[Link] The Groovy Age of Horror: A DANCE WITH DRAGONS: Separate Peaces
O frabjous day: Curt Purcell on A Dance with Dragons. As I say everytime I link to him, Curt is one of my favorite critics, accessing seldom-trod roads into genre art with minimal BS. In this initial post on the book, he forcefully rejects the idea that the two planned volumes remaining will be insufficient to the task of wrapping up the series’ dozens of storylines, or building up the Others into an antagonist given equal weight with the human enemies of previous volumes. He makes this latter point using a bunch of superhero-comic stories that range from “inspired junk” to “fun junk” down to “junk junk,” though, so I’m not 100% convinced. (He’s gonna murder me over “junk,” isn’t he?)
But the real meat of the post is his thoughts on Martin’s treatment of war-making vs. peace-making as models for his brand of tarnished heroism:
He seems to be trying to establish peace as a venue for heroism; the tightrope he must walk is to make it a flawed heroism (or it wouldn’t be true to the series, or for that matter to life) without reinforcing the all-but-inevitable cliche that the flaw is naivete or weakness. The violence in the series always goes horribly awry or leads to ghastly blowback sooner or later, and so must the peace—but in a way that doesn’t slip into the oft-evoked real-world religio-political narrative that striving for peace in the first place is stupid or contemptible and bound to fail, and that violence and war thus constitute the only strong and rational response to grievance or aggression.
His comparison of Tormund’s forces’ march through the Wall to the Battle of Blackwater Rush in terms of their place in their respective books’ narratives is particularly inspired. Read the whole thing.
