This is kind of EZ Mode for this column, since tons and tons of bloggers out there have written about these books in exactly the same framework as I’m using here, in terms of revisting or remembering a read from when they were young. (Alan Brown’s column at Tor is particularly good and detailed.)
Since I recently did actually reread Nine Princes, though, I figure I’m as entitled as anyone to talk about the experience. I suspect my rethinking on rereading is pretty commonplace, however.
I mentioned in talking about K.J. Parker’s Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City that I enjoy smart-ass first-person narrators but that it’s a delicate balancing act, and that Heinlein’s characters like Hazel Stone and Jubal Harshaw are the archetypes that illustrate the pros and cons of that kind of character. (Though they’re not first-person narrators.) Corwin in Nine Princes in Amber is a great version of this sort of character, on the other hand.
Corwin works in this first book because he’s an unreliable narrator about his own life: he’s lost his own memory and he’s faking his way through everything. So what is wondrous and fantastic to us as readers is that way to him, and yet also not because he has some remnant sense of how to be himself even when he doesn’t know who that is. So he cons his way through talking with several siblings until a critical turn in the plot that re-establishes much of who he is for himself. Importantly, I think, that doesn’t lead to a huge info-dump. Corwin’s great and yet I think he gets less great as the books go on, but then I think everything gets less great as they progress.
The reason for that is that the scale of action is just too fucking big and too hazy by the time at the end of the first series, such that we never really get full satisfaction about how all this works. Zelazny is such an erudite, smooth-reading writer that he is able to paper over just how little world-building he’s really done. That would be fine if he just decided to go with mood and feeling, to make the Amber books entirely impressionistic and picaresque, Corwin tripping through a series of misadventures across reality. But Nine Princes establishes from the beginning a series of puzzles and mysteries that it has to resolve, and the resolution of those mysteries has to involve the revelation of Corwin’s entire universe. By the time late in the first series that Corwin knows everything (more or less) that he used to know, he’s discovering that he and his siblings actually know almost nothing. On re-reading not just this first book but the series, it feels pretty clear to me that Corwin and Zelazny are in the same boat—once the series is past re-establishing Corwin’s memory of his own life in the first two to three books, the degree to which Zelazny is sort of winging it about how this whole universe/multiverse actually works starts to become clear. (The second series, featuring Corwin’s son Merlin, makes this situation even worse—it’s a terrible muddle and I’m not going to talk about it more here except to say that I have no desire to re-read it.)
The thing about Nine Princes that I really appreciate now (and the second book The Guns of Avalon as well) that I didn’t entirely get back then is the field of references—I didn’t know what Corwin was remembering about his life on Earth, really, I didn’t get a lot of the quick-on-the-fly details about characters and situations. (For example, Corwin ends up in a reality that mirrors some European chivalric literature in the second book, and with a companion named Ganelon, and I had no idea that this was both an allusion and a clue to what was coming.) It’s a bit like the thing I’ve observed about some cartoons—if the first time you encounter the Honeymooners is the Warner Brothers cartoon about a bunch of mice, then the first time you actually see the Honeymooners, you briefly think “man, this ripped off that cartoon”. Zelazny is slinging all sorts of references out that I didn’t know as a teenager and I think, mostly, it’s much cooler when you know them even if you start to feel just a bit as if they’re part of how he papers over having not fully imagined the universe that Corwin operates in.
I guess where you feel that the most even in this first book is Amber itself. The name strikes Corwin to his heart even in his amnesiac fog, it’s set up as this amazing place, the reality at the heart of Shadow, and then when we finally get to it, what we get is a bunch of people going “Amber! The most amazing place ever!”. It smells faintly of “It’s only a model.” About all we learn about it is that it’s a kind of generic fantasy place. Everything on the way is interesting and dramatic and grand and challenging, though somewhat in a tell-and-not-show way too, but Amber itself is just a place with a court and ladies and lords and a banquet hall and a dungeon. That never really gets better in the series: Amber never earns its reputation as the most amazing place, the most real place, or even the most Orderly place that is the opposite of the Courts of Chaos.
You stick with Corwin throughout even as he gets Count-of-Monte-Cristoed with a side of having his eyes burned out, and the mystery of how his world works stays pretty compelling in this book and for the next few books. His rivalry with his brother Eric never feels especially potent to me in this book or the second one—his siblings are a very mixed lot ultimately in terms of becoming meaningful characters with some dimensionality to them.
It’s a book that diminishes fairly considerably on an adult re-read. It’s still incredibly readable and the core gimmick is such a classic example of its kind (first-person narrator who has forgotten crucial details about his life and recovers them in the course of the story) that it still makes an indelible impression. I’m much better able to appreciate the author’s various allusions and some of the texture that comes with them—but I can also see just how threadbare some of the backstage behind the main action really is.
I loved this book when I first read it, but I’d forgotten about before looking at this. Another reading project for later, even if it’s bound to disappoint now.