book review: The Courts of Chaos

by: Roger Zelazny

And so my brief sojourn in (the first part of) Amber comes to an end.  Not with a whimper or a belch, but with a flurry of color and creation and Corwin passing out while someone else Took Care of Business.  Not that that’s a bad thing- again, I like how the universe doesn’t revolve around the main character (although teeeeechnically there is now a universe that does so!) , but it’s definitely a little jarring after all the mc-focused books I read (pretty much everything, right?).

As far as the quality level of this individual book… pretty strong.  I think books 3 & 4 were possibly the strongest, book 1 the weakest and this one and book 2 falling somewhere in between.  Definitely on the ‘good’ side of things, but just maybe not the best in the series.  So many things unanswered!  I’d be frustrated if I didn’t know there as a second Amber series to read.  Of course, Corwin is AWOL in those books (from what I remember) and they follow his son… who I’m not interested in in the least, but hopefully they’ll involve the rest of the Amber cast, each of which I find pretty fascinating.

I would have liked to actually see what happened to Oberon.  I would have liked to understand why Dara made the decision she did (seriously, if the only reason is that he killed that one dude, I’m going to have to put that down as the weakest bit of writing in the entire series and, somewhat weak in general but I figured I’m just missing something).  I wish there was a prequel book about Oberon’s flight from Chaos and whatever weird tryst Dworkin had with the Unicorn (seriously… if nothing else I want to know wtf the unicorn is to be as powerful as it is)…

So much more mileage remains.  I wonder if Zelazny intended to continue the series after this (as he did), or if that was a publisher/fan pressure kind of thing?

Annnnnnnnyway:

THREE AND A HALF STARS

A classic ending to a classic tale.  Leaves you (or me, at least) with more questions than answers.

[edit: If you’re curious about the various literary allusions and other smartsy reading stuff and junk, you might be interested in this article.  Watch out for the HUGE SPOILER for the ending of the second Amber series though.  Yeesh.    Best read after/if you’ve read the other series.]