A Dance with Dragons, by George R. R. Martin (I)

As I read A DANCE WITH DRAGONS listening to Hans Zimmer's score to THE LAST SAMURAI, I'm reminded how well the two go hand-in-hand. Despite Ramin Djawadi's brilliant score to HBO's A GAME OF THRONES, I still feel the LAST SAMURAI evokes the right touches of melancholy, nostalgia and epic grandeur for Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.

ADWD spoilers follow below...

I'm on page 912 of 1489 (though the appendix begins on page 1408, so you could say 912 of 1407) in my ebook on iBooks, beginning a Tyrion chapter where he's about to be sold into slavery. Remarkably, the song "A Way of Life," engenders cynism, exhaustion (both from Tyrion's epic journey so far and from life itself) and a level of self-disgust as I read Tyrion's chapter. Is it me or is Tyrion even more jaded than before? After learning of his brother Jaime's betrayal towards the end of A STORM OF SWORDS, Tyrion discovers new depths of sardonic cynism I never thought possible even for him. He's constantly thinking about dying and/or killing his brother Jaime or Cersei. Cersi, I understand, but wow even Jaime now.

Of course it's a ruse. Authors like to tell us the chips are too far down, the odds too low, and that a character's death is inevitable. We as readers know that as much as the character thinks he will die or wants to die, the less likely he will actually die. And GRRM is notorious for dissimulations such as these. I think Tyrion has already "almost died" at least four times in this book (journey across the narrow sea where he drinks and pukes himself to unconsciousness, when he was drowning with the stone man in The Sorrow, when the other dwarf almost killed him, and when the storm almost killed him on the journey to Meereen).

And of course Tyrion won't die. He's like a cat with 100 lives. Every book, it looks as if he can't possibly escape Death, but of course he does. And as GRRM's mouthpiece, as GRRM himself, and the most popular character in the story, we know he won't die, at least not until the very end of the series . . .

More thoughts to follow . . .