I love it when the hero wakes up with amnesia at the beginning of the story. We all have our little weaknesses, and that's one of mine. Starting out this way does not guarantee that I will continue to enjoy the story as it develops, but at least it captures my interest during the first chapter. In Zelazny's case, the narrator's plight captured my interest and the writing style kept it.
Our hero suddenly wakes up in a hospital bed with his legs in plaster casts. There are vague images in his mind of nurses poking needles in his arm every time he started to wake up before this. However, he feels pretty healthy at the moment, and some quick experimentation reveals he can walk across the room without collapsing in agony. A nurse enters at that point and wants to give him another shot. He assures her he is prepared to get along just fine without it. Her insistence on "doctor's orders" makes no discernible impression upon him. She leaves. Clearly one of the great rugged individualists, he removes a metal strut from the bed and breaks open his own plaster casts (as well as removing a bandage from around his head and others on miscellaneous parts of his body). A big beefy fellow comes in with a hypo in one hand and insists it's time for his shot. Our hero states he has the legal right to refuse medical care if he doesn't want it, and the beefy guy ignores that statement and advances with the needle, so our hero beats him up and takes his clothes. He seeks out the office of the man who is evidently the administrator of this private hospital and the fellow tries to pull a gun on him. It's enough to make a man wonder if he's in a legitimate hospital or a private prison.
After dealing with the gun problem, he gets the administrator to show him his own record. It appears that his name is Carl Corey, and after suffering a bad accident he was checked into this facility by his sister, Mrs. Evelyn Flaumel, of such-and-such an address. None of this data rings any bells in his mind, but he decides to go pay his Dear Sister a little visit, having nothing better to do that he can recall at the moment. He rather suspects that she ordered the hospital to keep him heavily sedated and thus harmless for as long as possible, and he can't help wondering what makes her so afraid of him. (He eventually will learn that this little episode was fairly typical of the high degree of trust and affection he can expect to receive from other family members who catch him at a vulnerable moment.)
So far it could be the opening sequence of a "normal" adventure novel, but after he arrives at his sister's place things start to get distinctly strange. She assumes he knows exactly what's going on and has a clever agenda in coming to face her as an equal. After all, when your brother knocks on the front door of your mansion and starts exchanging barbed comments with you, you don't immediately assume he's suffering from amnesia and running a bluff.
He does a remarkably good job of keeping his comments as vague as possible to let her read anything she likes into his cryptic responses to her statements and queries, and she never realizes he doesn't have a clue what they're talking about or where the rest of their obviously dysfunctional family resides. He does gather that his real name is Corwin, hers is Florimel (Flora for short), and his good old brother Eric is his worst enemy (in his family, that's a perfectly normal combination). At one point when she is out of the house, he naturally searches her desk (hey, wouldn't you?) and finds a deck of tarot cards concealed in a secret drawer. The ones he calls Greater Trumps are illustrated with excellent hand-painted portraits of thirteen people. As he looks at each one, he remembers the name and something of the personality of each of the nine men and four women depicted (he recognizes himself as one of the nine men). Somehow he knows that all of them are siblings in the same family . . . but it also seems to him that a few people are missing from the deck, although he can't name them.
But then their brother Random turned up pursued by five or six people with guns who launch a deadly assault when they arrive, with never a word of greeting first (I hate it when people neglect the basic courtesies before trying to kill you). I use the word "people" somewhat loosely. Naturally bloodshot eyes, grayish flesh, extra joints in their fingers, sharp spurs coming out of the backs of their hands, too many teeth in their mouths looking like the fangs of a predator. After this little nuisance has been eliminated and the corpses are being examined, Random says as if it were self-evident, "They crawled out of the Shadows, all right." Our hero nods brightly as if he had a clue what they were talking about. He is also made a bit curious by the discovery that during the fight he instinctively picked up a huge overstuffed chair and tossed it thirty feet to smash an enemy. His brother and sister don't seem to have noticed anything peculiar about this.
All of the above happened in approximately the first twenty-five percent of the novel, and it was a short novel at that (first installment of a five-part storyline). Zelazny was determined to give us a nice build-up to the later revelations of just what sort of family Corwin came from, what their special abilities happened to be, how the internal family politics were going lately, what sort of world they came from, and so on and so forth. Around the midpoint of the novel, Corwin gets his memory back - or most of it. It appears that he spent the last few centuries on our own world (his family can walk from any world they can imagine to any other, but this backwater we live in wasn't his idea), usually working in one military outfit or another, but the magical process which finally restores most of his long-term memories doesn't do so well with the things that were happening immediately before the car accident which put him in the hospital. He tends to blame his brother Eric for that little mishap, on the grounds that it must have been an assassination attempt and Eric and he had always hated one another, but this is a biased suspicion rather than being based on anything resembling hard-and-fast evidence. Theories and accusations regarding the liability for that car crash are going to be tossed back and forth throughout the series, actually, so brace yourselves!
Corwin and the others are the children of King Oberon of Amber, but it appears that Oberon disappeared abruptly from the royal palace in Amber several years ago, and even in a family of immortals (or near-immortals? Oberon looks older than his children do) that causes people to wonder if his job is now vacant. Eric has recently placed himself on the throne that dear old dad used to occupy, not yet calling himself "king" (just in case dear old dad made a sudden comeback) but definitely acting like one. Several other siblings have seen fit to accept this solution to a power vacuum that could otherwise become a multi-sided civil war.
The intricacies of the family politics and the details of their inherent magical abilities and other resources are fascinating, but of course it's Zelazny's style that really makes this memorable. For one thing, he can get quite poetic in describing little jaunts the narrator makes from one reality to another, with the shifting landscape and odd colors of sky and so forth. On the other hand, he (generally) avoids having Corwin utter archaic, high-faluting dialogue, favoring something more reminiscent of a rather terse (but grammatical) sardonic action hero in today's popular literature. There are exceptions, but they aren't necessarily successful.
Some novelists are at their best in the first person, filtering everything through the perceptions of a single interesting character with whom we come to identify, and Zelazny is one of them. (For your information, other novelists who generally strike me as being best in the first person include John D. MacDonald and Robert A. Heinlein.) Corwin is an interesting though not always admirable man. Members of the royal family of Amber are a power-hungry and self-centered bunch, and Corwin definitely has a lot of that left in him even after his lengthy exile on our own planet. But he has a sense of humor too, and there are hints here and there that he is actually capable of empathizing with other people upon occasion, even when he has nothing to gain by doing so. I wish to assure you that these hints will gradually develop into more as the series progresses, or else you might be ambivalent about the prospect of reading four more book narrated by this guy when you finish the first. But as is, I consider this one of the best multi-volume fantasy storylines I have ever read, as long as you heed my words and quit after finishing the first five-part series. There was a sequel series (also five books long) years later, which couldn't hold a torch to the original.
Recommended:
