It was a very long time ago, when I first made the journey to Roger Zelazny’s fantasy world in The Chronicles of Amber. It was, in fact, sometime in 1984. Why do I remember the exact year? Because I remember reading the book in the laundromat at the front of the R.V./mobile home park where I was living temporarily in my parents’ travel trailer after I started working at the Fort Worth Zoo (and 1984 was when I was there). The book was a hardback edition of the complete Chronicles — all five books in one volume — that I don’t even remember whether I owned or had borrowed from someone. I remember reading while I waited for my washer to finish, while I waited for my clothes to dry, and after I put my clean laundry away when I got back to my temporary home. I remember having massive headaches after spending hours with my eyes glued to the pages. And I remember that that is when I had to start wearing prescription lenses. Boo.
When I started re-reading the original five books, now included in a massive paperback tome that holds all TEN Amber novels, I remembered a lot more of the stories than I thought I would (except how all the conflicts were resolved). It’s always good to have a little of the original surprise at the end, even though sometimes knowing exactly how things turn out doesn’t spoil the enjoyment of re-reading a good story.
I remembered that the stories were complex, the plots convoluted, the settings complete to the smallest detail. And there were a lot of settings. Amber and its Shadows are like many other planets all layered on top of our mundane world. There are no space ships involved, but there is plenty of travel from world to world, from reality to reality. I had forgotten how much I had enjoyed the journeys.
Since I’ve learned a lot more about writing fiction in recent years, I have also been appreciating Zelazny’s story-telling abilities more this time around. I thought it might be easier to categorize things a bit. As in:
1. Characters and Point of View (POV). It’s all written in first person POV. A lot of people don’t like this. I’m not one of them. First person narrows the perspective on the story to the point that anything that surprises or mystifies the main character is going to surprise or mystify the readers. We don’t get to see inside the minds of the other characters (a style I think is often overused). All you need to know is the title of the first Amber novel — Nine Princes in Amber — to know there will be some serious family conflict going on. Seeing everything through the eyes of just one of those princes — Corwin — means you have only his experiences to go on when it comes to sorting out the good guys and bad guys, and you don’t get to find out which ones he might be wrong about until he finds out himself. I think it’s kind of cool.
2. Tension. I never really appreciated how important it is to keep the pressure on the characters at all times in order to keep moving the story forward. I used to wonder why these poor saps had to keep stumbling from disaster to catastrophe to apocalypse and back through the whole book until I learned that some people would actually stop reading if such was not the case. Really? I always had the attitude — and I don’t know where I got this — that once I started reading, I had to finish the book — no matter what. (Maybe it was kin to that parental decree that I had to eat everything on my plate, even if some of it made me gag.) And showing the tension’s effect on the character with a line like this is priceless: “A hot bath, a full meal, a bed would be very good things. But these assumed an almost mythic quality…” It’s a short little passage, but it speaks volumes about the character’s condition.
3. Setting. Nothing can beat a thorough job of world-building. A lot of fantasy novels include maps to help us locate all the story locations relative to each other as we travel through them. That would never work with Amber. Sure you could draw the mountain, Kolvir, with the palace atop it, and label places around it like Arden and Garnath, but it wouldn’t be enough. There would be no way to show all the Shadow worlds, and you couldn’t really have Amber without all its Shadows. Anyway, they’re all too fluid to restrict to one spot on a two-dimensional map. No. You have to build the map — the concept — of Amber in your head.
4. Interesting, if somewhat annoying. Like some other classics of science fiction and fantasy I’ve read recently, there are some details that seriously date the first five books. There’s a whole lotta smokin’ goin’ on. Every time they turn around, these guys are lighting up. Cigarettes, pipes, what have you. Considering the fact that Roger Zelazny died just a month past his 58th birthday, I have to assume the fictional habit was a direct mirror of his own. Too bad. He would be 73 now, if he’d lived (in fact, yesterday would have been his 73rd birthday). Who knows how far he might have been able to carry the Amber saga. I’ve only just finished re-reading the original five books, and the first chapter of the first of the second five, so I have no idea whether the conclusion to this round is the final word — I’ll just have to wait and see.
