Quick Take
- Narration: Roy Dotrice’s performance is a singular achievement, nearly 900 distinct characters across nearly 49 hours, and one of the most committed single-narrator feats in audiobook history.
- Themes: Political consequence, isolation and identity, the cost of leadership
- Mood: Expansive and often brutal, with long stretches of strategic deliberation punctuated by sudden violence
- Verdict: A rewarding but demanding fifth volume that sets chess pieces with patience, listeners who accept that this is preparation rather than payoff will find it essential reading.
I finished A Dance with Dragons late on a winter night after nearly fifty hours of listening spread across several weeks, treating it, as I think the audiobook rewards, as something closer to a long-form radio drama than a novel consumed in sessions. Roy Dotrice’s performance is the reason this works as well as it does in audio form. He has been with A Song of Ice and Fire since A Game of Thrones, and the continuity of his characterizations across five volumes, hundreds of voices maintained with consistency over more than a decade of recording, is the kind of commitment that makes you feel the scale of Martin’s achievement from the outside, through the instrument of a single performer’s memory and craft.
A Dance with Dragons is the fifth book in Martin’s series, and it is also, fair warning, the most controversial among readers. It covers roughly the same chronological period as A Feast for Crows, following the characters that book left out, principally Tyrion in exile, Daenerys in Meereen, and Jon Snow at the Wall, while also advancing several plot threads that Feast left hanging. The effect, for listeners who have followed the series from the beginning, is both the pleasure of returning to absent characters and the frustration of watching a narrative that is visibly deferring its climaxes.
Our Take on A Dance with Dragons
One reviewer articulated the critical tension precisely: the book is controversial not because it is poor but because it is not the book some readers wanted it to be. Martin is engaged here primarily in a massive positioning operation, moving characters toward confrontations that have not yet happened. The pleasures are largely internal, Tyrion’s increasingly desperate journey east, Jon Snow’s increasingly untenable position at the Wall, Daenerys’s political education in the costs of ruling a city rather than conquering one. These are good chapters. But they are chapters whose payoff belongs to a book that, as of now, has not been published.
The Italian reviewer who described the novel as closing the circle of characters and preparing the chessboard for the sixth book has it exactly right. And if you accept that description, if you understand going in that this is infrastructure rather than resolution, A Dance with Dragons is absorbing and often brilliant. The chapters from Jon Snow’s perspective are among Martin’s finest, and Tyrion’s darkly comic misadventures through the eastern lands reveal a writer still finding new angles on a character he has been developing for two decades.
Why Listen to A Dance with Dragons
Roy Dotrice’s narration is the primary reason to choose the audiobook format for this particular volume. At nearly 49 hours, A Dance with Dragons is the longest installment in the series, and Dotrice’s ability to keep voices distinct across that runtime, differentiating not just major characters but minor lords, servants, and functionaries who may appear in a single scene, is remarkable. One listener who had experienced the entire series in audio described the unabridged format as allowing full immersion in a way that the printed page doesn’t replicate, given the length of the novels.
A small caveat: Dotrice recorded A Feast for Crows with a different narrator due to health issues, which means listeners moving from that book to this one will notice a voice change on return to his narration. The transition is jarring if you’ve listened to both in close succession, though it resolves quickly.
What to Watch For in A Dance with Dragons
The Meereen storyline, Daenerys’s extended political struggle in the city she has conquered and now must govern, has divided readers most sharply. For some it represents Martin’s most interesting political writing: the gap between the ideology of liberation and the practical demands of governance, the costs of refusing compromise, the limits of dragon power as a substitute for institutional legitimacy. For others it is simply slow. I lean toward the first interpretation, but the second is not unreasonable.
The ending is abrupt in a way that has frustrated readers since 2011. Martin stops the novel at a moment of maximum tension across multiple storylines, which feels deliberate rather than accidental but is nonetheless difficult to live with when the next volume remains unfinished. The wait for The Winds of Winter, referenced plaintively in multiple reviews, continues.
Who Should Listen to A Dance with Dragons
Series readers who have reached this point are already committed and know what they’re getting into. New listeners should start at A Game of Thrones and work through in order, the character relationships and political context are far too dense to enter mid-series. Anyone who found the first four volumes rewarding will find this one necessary, even when it tests patience.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Roy Dotrice’s narration of A Dance with Dragons compare to his earlier work in the series?
Dotrice’s performance here is consistent with his work on A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords. He returned to the series after another narrator recorded A Feast for Crows, so listeners will notice a voice shift between books four and five, but his character voices are otherwise continuous with the earlier recordings.
Is A Dance with Dragons as slow as its reputation suggests, and does that translate particularly badly to audio?
The book does prioritize positioning over resolution, and long stretches involve strategic deliberation rather than action. In audio, those stretches either work, if you’ve settled into the series as an immersive experience, or drag more than they would in print. Long daily listening sessions work better than short ones.
Can I start A Song of Ice and Fire with A Dance with Dragons if I’ve already watched the TV series?
Not recommended. The television adaptation diverged significantly from Martin’s text in its later seasons, and the book series contains enormous amounts of character and political detail that the show condensed or omitted. Starting at book one is strongly advisable regardless of television familiarity.
Given that The Winds of Winter still hasn’t been published, does A Dance with Dragons have a satisfying enough ending on its own?
No, frankly. The novel ends at a moment of high tension across multiple storylines, and it is written as a setup for the next volume rather than a self-contained narrative. Readers who need resolution should know this going in.
