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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