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Started: April 27, 2021
Finished: May 18, 2021
Summary
Originally published in 1978, this is the fifth and final book in The Corwin Cycle (which, in turn, is the first round of stories in The Chronicles of Amber series).
The book delivers more of what the series is famous for--journeys through multiple universes, and all the strange lands and strange creatures that populate it. It also has more plot twists and plotting among the princes and princesses of Amber.
As with the other books in this series, Roger Zelazny’s prose can be a bit difficult to follow in the sections when characters are travelling through the multiverse. But on the whole, the book is a lot of fun to read, and provides a satisfying end to the series. (119 words)
[That's me attempting to be concise. If you want my usual long-winded version, continue on to The Full Review]
And so at last I come to the 5th and final book in The Chronicles of Amber, following: Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon, Sign of the Unicorn and The Hand of Oberon. (Actually technically this is only the end of what is now known as The Corwin Cycle, as Zelazny would later revive The Chronicles of Amber for a second series. But this was originally the end of The Chronicles of Amber, and furthermore it's the end of the Fantasy Masterworks volume that I have.)
Since we're 5 books in, I'm not going to waste any time describing the tone and style of the series. Let's just jump in with my observation about this specific book. ***SPOILERS FOLLOW***
So, at the end of the previous book, the King Father Oberon was finally revealed.
Oberon, the father to the princes and princesses of Amber (equally feared and revered, so far as we can tell by their reminiscences of him), has been hovering over this series the whole time. The characters have remembered him, talked about him, and hypothesized about his disappearance, but we've never actually seen him (*1). And now after all that build up, he finally becomes a character. I was excited to actually see him in action, except that we see very little of him in this book. He appears briefly at the beginning, still very much shrouded in mystery, and then once again disappears for the rest of the book.
The bulk of this book is taken up not with Oberon, but with Corwin's journey across the multiverse. Corwin has to travel all the way from Amber to the Courts of Chaos, which means he has to cross the whole multiverse (*2).
I've complained in my previous reviews that the journeying through shadow parts of this series (and the weird prose that always accompanies it (*3) ) are my least favorite parts of the series. And there was a lot of journeying through shadow in this book. And yet, even though it could frequently be disorienting, it could also be fascinating. The book was peppered with short little descriptions of different universes that seized onto your imagination. My favorite was:
I crossed there under wheeling comets, coming to the shore of a bloodred sea in a place of heavy perfumes. I rode a large green sun and a small bronze one out of the sky as I paced that shore, while skeletal navies clashed and serpents of the deep circled their orange and blue-sailed vessels. (p.678)
That's all the description of we get. Everything else has to be filled in by your imagination. And that's the fun of these books.
Along the way, Corwin also encounters treacherous leprechauns, a talking tree, a depressed giant stuck in a bog, a devious jackal, and a bird of ill-omen. The bird of ill-omen eventually gets unceremoniously eaten in a passage that is typical of much of the dark humor in this final book (*4):
"...As for me, I must try, for so long as there as there is breath within me, to raise up a pattern against it. I do this because I am what I am, and I am the man who could have been king in Amber."
Hugi lowered his head.
"I'll see you eat crow first," he said, and he chuckled.
I reached out quickly and twisted his head off, wishing that I had time to build a fire. Though he made it look like a sacrifice, it is difficult to say to whom the morally victory belonged, since I had been planning on doing it anyway. (p.723)
Throughout this whole time, the multiverse is being erased by a rainstorm that is slowly following Corwin, and Corwin has to make a new pattern in order to save the universe, as well as join his brothers and sisters in a giant battle against the forces of Chaos.
One often gets the sense that Roger Zelazny is just making the rules for this multiverse up as he goes along. I'm not saying he is, I'm just saying you get that sense, because we are constantly being introduced to all these rules about the pattern and Amber and shadow and chaos, and the rules often have an arbitrary rather than an organic feel to them. But I think (unless I missed something) that it is at least consistent--that is, once a rule is introduced, it's consistent throughout the book.
The ending of the book includes several twists, including a classic "Character you thought was dead had only been faking his death" type trope. The ending also gives conclusions to most of the mysteries that have been permeating this series. (We finally find out, for example, who stabbed Corwin in the middle of book 3.)
And then, the characters Brand and Deirdre die by falling off a cliff. But we never see their bodies, and in a series with as many twists and resurrections as this one, I'm not about to believe their really dead.
[Sidenote: Much is made of Deirdre, Corwin's sister, and how Corwin is in love with her. But nothing interesting ever happens with her. Which is weird. I mean, if Roger Zelazny wanted to scandalize us by doing a provocative incest storyline, then why didn't he just do it? But what was the point of just hinting at the incest, and then doing nothing with it? Was Deirdre just a character that Zelazny built up at the beginning, but then ultimately didn't know what to do with? Put Deirdre in the "maybe the series wasn't perfectly planned out from the beginning" column]
The End?
According to Wikipedia, there are two stories in The Chronicles of Amber series--The Corwin Cycle and The Merlin Cycle. This is the end of The Corwin Cycle, so it's a natural stopping point. There are still several unresolved questions (Is Brand really dead? What's going to happen with Dara? Will the new pattern that Corwin made disrupt the multiverse? What will happen with Merlin?) but the story arch is, more-or-less, wrapped up at this point.
But more importantly, it's the end of the Fantasy Masterworks volume that I have in my hands. Which I only got because I randomly found it at a used-book table here in Saigon. I don't have the other books in my possession, and, since I'm all the way out here in Vietnam, no way of getting them at the moment. (Apparently the other books are not as good anyway? At least that's what people say.)
So, this is the end of the series for me. If I'm ever able to track down the rest of the books in this series, I might start up with this series again. But for now, I'm going to stop here.
Footnotes
(*1) Okay, so technically Oberon's been with us from book 2 in the form of Ganelon. (That is, if you give Zelazny the benefit of the doubt and assume he was planning the Ganelon-is-Oberon plot twist all along.) But he wasn't revealed to us as Oberon until the very end of book 4.
(*2) When I was reading this book myself, I didn't pick up on the fact that the journey involved crossing the whole multiverse. I mean, of course I gathered that it was a very long journey, and that it involved "moving through shadow" (which means shifting through alternate realities in the parlance of this series). But I didn't pick up that the journey from Amber to Chaos involved going through all of the multiverse exactly. I didn't pick that up until I read the Wikipedia summary:
Corwin must ride the entire length of the multiverse, from Amber to the Courts of Chaos
(*3) Obligatory sample of the weird disorienting prose that accompanies the journey through shadow:
A strong wind ... Clouds across the stars ... A bright for spearing a shattered tree to my right, turning it to flame ... A tingling sensation ... The small of ozone ... Sheets of water upon me ... A row of lights to my left ...That's a small sampling. It often goes on for pages like that.
Clattering down a cobbled street ... A strange vehicle approaching ... Cylindrical, chugging ... We avoid one another ... A shout pursues me .. Through a lighted window the face of a child ...
Clattering ... Splashing ... Storefronts and homes ... The rain lets up, dies down, is gone ... A fog blows by, lingers, deepens, is pearled by a growing light to my left ...
The terrain softens, grows read ... The light within the mist brightens ... A new wind, from behind, a growing warmth ... The air breaks apart ...
Sky of pale lemon ... Orange sun rushing toward noon ... (p.673 in The Fantasy Masterworks edition. Trailing dots in the original)
May 9, 2021 The Courts of Chaos p.672-680
May 16, 2021 The Courts of Chaos p.680-752
May 23, 2021 The Courts of Chaos p.752-772 (finished) 2nd reading p.645-648
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