Roger Zelazny (1937–1995)

I went into this book with pretty low expectations. I’d disliked the author’s Lord of Light quite a lot. I did think A Night in the Lonesome October was cute, but nothing special. I think my reaction to this book leaned more toward the latter, but I liked it better than I feared I would and it’s less than 200 pages so it was a quick read.

The setting was initially more modern than I expected, set I guess around the time the book was published in 1970. We’re introduced to the main character, Corwin, as he wakes up in a hospital with no memories of who he is or how he got there, and it seems he’s being kept against his will. Through a combination of pretending to know more than he does and convenient intuition, he manages to get away and find allies. The actual plot doesn’t take off until a good ways into the book, so I don’t want to spoil it.

I never felt any great investment in Corwin or any of the other characters, but I remained moderately interested in him throughout the book and the plot held my attention pretty well. The amnesia trope got a little frustrating to me in the beginning because I had trouble buying into all of Corwin’s convenient intuitions. In retrospect it might be believable, but it didn’t feel that way at the time I was reading those parts. I was curious about what was going on though, so that helped to hold my attention, and then the story became more interesting to me further on, although it did have some slow spots.

This story isn’t very satisfying by itself. It doesn’t end on a true cliffhanger, but the main plot is definitely not resolved and there are a lot of open questions. I might have given in to the temptation to keep reading if I’d had it in the omnibus format, but I just had this as a single volume and I don’t feel a burning desire to read more of the series so I don’t plan to seek it out. I’m rating it at 3.5 stars and rounding down to 3 on Goodreads.… (mais)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/nine-black-doves-volume-5-the-collected-stories-...

The penultimate in the complete collection of Zelazny’s short fiction, bringing together stories published between 1979 and 1990. Huge Zelazny fan that I am, I must record that I had read all of the stories before – more than half of them are in the 1989 collection Frost and Fire, though I have mislaid my copy of Author’s Choice #27 which had two of the more obscure ones. The books also includes Zelazny’s poetry, which to be honest is not all that special, and several treatments and sketches for unmade films and unwritten books.

But there are a couple of points that made me glad to have bought this. The first is that the text of the Hugo-winning “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai” is in fact illustrated by the relevant 24 woodcuts from Hokusai’s famous series. It’s only monochrome but it makes a big difference to your appreciation of the story. Also, Christopher Kovacs’ detailed chronology of what was going on in Zelazny’s life in the years from 1982 to 1990 is illuminating. Amusingly, Michael Whelan agreed to do the stunning cover art for the collection after discovering that one of his other pieces had been ripped off without credit or payment for an earlier Zelazny book.… (mais)

This is the seventh Amber novel by Zelazny, and the second in the follow-up five-book sequence about Corwin's son Merlin. In this book, Merlin, also called Merle, escapes the prison where his 'friend' Luke stowed him - at the end of previous book, Luke was revealed to be the son of Brand, the psychotic Amberite who tried to destroy the others in the original series. He is seeking revenge for his father, who the others had no choice but to kill, but it seems he's mixed-up because although he was responsible for the first few assassination attempts against Merle, committed every 30th April over about 8 years, he apparently stopped and someone else, possibly his mother, took over later. Merle discovers in this volume that various odd characters who approached him in book 1 are actually people who have been possessed by an entity who claims to want to protect him. That entity finally breaks cover and agrees to an exchange of information, but as Merlin insists on a quid pro quo, the sequence where they laboriously trade snippets is very tedious.

The plot of the present volume is rambling in the extreme. Zelazny could obviously write - I loved a section of description where Merlin walks down by the docks en route to a restaurant - but seemed here to be going through the motions plot-wise. A lot happens including blow-by-blow fight sequences which I found confusing and also unconvincingly detailed for someone caught up in the adrenaline of a fight, various people try to kill Merle and he spends a lot of time discussing who this could be and also refusing to confide in people, including his uncle Random, now King of Amber, who might be able to help him. Yet he naively trusts Luke who has admitted to making attempts on his life and appears to continue to have his own agenda. A lot of characters arrive and depart, almost on a revolving door basis, and don't add much to the story, and more are introduced in passing - e.g. two more siblings of his fathers turn up in the form of Trumps (the cards the royal family use to contact each other) whom I believe were mentioned in the first series as being thought dead long before Corwin was born - and I would guess these characters probably feature in later volumes. There are sudden rather jarring flashbacks to Merlin's upbringing at the Courts of Chaos where he had terrible fights with a person who hated him for no apparent reason his brother and it seems pretty obvious that the shape-shifting sorcerer who trails him in this volume and eventually attacks him must be that person, yet he doesn't draw the obvious inference even when he thinks back to how this person behaved. Instead he is unable to work out who might be trying to kill him, despite the fact that this person tried at least twice when they were growing up, once by trying to shoot him in the back.

It is also far too 'easy' for Merle compared to his father - in the earlier story, Corwin was enough of a superhero: he had the ability to travel through Shadow, that is, from world to world, was a master swordsman, had above human healing powers, an extended lifespan (when banished to our Earth, he lived there for hundreds of our years), and could use the Trumps - special cards developed by his grandfather - some of these abilities developed through walking the Pattern, an energy grid used to bring the worlds into being originally. All these powers were shared with his siblings and made his family powerful enough, in my opinion. But Merlin also inherits powers from his mother Dara who is one of the Chaos party, so he can use something called the Logrus to create spells including an invisibility one, and he can shape-shift into other forms including that of an apparently fearsome beast (he uses this ability to best a demon at one point though it isn't shown as the chapter ends and the next one switches to after he has done so). He can also reach into Shadow and pull out new clothes whenever he needs them or a sword or just about anything else he needs. Frankly, this makes him far too boring a character and his general naive stupidity doesn't endear him to the reader either.

The book ends as its predecessor did - Merlin is now a prisoner somewhere, this time in a very surreal placeLewis Carroll's Wonderland. With the lack of real character development or a half-decent plot, I can't believe it would be worth the bother of tracking down the final three volumes of this (I have only the first two) as there is no real incentive to read on.… (mais)