A Series Ian Likes: The Chronicles Of Amber by Roger Zelazny

Corwin wakes up in a hospital. He’s clearly been in an accident but he has no memory of it… nor of his life up until this moment. Escaping from the hospital he learns that he was put in it by people posing as family members, so he goes in search of them. Discovering a woman who claims to be his sister and a man who claims to be his brother, he realizes that he is part of a bigger family that is possibly not of this world at all. So he goes looking for it…

Roger Zelazny (1937 – 1995) was a major figure in the New Wave, the progressive literary movement that dominated Science Fiction during the 1960s and beyond. He was the author of many award-winning novels, including Lord Of Light and This Immortal. Many of his novels, SF and Fantasy, are based around Earth mythologies. He also wrote the excellent Damnation Alley which was filmed under the same title and should be avoided in this form. However, he is most famous for The Chronicles Of Amber, a set of ten novels that concern themselves with Amber, the kingdom at the end/centre of the universe and the adventures of Corwin, Prince and occasional king of the realm; and Merlin, Corwin’s son.

The first five novels – Nine Princes In Amber, The Guns Of Avalon, Sign Of The Unicorn, The Hand Of Oberon and The Courts Of Chaos – deal with Corwin and his quest to regain the throne of Amber following the disappearance of his father, Oberon. It’s a tale of intrigue, infighting and fratricide that would do any Greek tragedy or modern blockbuster proud, but all that takes second place to the adventures that Corwin has exploring the universe.

In Corwin’s universe, all worlds – including our own Earth – are but shadows of Amber, the one true world. People with access to magical ability or artefacts (the most common are Tarot-like cards known as Trumps) can travel between these shadow worlds for whatever purpose they choose. Long ago, Corwin fought with one of his siblings and was left in our world to die, but he recovered without his memories and remained stranded with only his great strength and considerable talents to help him survive. After his accident he begins to recover that memory and plan his revenge.

It takes him all five of those novels to achieve that and to realise that it might not have been what he was looking for…

In the second quintet of novels, Corwin has mysteriously vanished, and we are led on our adventures by Merlin, his son. These novels – Trumps Of Doom, Blood Of Amber, Signs Of Chaos, Knight Of Shadows and Prince Of Chaos – don’t spend as much time on our Earth as the earlier novels do but they cover a wide range of exotic and bizarre worlds. Merlin, having spent his life among the near-immortals of his world, has a very different skill set to Corwin and approaches problems in a far different manner…

The series was phenomenally well-received on its original publication. Zelazny uses a particularly hard-boiled voice for Corwin and the mystery that surrounds his initial adventures up until the point that he recovers his memories and realizes who he is. That voice remains but the intent becomes a little more self-assured as we realise that he is quite the formidable protagonist. And his exploits over the next four books as he plots himself from a lone traveller to a general commanding vast armies and then to assuming the throne of Amber feel less like a power fantasy and more like a natural progression of events, especially when we learn some of the details of Corwin’s previous life and the company he keeps.

The second set of novels were successful but didn’t achieve the same adulation from fans. I don’t enjoy them as much – the intriguing and wheels within wheels within wheels plotting turned me off – but it was great to return to a setting and characters that I loved. I had read some complaints that Merlin seemed to be inhabiting a “different” Amber to that of his father, but I always saw it as just a different viewpoint. Corwin narrating the series as an outsider who hadn’t visited Amber for several centuries and was getting to know people and places all over again; Merlin had spent most of his life with these people and had had a different upbringing to Corwin, which meant that he was going to focus on things differently to his father. It even explains the way that Corwin’s brothers and sisters behave in the books: Corwin is the brother who most of them were afraid of, or had a healthy respect for, while Merlin is the bright youngster they’ve known all their lives; Flora, for example is a younger sister that Corwin regards as an unreliable social butterfly, while to Merlin she’s the cool aunt who always has time for him and his ideas.

I came to the series when I was 15, almost a decade after the Corwin books were finished and a year or two before the Merlin books began. I was hooked from the first chapter of Nine Princes In Amber and devoured the series. I adore the first two volumes as they feel to me like almost perfect fantasy novels: the adventures of Corwin through the multiple shadow worlds were precisely the sort of story I loved at the time, and the impossible battles he fought in those two books made him an incomparable hero to me. I loved how he was aware of how privileged he was as a prince of Amber but also how open he was to ideas from powerless and ordinary mortals because of his time in our world… He was cool, but also dangerous, just as a lot of the more realistic characters I was encountering in my reading were proving to be. The fact that Corwin is one of the few remaining characters of this sort that I still like is also testament to Zelazny’s skill as a writer.

I was less of a fan of Sign Of The Unicorn, because it was a novel that featured Corwin exposing a lot of plotting which made the storyline a little more muddled, with those shifting alliances that some writers seem so fond of but which leave me cold: I like the narrative idea of putting your faith into people that aren’t entirely trustworthy to add some tension, but a lot of authors seem to then forget what it is that makes the person so untrustworthy and they become a necessary and valuable member of the team with everything they’ve done prior to then forgotten about. Corwin tries to trust his family members but they don’t fully return that, having also been betrayed by him prior to his disappearance, so him being the suspicious character is a fresh twist. But Unicorn seems to largely be filled with characters explaining where they were at a particular time and place, and setting out their allegiances. Fortunately, there’s also a fair amount of story unfolding with all this and it raises the stakes for Corwin as well, so that when we get to The Hand Of Oberon, he seems just as lost as when he returned to Amber several books ago. But Hand is a much more relaxed book which takes the time for Corwin to get to know his family some more, and vice versa. But things come to a head with a brilliant cliffhanger reveal at the ending…

… that leads nicely into The Courts Of Chaos, the concluding volume where the tale so far is wrapped up neatly and we are introduced to Merlin, the son that Corwin didn’t realise he had and who will lead us through the next set of books.

Trumps Of Doom opens with the idea that Merlin has a personal assassin who tries to kill him on one particular day every year. We soon learn, though, that his life contains loads more complications than that. Merlin spends a lot of time dodging local and otherworldly attempts on his life and soon realizes that he is part of a greater set of intrigues than he had imagined. And a lot of it is centred around what happened to Corwin. Blood Of Amber reveals that there’s an even wider net trying to capture Merlin, partly because of who his father is, partly because of who his mother is, partly because of where he stands on any number of important issues, some of which he can help, some of which – like his position in the order of inheritance to the throne of the Courts Of Chaos – he can’t.

Sign Of Chaos and Blood Of Amber contribute to the mess, with Merlin discovering that the range of suspects in his attempted murders has grown wider and more powerful. However, he does manage to broker a sort of peace with some of them, as well as discovering more relatives than he believed he’d had previously. It all becomes a little complicated, rather like the third and fourth volumes in his father’s story did, before everything comes to some sort of conclusion in Prince Of Chaos, the last volume published before Zelazny’s death. It also concludes the mystery surrounding Corwin’s disappearance.

But it’s not really a conclusion to the series: Corwin and Merlin are making their own separate ways back to Amber. Unfortunately, though, all we have a set of fragmentary short stories that tell part of the tale before leaving us completely in the dark about what happened next…

I don’t enjoy the second series as much as I do the first. It’s down to a lot of reasons, though: they are confident books, with strong characters and they do expand the world and take the story further. My issues are largely down to my own personal taste.

Corwin visited Amber almost as a stranger. He was a master of magic and of travelling through the universe his father created, but he likes to take a simple approach to solving problems: he’s one of the best swordsmen in the known worlds and a brilliant tactician and strategist (surpassed only by his brother, Benedict. And the scene in The Guns Of Avalon where he explains why he’d never cross Benedict is amongst the most chilling in the entire series). Corwin also comes to a lot of the situations in the books like a relative newcomer: he has been away for a long time, after all, and sometimes remarks on the changes that the place has undergone while he was away. For all that, though, or because of it, he shows little interest in seeing more of his world than what he needs to further his aims. He also hints at being a lot more emotional than you might think from his narrative: he talks freely but carefully about what he went through after his blinding and imprisonment after the first attempt at wresting control of Amber from his brother Eric in Nine Princes In Amber, and he frequently withholds information from the reader about where he has been and what he has done before. Part of that is Zelazny inventing details on the fly, but it is also Corwin not being the most reliable of narrators.

Merlin, on the other hand, has grown up in a royal court and is a frequent visitor to Amber; he’s familiar with the palace and city. He also knows his family quite well and, like Corwin, is adept at hiding how he feels from people that he doesn’t want to know about it. But he’s clearly a favourite nephew to many in Amber; Flora, as I said, always looks out for him, and Random, frequently intimidated and swayed by Corwin, often indulges a lot of Merlin’s ideas and fancies, sometimes against his better judgment.

This leads, naturally to a different feel to these books. Amber often comes across through Merlin’s eyes as a fairly cosmopolitan place, foreign and familiar at the same time, whereas Corwin made it feel like some sort of dark, fey paradise, filled with marvels and dangers. Under Merlin’s gaze, it’s more like a favoured holiday destination, one that gets visited more often than most others, possibly because you’ve got a holiday home there.

Merlin also interacts with the universe differently. He grew up with a different sort of magic to Corwin so takes a more casual attitude towards its use. When Corwin uses magic, it’s something arcane and alien; Merlin uses it like we would an app on a mobile phone because he grew up surrounded by it.

And there’s another justification for why the books read differently: they are narrated by two different people. Zelazny was a good enough writer that he could carry off a stylistic challenge like this and he really does follow it through; while fans may have wanted another five books from Corwin’s perspective, Zelazny clearly didn’t want to repeat himself. And while I don’t have the same affection for the second books that I do for the first, I love how they are so radically different form them while still inhabiting the same universe with a lot of the same characters, though seen through a glass, darkly.

But regardless of how the second series was received, though, the entirety of it is regarded as a modern North American Fantasy classic. And it’s written in a uniquely North American style: the world that Corwin inhabits is a high fantasy universe where personal honour counts almost as much as your credentials and experience, but it’s told in the style of a hardboiled detective novel… which fits when you consider just how much snooping about Corwin has to do over the course of them, and how many times he gets wounded or tricked out of his goals, often in search of a MacGuffin. But it’s a world that would baffle Sam Spade or Philip Marlow and the darkness that Corwin has to penetrate is often more nefarious or shabby than that uncovered by any noirish detective of the golden age.

And that hardboiled style fits a journey to a mythical kingdom beautifully. Corwin is alienated from his homeland: he has, as the memes say, seen some shit. He mistrusts most people because he has been awful to them in the past and expects them to want some kind of revenge on him. And this terminal state of expecting betrayal does make him desperate for some kind of redemption, no matter the cost to himself. It’s a story that could play out in almost any background, but Zelazny chose the literal ends of the universe to do it.

So it clearly resonated with a lot of people. This is evidenced by the number of games and spin-offs it has generated over the years. There are the inevitable source books, some of which I own; role-playing games; board games, tarot cards (a motif that features heavily throughout the series), and many others. Over the years, there have been talks about numerous film and television adaptations (Stephen Colbert is the most recent name to be attached to it). But there have been surprisingly few other books set in the same universe: Zelazny himself wrote some chapters to what was possibly going to be the eleventh book but his death prevented that being published, although you can find them in several anthologies. They provide an interesting glimpse into a story told by both Corwin and Merlin. There’s also a prequel trilogy by John Betancourt that focuses on Corwin’s father Oberon, which is intriguing but, sadly, lacks the same power of the original books.

What we do have, though, is wonderful: an epic saga spanning the universe and all possible worlds in it. Surely, we couldn’t need more than that?

You can find out more about Roger Zelazny at http://www.roger-zelazny.com/