Review: The Courts of Chaos

The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve been a little hard on the recent volumes of this series, but this one delivers. It’s not just that this one is the climax of the plotting and planning. Nor is it that, given the clear structure of a good-guy/bad-guy showdown, it avoids some of the loose narrative of the third and fourth volumes.

Instead it’s that this one culminates in a profound strangeness. It builds on the unsettling imagery and metaphysics of Amber, taking it to another level of experiential philosophy. This one doesn’t merely tell a story. It goes beyond that to imply a whole new way of imagining the real, but it does so in the pure speculative joy that opened Nine Princes in Amber.

I may not be making much sense with all that. More concretely, what I most enjoyed here was Corwin’s passage through chaos to his – SPOILER – ultimately unsuccessful assault on the Courts of Chaos themselves. There are plenty of sword fights and hellrides and speculations about whodunit, but the highlight of this comes when Corwin meets a philosophically minded bird who feels all is vanity, or encounters a sentient tree who marks the boundary between the order of Amber and the chaos from which it was born. It’s when he’s venturing down a strange road – strange even by Zelazny’s standards – and the very nature of conflict gets overturned. Brand tries to waylay him a couple other times, but otherwise he runs into only those things that feel as if they are somehow allegories, but it’s never clear what they’d be allegories of. What do those leprechauns represent? Why are strangers giving him comfort even as he threatens their capital? It feels as if there ought to be an explanation, but there’s a narrative power in all of that getting subsumed by chaos – both the named chaos of the adversaries and the implicit chaos of a story that edges along the boundary of no longer making sense.

It’s a strange quest and an even stranger narrating of it, but there’s a combination of philosophy, play of language, and fringing away from the conventions of genre that make it spectacular. I’ve flown through most of this Amber stuff, but this makes it all worthwhile and more. This is the top-notch work I remembered even as I’d forgotten the details of reading it more than 20 years ago.

The ending is satisfying, giving us a sense that Corwin may have learned something about himself and about the nature of his family, but hardly rubbing it in. He more or less says directly that the motivations that drove him early have been exhausted. He hated Eric more than he craved the throne, and now there’s nothing left. He’s diminished by his victory, left empty as he stands at the precipice of being happy.

All of that is sophisticated yet always in the service of fun. This may have aged a little over the last couple decades, but it still works for me. I’m sure I’ll take a break before I give the second five of these a shot. I recall those as being pretty good, though not as good as the original Amber.

Having revisited here, I can’t quite claim this work stands as the very best that the fantasy genre has to offer, but it’s not far behind. I read it now, in part, to get rid of the taste of the bulging newer release I worked through earlier in the month. It was good timing, and I’m reminded that there has to be a better way to explore the genre than the current model of the 800-page beast.


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Review: The Hand of Oberon

The Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In Zelazny’s marriage of generic forms, the first two of this series mix fantasy with noir and the third mixes it with the closed-door-mystery premise of the cozy. I’m far enough along with the final one (and have some memories of 20 years ago) to get the impression that it’s a picaresque or quest: Corwin has to go on a trek to save the world.

So that leaves this one, the fourth. While Zelazny writes with much of the same strange mania as before, this particular volume is really a sort of grab-bag. Within the scope of the whole five-volume sequence, it’s crucial. As a book by itself, though, it’s sloppily plotted. We get more repetitions than elsewhere – more asides that catch us up on things that took place in the earlier books – and we have a series of short quests. The first part, for instance, has Corwin and Random discovering the depths of the true pattern; then they’re back. We have other quick jaunts, too. There’s the rediscovery of Dworkin. There’s the battle with Benedict. There are rotating suspects in Bleys and Fiona that depend on our caring more about some of these minor characters than we have reason to.

As a bottom line, then, I think this is easily the weakest of the original five volumes…until the end.

SPOILER: When Oberon reveals himself at the end as having masqueraded as Ganelon for the course of the books that have come before, it accomplishes two key things. First, it removes a growing complaint I’d had which was that Ganelon seemed too good to be true. He figured things out too quickly, and he’d even beaten someone up (Gerard?) which no mortal creature should have been able to do.

Second, it’s the kind of reveal that reminds us that Zelazny really does know what he’s doing. It’s clear he’s had this in mind the whole time, that he isn’t simply making things up on the fly. It’s not just that Ganelon has shown up and helped out; it’s that Oberon has always been backing Corwin, has chosen him early in the conflict and sought to test him to be sure. There’s a subtler coherence to the series than it had begun to seem. There is, I say in pointed fashion, a pattern, one that, within the books, Oberon has drawn.

So, I like all that, and I am renewed in my hurry to finish this. The series as a whole may not quite be as excellent as memory had it, but it’s still got some surprises.


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Review: Sign of the Unicorn

Sign of the Unicorn by Roger Zelazny
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Part of what makes Zelazny memorable is that, in Nine Princes in Amber and The Guns of Avalon at least, he marries the fantasy genre to noir. We get a narrator embroiled in a world rife with evil – a kind of “mean streets of Avalon” – and then we follow him as he makes choices that are only contingently moral.

In Sign of the Unicorn, though, he’s marrying fantasy to what I’ve heard called “the cozy.” That is, this is less about finding a way to bridge to Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler than it is to finding one to Agatha Christie. This is, in other words, a ‘locked room’ mystery set in a fantasy world. Someone has killed one of the princes of Amber, and we know it had to be another of the princes. That means Corwin has to play detective in the narrow sense of the word.

Zelazny still has the chops to pull it off, and this remains a fun and quick work, but I’m experiencing that wistful feeling that this isn’t quite as good as I remember it.

I’m going to keep going, not just forensically to see if it gets better or worse, but because the whole of the narrative still grabs me. I still believe there is something more appealing in this more innocent way of publishing the genre. Maybe the first Amber books would get printed today as a single door-stopper, but this reminds me of the joy of being 12 years old and scanning the shelves at the Granville Times bookstore – the shelf of thin new paperbacks below the stair that shot back upstairs. I never knew then what I would find, and it was always exciting when something I was following – some series I’d already begun – spun out a new one.


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Review: The Return of the Native

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this years ago and remember loving it, but I’ve gotten it tangled in my memory with The Mayor of Casterbridge. How I could have forgotten Eustacia Vye I don’t know, but it speaks to how stupid I was as a young man.

This is not Tess. But that’s OK since, as I see it, nothing is Tess, which is, for me, the finest British novel of the 19th century. Instead, this is an inspired look at thwarted passion. It may not be Hardy at his very best, but even second-level Hardy is towering. I got the chance last month to pay respect to him at Westminster Abbey, and it’s good to have him speaking back to me now through this great work.

If you want to pick at this, you could acknowledge that some of the literary seams show. There are a couple contrived moments that keep this from the excellence of Tess – in particular the coincidences that have characters just missing chances to explain misunderstandings. Eustacia just misses a letter that would clarify things with Clem; Mrs. Yeobright arrives with her peace offering at the one moment that might compromise Eustacia; Diggory has a capacity for winning at cards when he must. Still, the effect of those contrivances is not contrived.

These are characters in a beautiful but barren landscape who suspect there are grand possibilities in life but cannot quite see them from the heights around them. Clem is noble, with a vision of improving the education of the unfortunate around him. He’s naïve, but I certainly forgive him. He’s read books as a young man, and he’s found it’s likely he can make his fortune. He wants more; he wants to bring the best of the outside world to the heath.

Damon is a shyster. He’s taken all he can from the Wessex he knows, and, once he gets his inheritance, he decides he’d rather feed on the opportunities of a bigger city.

Diggory is weird, but he’s a marvel, too. In his redness, he represents both the soil around them and the potential for that soil to hold spirits greater than the forces of Modernity that draw the other characters.

Tamsin is, well, a too sweet Victorian stereotype. I’d think of her as a flaw in the novel except that she works so well as a counterpoint to Eustacia.

And then there’s Eustacia. She’s worth the price of admission alone. She is passionate, not just for the ideas that grab Clem but for the physical world around her. She is as sexual a creature as I can imagine from this era. The opening scene of her lighting the largest and most enduring bonfire is just perfect. She burns brighter than others herself, and that means she’ll have to consume herself more quickly as well.

I love Hardy for his romanticism, but I love him more for the cynicism underneath it. This is a man who once wrote a poem about the Titanic in which he rooted for the iceberg. (“The Meeting of the Twain.”) He gives us characters who hope for more than they have, then he gives us a character who, in the intense physicality of her passion wants even more than that. Then he takes them away. If you stare into a fire and then look at the dark, it’s darker than it was before. That’s how it is with Eustacia. Once she’s extinguished, the romantic possibilities of the novel seem all the darker and less available.


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Review: The Guns of Avalon

The Guns of Avalon by Roger Zelazny
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I know exactly why I read this one: since I’m immersed in my own writing, it’s been hard for me to read contemporary fiction. That’s meant a split between lose-yourself-in-fantasy stuff and some of the great Victorian novels I wanted to get to after my London trip. In this case, I needed a palate-cleanser after the way-too-long Robin Hobb trilogy I just finished up. I wanted to see what it took to write in that genre with an eye toward tightness.

Zelazny challenged the fantasy genre by crossing it with noir, and his effort still strikes me as a promising way to go. Nine Princes in Amber, which I re-read a couple years ago, is genre-redefining, and this, the second Amber book, picks up right where it left off.

As I come back to this, I’m struck that the generic difference between Amber and some of the door-stopper ones I’ve been reading is less wide than I thought. It’s true that the Amber books all clock in around 220 pages, meaning that the first five add up to about forty percent of Hobb’s trilogy (though I could use other examples as well). It’s less true, though, that each is really a 225-page book. Instead, each feels a lot like a chapter in the larger serial. You could not, for instance, get much out of this one if you read it separately.

As a result, I get the impression the first five Amber books, if they were written today, would be published as a single 1200-page monster. I understand that for marketing reasons – if you can get someone to buy one $30 paperback instead of five $9.99 paperbacks (and save the shipping, storage, and printing costs that come with that) – you probably make more in the long run, Plus, given the fashion of the genre, you provide something that looks magisterial, that looks like the sort of esoteric thing you could get lost in.

In any case, this starts a bit slowly, but by the end it’s is nearly as much fun as the original Amber. That concept is one of the strongest I know in fantasy fiction. There is a place called Amber, the one real world, and everything else is shadow. Some shadows are close to Amber and look a lot like the real place, while others are farther away and distorted. Like his many siblings, Corwin can manipulate shadow, can change one or two elements of a world as he walks through it, so that he can reach almost any place he chooses. He is, for the many creatures he meets in shadow, a kind of god. There’s a dash of Neil Gaiman in all of this, a reminder that it’s possible to repurpose old myths, but I find this decidedly more fun than any particular Gaiman I know.

Corwin remains determined to crown himself king of Amber, and he has a secret plan: he’s discovered in shadow – largely in our own familiar world – a substance that functions as gunpowder in Amber. (Conventional explosives don’t work there; instead, by chance, a jeweler’s cleaning powder does.) That’s just the start of the fantasy-noir convention: our protagonist has to get a gun. Along the way he meets a femme fatale, and he makes a series of ethically compromised decisions. It’s all there, a fusion of genres, but it works as well as it does because Zelazny never loses his sense of humor and because he never digresses to the point of losing his narrative thread.

This wraps up with a genuine conclusion. SPOILER: with Eric dead in defense of Amber, Corwin does get to be king. With the mysterious Dara having played him for a fool and learned to walk the pattern, learned the skills to manipulate shadow, he ends the book with a perhaps even greater challenge before him. He rules Amber at last, but now he has to defend it.

I love the creativity and the invention, and I’ll probably hit the next one right away. It’s been more than 25 years since I first read them, and – unlike almost everything else in the genre – they seem to hold up.


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Review: Assassin's Quest

Assassin's Quest by Robin Hobb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I guess it’s a reflection of the low-bar I have in mind for “high fantasy” work that this strikes me overall as pretty solid work. I continue to be impressed with Hobb’s ability to paint a scene from her imagined world with the kind of relevant detail that makes it seem to come to life. Even at her worst – and this is the worst of the four Hobb books I’ve read – she has a gift for solid writing that puts her in the forefront of this genre.

I have long complained about the slowness that grips her work – I can’t believe a good editor couldn’t cut out 30 to 50 percent – but until now she has avoided the writerly sin that plagues others I’ve read in this vein. (I’m tempted to call it “Jordaning” after Robert Jordan who swelled his promising Wheel of Time stuff from what should have been a 1200-page book – still quite long – to 12 novels of 800-1000 pages each. Yeah, I jumped off that wheel, but not without the frustration that he had a shot at something as excellent as Dune, the first one, if only he’d had a clue how to stay focused.)

That is, she pursues tangents to the central story line that serve little purpose in moving the plot forward but that certainly thicken the spine of the published book. Here, she sends Fitz off on a “fool’s errand” to kill Regal. It takes up about the first quarter of the book, and it proves both fruitless and pointless. SPOILER: By the end of the book, we learn that keeping Regal alive and skilling him into submission is a far better revenge and a far more responsible move. Well before the end, we discover that Fitz should be on his way to find and serve Verity; anything else is self- and nation-destructive. I can see that from page one, and Fitz sees it eventually, but we have to go through 200 pages before he gets it.

That kind of digression – and it’s the longest but not the only, there are all sorts of 20-page experiences where they explore inconsequential places or build-up to events that aren’t worth the attention when they do occur – hurts the narrative, but it also hurts the premise. I don’t enjoy feeling “Jordaned” (in one book, he spent hundreds of pages marching an army across his continent only to have them get to the end and turn around – and they were an army so much less powerful than the forces of the world that it never made sense in the first place why they were involved) as a reader, but, more subtly, I find myself questioning the otherwise dependable perspective of Fitz. I like that he’s flawed, that he doesn’t understand other people and that he lets his passions get him into trouble, but I trust he is still bottom-line smart enough to get the big things right. In the first quarter of this, though, he’s just so foolishly caught up in his plan that I want nothing to do with him. If I hadn’t already invested 1100+ pages in him, I’d have bailed. (I might have bailed anyway if not for Hobbs’s generally fine writing at the basic sentence level.)

Alongside that core flaw there is the further frustration that this becomes increasingly a kind of “Deliverance meets the Lord of the Rings.” Fitz or Night Eyes endures terrible beatings all the time. We get arrows in the back, beatings to unconsciousness, and grievous loss of blood and strength. Our main characters come within millimeters of death every couple hundred pages, but they always rally. Hobb tells us about their suffering and maiming in gruesome slowness, but then, without any comparable attention to their recovery, they pull off feats of deep endurance the next time they’re called to do so.

I’ve led mostly with the complaints. In the end, I do think Hobbs’s vision has some compelling elements. SPOILER: Her notion of what it means to wake a dragon grows thoughtfully out of the theme she’s been pursuing throughout the trilogy: the challenge to find a way to connect with others. The magics of the skill and the wit accomplish some of that, but the work of opening up to someone else is itself a powerful magic. (The scene where he connects with Kettle, opening the burn of her skill-mind, is one to think about. In the end, beyond the magics in play, Fitz has to be able to hear a frightened other in order to bring her around.) One wakens a dragon then, by giving up ones entire humanity. You put your life – not your strength but your memories, joys, and hopes – into something inert and that quickens it. The process isn’t all positive. It means dying. It means, as we see from the resting place of the older dragons, turning eventually to a kind of stone that hungers for more life.

(A further SPOILER complaint: since it turns out to be so easy to wake the other dragons – to put blood on them and use some fire or some fairly simple combination – why does Verity have to sacrifice himself to become a new one? I get that it makes for a better story, but it’s a narrative clumsiness Hobb falls into. As a free editorial suggestion, wouldn’t it work to require a new dragon to wake the old ones?)

Anyway, it staggers me to think there are another nine or twelve after this one. I’ve enjoyed these three enough to finish them – and that’s no small matter given how long and sometimes tendentious they are – but I can’t see going on. I might take 15 minutes some time to read a few reviews and see what I missed, but I’m done. It’s a shame that Hobb, who really does seem more talented than the others in this genre, is invited to write such long works. I feel as if her work, and the whole genre, would be better served with tighter writing and a commitment to better editing.


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Review: Royal Assassin

Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ll repeat my earlier conclusion in this, the second of Hobb’s Farseer trilogy: after George R.R. Martin, she is the most capable person writing in this slice of the fantasy genre. She has a clear vision of the world she’s describing, she has the ability to move a plot forward (though, given the constraints of the way the genre is marketed, she does so very slowly), and she has a sense of deep detail. When you read her stuff, you get a sense of the very specific economy of the seven duchies. You see what it means to run a stable, to make and market your scented candles, or to learn the hard lessons of how to fight. Many of her competitors try, but they fall far short of what she accomplishes. She runs on, but she does so in a careful survey of the world she’s invented.

On top of that, in this volume particularly, she is using her “system of magic” (a term I don’t like since it treats something potentially wondrous like an algebra problem) to explore a legitimate, human question: to what extent are we “selves” in the sense of being locked in our own experience, and to what extent are we connected to others who are sorting out what it means to be alive.

One of the magics in play here, the wit, is precisely that. It’s an extra sense that allows you to know what animals are experiencing. In its extreme form, it means “bonding” to an animal, making an alliance with a creature very different from yourself and thereafter seeing the world through two sets of senses.

Hobb is at her best and most compelling here when she brings that material out. The scenes where Fitz comes to bond with his wolf, Night Eyes, are among the best. Hobb avoids the easy way of describing it, avoids the notion that getting to see through a wolf’s eyes is somehow an addition to oneself. Instead, she makes clear that it exacts a price. It’s too much like love, too close to giving ones full self over, to be something that is merely empowering.

We get the voice of Burrich who knows to fear the wit, who knows the potential for it to turn a man into an animal. Fitz insists he’s wrong, but we see enough to know that Burrich has a point. Giving that much of yourself to anyone – even in the more conventional sense of dedicating oneself to king or country – is somehow wrong. I almost used the word “sinful,” but that’s not quite right. The concept is more fundamental, more a matter of deep gut instinct than any larger system of ethics.

We get a parallel concern in the way ‘the skill’ works. At its best, in the hands of Prince Verity, it allows someone to send his or her strength to others. (It also allows someone to beguile another, but Verity makes clear that such magic isn’t to his taste, even as he spends much of the book practicing it.) It lets you give of yourself to others in ways that simultaneously deplete you. For Verity, it’s also about love, loving his subjects, but it’s wearing him out.

So, with those kinds of ideas in play and the rich detail that Hobb gives, this middle book in the trilogy sustains the strong work of the first book. I can’t entirely forgive what seems like unnecessary slowness, but I did find myself caught up in the action as Fitz found himself going up against Regal and his coterie.

If you don’t care for the genre – and there is enough silliness inherent in it that I get your concern – this isn’t the one to start with. If you’ve enjoyed Game of Thrones, though, this is better than any of the dozens of door-stopper imitators and wannabes I’m aware of.


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Review: Dr. Wortle's School

Dr. Wortle's School by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'm a big Trollope fan. I think the Warden is one of the great works of the Victorian era (or, really, any era), and I have enjoyed some of the bigger ones like Barchester Towers and The Eustace Diamonds a lot. So, as part of my first trip to London, I thought I'd try a new one.

I'd always understood that Trollope is eerily consistent, that just as he sat down and wrote every day, he also maintained a consistent level of excellence throughout his career. This one is very late, though, and all I can think to say about it is that it's Trollope jumping the shark.

For starters, there's something formulaic about this. We get a romance as a secondary plot, but it feels like a fill-in-the-blank exercise. Our sort-of protagonist, Dr. Wortle, has a daughter who's not only pure but blandly obedient. When her "lover" expresses interest in her, all she can think to say is that she's never thought of him in that way. She's a perfect Victorian type -- outside of playing tennis with the young man, she's shown him no interest and merely waited to be acted upon. There's no spark at all to their "affair"; instead, it just seems to fill space in a largely empty novel.

I gave it a shot in the first place because the introduction by John Halperin insisted that it creates and explores a profound ethical situation: what happens when an individual suspects that the majority of people in a culture are wrong in their certainty that someone else is at fault. (I also gave it a shot for its great opening line, "The Rev. Jeffrey Wortle, D.D., was a man much esteemed by others, -- and by himself.")

The trouble is, there's nothing unsubtle about that situation. Dr. Wortle's assistant head of school, Mr. Peacock, has accidentally married a woman whose husband may be alive. Or he may be dead. In any case, Peacock has acted only in entirely above board ways. He's never set out to deceive anyone, and his offense -- marrying a woman whose first husband was a drunk and who abandoned her -- seems not merely dated but a strawman crime as well.

It's an undramatic dramatic setting and then, to compound all the other narrative sins, it spends much of the second half with Mr. Peacock traversing the United States to find the proof he needs of his wife's ex-husband's death. Trollope is good -- at his best he's one of the all-time greats -- but he has no conception of how to describe an American cowboy. Imagine, for instance, Mr. Peacock finding himself in a near knife fight; it's like Downton Abbey working in a brief mafia plot.

There are still some wonderful flashes of verbal economy, sentences like that first one that capture a top-notch mind in the midst of moving a story forward, but the overall structure here falls two or three full notches below Trollope at his best.

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