The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I know people who say they like to read books because it takes them places. When you think of, say, Lord of the Rings, there’s many awesome battles, but people also remember the sights themselves, from the quaint peaceful realms of Hobbiton, to the great city of Minas Tirith, to Sauron’s tower rising out from a blackened land. Of course, it takes a lot of time to travel between them (and plenty of people are fond of complaining about it, too).
In Amber, characters travel between these majestic locations like you and I might walk from one street block to the next. Zelazny is willing to show you -anything- he can dream up, and his imagination alone is worthy of deeming this collection a classic.
Almost as important is his reach. He’s not telling a story of a kingdom surviving the attack of an enemy. Oh no. That isn’t big enough. Imagine a million alternate worlds, and then run a black road through them all, spreading destruction as it grows to encompass every world, every city, every creature imaginable. In the center of all these alternate worlds is Amber, sort of like the pillar holding everything together. Should it fall, so does all else. Tolkien wanted to show the battle for one single Middle Earth. Zelazny wants to show a war to save billions.
The main narrator is Corwin (yes, it is first person, but don’t worry, the writing is a masterful combination of beauty and down-to-earth jokes and grumblings). He wakes up in a hospital, with no memory of who he is, what happened, but my isn’t it peculiar how his broken legs are healed so quickly? From there he encounters his family person by person. They backstab, deal, threaten, switch sides a hundred times, and all can walk through shadows to whatever realm they wish. I loved every second of it.
The series starts to bog down around the third book. The climactic fights, which sometimes feel like a boy grabbed various action figures and started slamming them together (go, go, wolfman army, shoot down those pterodactyls! Oh no, knights in armor, fire fire fire!), grow less frequent. There is a LOT of talking, and while it is usually spaced out well, near the middle there is so much, trying to establish who is friends with who, what happened to what, etc.
By the end of the book, I loved the narrator, adored the city of Amber, felt like I personally knew the various princes and princesses of the city, and sorely wished I had more. I checked the next five books, and was sad to see the narrator was not the same. Oh well. Farewell, Corwin. You gave me one heck of a ride.
