow.

“The dust jacket compares it to the ‘scope and grandeur of Gibbon’s The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire‘, and… well, yes, they are both long. “Martin is really, really committed to a dry, dusty historical screed for his style of writing,” Levesley says. Publishers Weekly is a little more generous, but only just:īrief sections are dramatic (“the golden dragon devoured the queen in six bites”) or salacious (“it aroused the princess to watch the men disporting with one another”), and there are entertaining snatches of dialogue and detailed depictions of battles, but they only last a few pages before a return to brisk summary.Īngriest of all if GQ’s David Levesley, who does everything but say he’s reviewing this book under protest. But the sheer scale and exhaustive detail in Fire and Blood makes reading it feel more like you’ve been assigned a mildly interesting, but often tedious, piece of homework. “Yet the prose is so dry that even descriptions of a battle in the sky between two brothers manages to fall as flat as the losing Targaryen and his dragon.”įire and Blood is ideal for fans of the stories who love to obsess over the most minute of details, and it’s fun to see the ancestors of other popular characters – from the Starks to the Lannisters – turn up along the way.

“Martin appears to have made the assumption that historical writing should be dry and clinical, and that the excitement of the events themselves should be left to do the talking,” writes Independent critic Roisin O’Connor.

A song of fire and blood