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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