Originally, I saw this book, A Feast for Crows, in a Chapters well before I was back on the fantasy-reading wagon. This sighting places it before my time teaching abroad, since I was able to find a copy of A Clash of Kings in the ever-excellent "What the Book" in the Itaewon neighbourhood of Seoul.
After having read the first three books and about 1/3 of the fourth, one of the things that strikes me about Martin's writing style is the way in which he describes things. People's features, and the physical features of locales are often described with the sketchiest of notes. The composition of a room is mentioned, or the colour of a person's hair or eyes, but little else comes up. I find this interesting because it follows quite nicely the advice of Canadian author Thomas King: trust your reader.
Unlike other major works (Tolkien springs to mind immediately), Martin spares us long explanations of his settings' finer details or the features of a character's body or face. Unless they're important to the person's character.
It's probably fairly obvious, but that's what the engine in Martin's Ferrari of a series is: character. And, unsurprisingly then, everything he writes is in service of the characters.
Yes, his is an intricate plot involving many different simultaneous threads. But any level of plot complexity can just be expressed in a few sentences in an outline (or at least boiled down to such from an author's rambling notes; hence the possibility of creating "plot summaries").
But in the car that is "A Song of Ice and Fire," plot is at best the wheels. Almost all of the books' energy is devoted to their characters, making them as real as is possible for fictional characters. And Martin's not shy about exploiting his way with character: especially since so many more are used as perspective characters in A Feast for Crows.
Plus, when you care about characters as much as you care about Martin's characters their inevitable deaths are all the more potent.
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