Close-up on his fist, as he unravels it to place an onyx dragon in her palm.
Cut to Volantis. We zoom out on Quentyn’s face.
His eyes are bloodshot.
His hands are trembling.
His friends are dead.
He’s going to die.
He knows it.
DORAN: (in voiceover) Fire and Blood.
As his opening move in Quentyn’s storyline, GRRM elects to rip a gigantic hole in it, disorienting the reader along with the protagonist right from the start. Quent’s first chapter in ASOIAF is not set in Yronwood, where his story “should” begin; nor is it set in Sunspear, receiving his mission from his father; nor is it set in Planky Town, as he sets out on his quest. It is set in Volantis, after Team Quent has already passed through all those others. Why structure it this way? Why open the story on what really ought to be the fifth or sixth chapter? So GRRM could start said story like this:
Adventure stank.
It’s the most meta moment in the series’ most meta storyline. Indeed, it’s a huge sick hilarious fourth-wall-breaking (and heartbreaking) joke, once you know how this story ends. But it’s also Quentyn’s story in miniature. Even more than, say, “he drank his way across the narrow sea,” the opening line of “The Merchant’s Man” throws down a gauntlet for the reader, setting the tone for the rest of the storyline. This adventure is not empowering or exciting or, indeed, successful. This adventure stinks. And what does it stink of?
She boasted sixty oars, a single sail, and a long lean hull that promised speed. Small, but she might serve, Quentyn thought when he saw her, but that was before he went aboard and got a good whiff of her. Pigs, was his first thought, but after a second sniff he changed his mind. Pigs had a cleaner smell. This stink was piss and rotting meat and nightsoil, this was the reek of corpse flesh and weeping sores and wounds gone bad, so strong that it overwhelmed the salt air and fish smell of the harbor.
It stinks of death, that winged chariot which has already visited Quent’s quest before we even meet him, the maw waiting for him at quest’s end. Quent’s death is so horrific you can smell it a book away. It haunts his entire story from the very first words. It’s the end result of every twist of the plot, every decision Quent makes, rendering the experience of reading Quent’s arc the equivalent of watching a dog-eared storybook set suddenly on fire.
And even before we enter Quentyn’s story, his best friend (Cletus Yronwood) and two of his other companions (Willam Wells and Maester Kedry) are dead, killed in a corsair attack. So the quest is broken before it starts. It’s already all gone wrong, and we have no experience of Quent’s story before that happens. Quentyn’s fantasy tale has torn off its mask and revealed itself as a horror story, and the trapdoors just keep opening up beneath him, falling closer to the fire with each drop. This is a Hero’s Journey in which the Refusal of the Call was absolutely correct, which in and of itself constitutes a radical reshaping of how this sort of story is supposed to go.
Brilliant stuff – cuts right to the heart of why Quentyn is so important for ASOIAF as a whole.
And the comparisons to Tolkein and the Hero’s Journey couldn’t be more apt. For Maester Kedry, read Gandalf. For Cletus Yronwood, read Aragorn. Imagine if they had died, permanently, right at the beginning of their quest, in a literal random encounter. No grand set-piece on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm or anything like that, just the DM rolling some percentile die on a table.
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