Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny

(Book Review)

Started: March 15, 2020
Finished: April 2, 2020

Right, since everyone is desperate for distractions during this time of self-isolation, let me start right out with the audio drama link.
Some kind soul has uploaded a fan made audio drama of this book.  I've been listening to it, and it's good quality.  So if you're in need of some distraction these days, I can recommend it.

Chronicles of AMBER Audioplay - Book 1 - Omnibus



...and now, on with the rest of the review.

Why I Read This Book
I mentioned in a previous post that I've become addicted to Steve Donoghue's booktube channel.  And this book comes from Steve Donoghue.  In one of his Q&A videos (1), someone asked Steve Donoghue about his thoughts on "The Chronicles of Amber" series.  Steve made some sort of comment about how not everyone will recognize this series (it's apparently a cult classic--well beloved by its fans, but not well-known by the masses).  But then Steve Donoghue said that he liked the first 5 books in the series, but he thought the series took a massive dip in quality after the 5th book. (2)

This was all the information I had to go on, but the title sounded appealing to me.  A name like "The Chronicles of Amber" seemed to promise something epic, and yet magical.
I went to the Wikipedia page, and learned that this was a fantasy series first published in the 1970s.  It looked interesting.
I mentally filed it away in my mind in my "list of books to track down someday if I'm ever living in an English speaking country again".  Because, I thought, there was no way I was ever going to find this series here in the bookstores of Saigon.

...and then, wouldn't you know it, I was browsing through book street in Saigon, and on one of the used book tables, I found Fantasy Masterworks 6: The Chronicles of Amber. (3)

...after flipping through it, I discovered that this was the first 5 books in The Chronicle of Amber series collected into one volume (4). Well, this was fortuitous.  I guess I would be able to read this series after all.

The next question was whether to review each book within the binding separately, or to wait until I finished the series, and then review it as a whole.
Simon over on goodreads is absolutely appalled by the idea of anyone trying to review these books separately:

Looking at the other reviews of this book, I am surprised at how many people have reviewed each book separately. That really is a pointless exercise; in my opinion these books should be read as a whole or not at all. They do not stand alone and there is no point in reading any of them individually or out-of-order. It is one continuous story arc.

In spite of this advice, I've decided to go ahead and review these books separately.  I'm a slow reader, and my track record with finishing books has not been good lately.  If I don't start making notes as I go, there's a good chance I'm going to get stalled in the middle, and then have to restart the whole thing. (5)

Brief Background

Nine Princes in Amber is the first book in The Chronicles of Amber series.  It was originally published in 1970.  

It's a very short book.  It takes up only 155 pages in my edition.

I was initially worried that perhaps the publishers had abridged the book in order to fit all 5 books of The Chronicles of Amber series within the same Fantasy Masterworks binding.  But I've looked it up online, and it appears no matter which edition of this book you buy, the page count is very low.  (Amazon kindle edition is only 146 pages).(6)

The Review

Right, so I'll do my best, but this is one of those books that's hard to review without giving away the plot.  So, some spoilers are going to be inevitable.  I recommend you read this book (or listen to the audioplay linked above) before continuing on with this review.

Although this is a fantasy novel, the story opens in a present day New York (7).  The protagonist is waking up in a hospital.  He can't remember who he is, or how he got into the hospital.

...(sigh), yes, it's another amnesia story.  Cliche alert.

Amnesia plots always used to confuse me as a kid, because invariably whenever amnesia shows up in fiction, the protagonist's identity is completely erased, but their general knowledge of the world (how money works, basic grammar, sociolinguistic conventions) is always left intact., How could a trauma wipe out your entire memory of your identity, but leave your memory of everything else intact?
And then, like everyone else, at some point when I was going up, I learned that amnesia doesn't really exist.  It's something completely invented by modern fiction writers.  (Wikipedia article here).  And I've never been able to take it seriously in fiction ever since.

Now, granted, it's a cliche for a reason.  It's a plot device that has immediate built-in suspense and mystery.  (Who is this person?  What happened to him?  Why can't he remember?) And it has immediate built-in conflict (the protagonist's struggle to regain his memory).  So it's useful, particularly at the beginning of a story, when you need to do all the work of introducing the characters and the setting.  All that set-up would otherwise be boring, but throw in some amnesia drama, and it makes the boring set-up turn into a suspenseful mystery.

The other advantage, in this story in particular, is it allows the protagonist to view himself as an outsider.  As the novel progresses, we start to get hints that the protagonist isn't always a nice guy--he can be arrogant, vengeful, and callous.  And yet, as the protagonist discovers these things about himself, he's just as surprised as the reader.  And this gives an unusual point of entry for the reader to view an unlikable protagonist.

...and yet, for all that, I had a hard time going along with this amnesia plot.  I kept thinking to myself, "Yes, but how come he remembers how to do this, but not how to do that?"  I just couldn't shut that part of my brain off, and it prevented me from fully getting into that part of the book.

Other reviewers have described the beginning of this book as almost a hard-boiled detective novel in the style of Raymond Chandler (8).  The last (and only) Raymond Chandler book I read was over 10 years ago now, so it's not fresh enough in my memory for me to talk intelligently about it.  But I thought I did notice some parallels.  The dialogue style seemed similar.  And also Raymond Chandler's habit of constantly mentioning food and drink--a couple sandwiches washed down with a glass of beer, a few cups of coffee after waking up from a nap, etc--is similar in this book. (9)

The narration style is mostly readable, but every so often I can get completely thrown off by a strange sentence:

The woman behind the desk wore a wide-collared, V-necked dress of blue green, had long hair and low bangs, all of a cross between sunset clouds and the outer edge of a candle flame in an otherwise dark room, and natural I somehow knew, and her eyes behind glasses I didn't think she needed were as blue as Lake Erie at at three o'clock on a cloudless summer afternoon; and the color of her compressed smile matched her hair.

...wait, what?  What was a cross between the sunset clouds and a candle flame?  Was that her dress or her hair?  And what color was her smile?
So, obviously the author likes to indulge in some poetic descriptions from time to time that make you work a bit as a reader, and this slowed me down occasionally as I read it.  But while the above example is not atypical, it's not all the time either.  Other sections can be quite readable.

Then, the fantasy part of the book starts to kick in.  And it is wonderfully bizarre.  The characters travel through several parallel universes, and encounter all kinds of bizarre civilizations.
The randomness of all the different worlds they encountered reminded me a of the wonderful randomness of Rick and Morty jumping through parallel universes.

We moved through a canyon or rocks, then passed through a city which seemed to be made entirely of glass, or glass-like substance, of tall buildings, thin and fragile-appearing, and of people through whom the pink sun shone, revealing their internal organs and the remains of their last meals. They stared at us as we drove by. They mobbed the corners of their streets, but no one attempted to halt us or pass in front of us.
"The Charles Forts of his place will doubtless quote this happening for many years," said my brother.

And there's also this wonderfully bizarre underwater world.  There's a city under the ocean, that's a complete mirror of the city of Amber above the ocean--everything the same as Amber, but underwater and in reverse.  And they have to travel down this underwater staircase to get there.  And while they're walking down the underwater staircase, they get pursued by these men on horses who are chasing them down the stairway underwater.  And if all of that sounds wonderfully bizarre and fantastical, then this is the book for you.  (If, on the other hand, you hate these kind of weird fantasy books, well, consider yourself forewarned then.)

The description style is minimalist.  There's just enough information given so that you have some vague idea, and then you have to fill the rest in with your imagination.
Ordinarily, I tend to tire of long boring literary descriptions in novels, so I was mostly glad for the bare-bones style.  And yet, there were several times I wanted more information about what was going on, and did not get it.  I occasionally felt like my imagination had to do too much work to fill in the gaps.  For example, in chapter 8, they're attacked by some sort of fire creature but a complete description is never given:

After a time, we smelled smoke.
After another time, we saw it, flapping skyward all about us.
Then the sheets of flame began to rise and fall. They moved toward us, with their crunching, constant footsteps; and as they came nearer, we began to feel the heat, and somewhere, way back along the lines, a panic arouse. There were cries, and the columns swelled and welled forward.
We began to run.
Flakes of ash were falling about us now and the smoke grew thicker...

...etc.  The scene goes on for a bit longer, but there's no further description of the creatures than what I quoted above.
So, what was it that attacked? "it" or "they"?  Something that flapped skyward, or something that had crunching footsteps?  I give up.  They got attacked by some sort of fire, that's all I can work out.

Again, I should emphasize that the book is readable for the most part.  But there were definitely passages like this that left me scratching my head.

The middle part of the book describes a long journey and then a big battle to try to retake the throne of Amber.  As with the rest of the book, it is imaginative and wonderfully bizarre (weird creatures, strange parallel earths). 

But, I also did begin to get battle fatigue in this section.  So many pages of fighting, and I wasn't quite sure why I was reading this.  I wasn't even sure that I liked these characters, which made it all the harder to get invested in so many pages of them fighting each other.
The main character, Corwin, is somewhat charismatic (brave, brash, dashing).  So I didn't hate him completely.  But he and his brother don't make any attempts to gloss over the fact that they are sacrificing thousands of lives of their soldiers in order to try to gain the throne.  So I could  never sympathize with him completely.  And that lack of sympathy made it hard to get invested in the battle.

The book then takes a dark turn, as one of the characters is cruelly blinded and imprisoned.  "What am I reading?" I asked myself.  "I thought I had picked up this book for some light escapist fantasy entertainment?  When did my escapist entertainment get so dark?"

The book then takes on shades of the prison scenes from The Count of Monte Cristo  .(10)

And then, escape, and the book ends on a cliffhanger.
So, I guess on to the next book in the series to find out what happens next.

Addendum
Most of the huge fans of this book seem to have discovered it in their adolescence or early teens.  No doubt, this would be the perfect time to read a story like this.  I regret that I never got big into strange fantasy literature when I was that age.

Notes (docs, pub)
(1) I can't find the link.  Sorry. Steve posts so many videos that if you're trying to locate one particular quote from a video you watched months ago, it's a very daunting task.

(2) I'm quoting from memory, but I think that's right.

(3) Fantasy Masterworks is a series of paperback books which have as their goal to re-print the classics of the modern fantasy paperback genre.  According to the back cover:

Fantasy Masterworks is a library of some of the greatest, most original, and most influential fantasy ever written.  These are the books which, along with Tolkien, Peake and others, shaped modern fantasy.

The Chronicles of Amber is number 6 in their series.  The Chronicles of Amber series was only just published in the 1970s, but I guess by the standards of paperback fantasy, that's old enough to be considered a classic now.  According to Wikipedia, Fantasy Masterworks is a British publication, so I'm not sure if they'd be in American bookstores or not.  The used copy I picked up in Saigon was most likely brought over to Vietnam by a British backpacker.
Looking at their Wikipedia page, it looks like their are some really interesting titles in the Fantasy Masterworks series.  I'd love to track down and read all of these someday.
That being said, if I had to make a complaint: there's nothing in my volume in the way of any extras from the publisher.  There's no publisher's introduction explaining why they've chosen to reprint "Chronicles of Amber" or why they think it's one of the "most influential fantasy series ever written".  There's just the titles of the original books, and their original publication date, and then the text, and that's it.
I was away from my computer when I first encountered this book on a used-book table, and I felt like I could have used some more guidance from the publisher about whether or not these 5 books were a complete story arc when I was weighing up whether to buy the book or not.

(4) There are 10 books in the series, but I've been told that the first 5 books make up one coherent narrative arc.  So if this book only contains the first 5 books of the series, that's probably good enough for me.  Plus Steve Donoghue (and apparently a number of other people) think that the quality drops off after book 5 anyway.

(5) This is, after all, exactly what happened to me with The Complete Stories of Oz.

(6)Although, the audio play on youtube does contain some lines that are not found in my print edition.  What to make of that?  It's never much (a few lines of dialogue or exposition here or there), but just to make sure I'm not missing anything, I listened to the audio play as well.  (I put it on in the background while I was working on the computer.)

(7) Or, that is, what was present day when this book was originally published in 1970.  You know what I mean.

(8) See, for example, this excellent review from Tor.com: Hard-Boiled Fantasy: Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny.

(9)  I would constantly get hungry as I read this book.  "Boy, I could really go for a couple of sandwiches and some beer right now," I would think to myself.

(10)  The narrator himself explicitly draws the comparison to The Count of Monte Cristo, so I don't get any extra points for noticing the parallel. And yet, as somebody who has read through The Count of Monte Cristo, I thought the comparison was apt.  The same sense of claustrophobia.  The same brooding on revenge.  The same suspenseful scenes plotting escape.

Video Review
Video review HERE and embedded below (Playlist HERE):



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