Stumbling across your brother's corpse can be such a nuisance. Corwin doesn't pretend his heart is broken, because he has plenty of brothers and this one had, until recently, been one of the strongest supporters of Corwin's lifelong rival, their brother Eric. But it is rather embarrassing, all things considered.

Warning: These "novels" I'm reviewing are not five individual stories which happen to have the same narrator (Corwin); they're one long storyline which just happens to have been divided up into five installments. (Let us all remember that J.R.R. Tolkien originally wrote the Lord of the Rings as one big book manuscript, and it was an editor who insisted upon splitting it up into a three-part trilogy so the cover price on any single volume wouldn't be so frighteningly large.) Ideally you shouldn't even be looking at this review unless you have already read Nine Princes in Amber and The Guns of Avalon and are wondering if you ought to press forward with the third volume of the series. I recognize that we do not live in an ideal world, but I swear I won't be offended if you quit reading at this point and run off to the library to find the first two books and read them before coming back to read the rest of this review. Honest! End of Warning.

We now return to our regularly scheduled review.

In the first book of this series, Eric (noticing that their father, King Oberon, hadn't been heard from for many years) finally held his own coronation, having lined up a fair number of supporters in Amber first, including at least two or three other members of the royal family. Eric and Corwin were bitter rivals during the first two books (Eric was the one who tossed Corwin in the dungeon after capturing him), but Eric finally died in battle at the end of the second book, and ironically Corwin showed up on the scene with a few hundred riflemen just in time to abandon his plan of attacking Eric himself, instead offering to join forces with the rest of the family and beat off a vicious assault by mysterious outsiders from some distant corner of the multiverse. Dying of his wounds, Eric handed Corwin the mysterious Jewel of Judgment and whispered some secret instructions on how to attune it to yourself so you could make full use of its unique powers.

As we open up the third volume, it's been less than a week since the previous volume, and everyone is walking on eggshells. Corwin received the Jewel from Eric, which is tantamount to being proclaimed his heir (their father, Oberon, always used the Jewel as a symbol of his authority during the many centuries of his reign), but has not yet dared to say, "Let's have me officially coronated!" On the other hand, there are only three hundred functional rifles in all of Amber, and Corwin has the loyalty of the men who carry them. Everyone else is stuck with medieval weaponry, so no one has overtly challenged Corwin's authority to give orders on routine day-to-day administrative matters around the Palace. But all of his family have certain magical abilities that could complicate the issue, so he can't count on the rifles to intimidate everyone into kissing his foot if he tries to put a crown on his own head.

Just before the first chapter opens, Corwin received a handwritten message from brother Caine asking for a secret meeting at the Grove of the Unicorn at such-and-such a time. When he arrived at the Grove, he found an ugly semihuman creature standing over the freshly dead body of Caine. Corwin tried to capture the creature, but finally had to kill him when the guy wouldn't surrender. Searching Caine's body, he found a handwritten message from Corwin (at least that was the name written at the bottom) asking Caine to meet him secretly at the Grove of the Unicorn . . . and suddenly realized he had been set up. Someone was having a field day forging messages! Caine had been one of the strongest supporters of Eric's regime from day one, and had never gotten along very well with Corwin even in the old days (hundreds of years ago) when they all lived in the Palace in apparent harmony, with their daddy running things, and now he had mysteriously been murdered while keeping a secret rendezvous "with Corwin." It didn't take a genius to figure out what conclusion most of the other surviving family members were likely to reach -- Corwin was slaughtering people he saw as obstacles to his claiming the throne!

As I said in my title, this is the book where Zelazny really starts to fill some gaps in the backstory, things that had been happening without Corwin's knowledge before the series started, and which he never had the chance to inquire about until now, what with joining with another outcast brother to build an army to attack Amber, losing, being in a dungeon for almost four years, escaping, regaining his old strength, and then secretly putting together his own little army of riflemen in preparation for a fresh attack on his native land of Amber at the end of Book 2.

You may recall that I said in the review of the first book that early on, while Corwin was still on our Shadow Earth and suffering from amnesia (but keeping it secret), his brother Random suddenly turned up at their sister Flora's mansion, pursued by several ugly fellows with grayish flesh and fangs and sharp spurs on their hands and generally looking not-quite-human. Corwin helped kill them when they charged into the house with guns in their hands, but then didn't dare ask just where they had come from and under what circumstances they had begun chasing Random, because he was afraid his questions might demonstrate ignorance of things he already ought to know. And after he regained his memory, it was several years before he finally met Random face-to-face again, for reasons mentioned above. But the mysterious and now-dead assassin of Caine fits the profile of Random's long-ago pursuers to a T, and so Corwin finally seizes the chance to sit down with Random for a heart to heart chat on the subject of just what he had been doing right before he bumped into Corwin that one time. Random's account, in fact, is the entire second chapter and I calculate it occupies just over 1/7 of the text of this novel. As Corwin observes, it raises more questions than it settles, but at least he's finally getting up to speed on what's been happening to the family lately.

About half of Chapter 4 is devoted to Corwin's similar filling-in-the-blanks chat with Flora, on less cordial terms. You will recall from Book 1 that after his mysterious car accident, he ended up in a private hospital with Flora paying the bills to get him healed, but also ordering them to keep him heavily sedated for as long as possible so he couldn't stir up trouble. He hasn't been able to find it in his heart to trust her since then. (I tell you, some people hold a grudge over every little thing!) She insists that she had nothing to do with his near-fatal "accident", didn't know it was going to happen, and to this day she still doesn't know who shot out his tires. She agrees it is probable that brother Eric arranged that, but since Eric is now dead it will be awfully hard to get him to confirm (or deny) anything. But don't give up hope! There are still alternative explanations of this episode waiting to be offered to us, in this volume and later on!

Their brother Brand has been mysteriously missing for quite some time now - as in, several years, beginning even before Corwin woke up in a hospital at the beginning of the series. Occasionally one person or another has managed to make fleeting psychic contact with him (one incident of this was described in Random's flashback in Chapter Two), but nobody ever managed to establish a sufficiently strong connection for long enough to use the inherent abilities of the family to rescue him from wherever he is imprisoned. Corwin comes up with a rather clever idea for combining the forces of all available brothers and sisters at once to try a new approach, and they are actually able to haul him out of whatever obscure Shadow he was chained in, and teleport him back to the Royal Palace in the midst of a family gathering. While they are all clustered around him someone shoves a dagger in Brand's side before he can make any really significant statements (such as putting the finger on whoever had originally captured and imprisoned him). It doesn't quite kill him, but he faints from the shock and won't be answering any questions for awhile.

There is a lengthy discussion which is moved to another room while one brother, who's appointed himself Brand's personal physician, hovers over him with blood transfusion equipment and such. The rest of the family is clearly drowning in paranoia (someone stabbed Brand and only family members were in the room at the time), but nothing is resolved despite many a barbed comment and veiled warning and so forth. (Pardon me while I wipe a tear from my eye - these tender family reunions make me so emotional!)

Those are some of the major points of interest in approximately the first half of this installment. And bear in mind that a fair portion of this first half was actually describing stuff that happened before the series ever started! Heck, you didn't think I was going to ruin all the good stuff, did you? I'm just trying to give you a feel for the wonderfully dysfunctional family of immortals which Zelazny has created, and the happy times they have together! (If I were a member of this family, I think I'd run away from home as soon as I was self-sufficient, and hope they forgot about me after a few hundred years of not receiving any postcards. Of course, I've been known to say the same thing regarding what I would do if I were Prince William of the British Royal Family, so you can see I'm a fiery radical at heart.)

If you want a nice straightforward fantasy story where you know exactly who the good guys are and who the bad guys are and the good guys have enough information to form a coherent strategy for victory, you had better go reread the Lord of the Rings because you sure don't have any business reading the Chronicles of Amber. If you want a convoluted case of family politics where the hero spends much of time time wondering what's really going on and who is allied with whom, written in an interesting style with occasional flights of pure poetry in the descriptions of one thing or another, then this is the series for you. By the end of the book, Corwin has managed to fill in even more background on what's "really" been going on (assuming his informants are reliable), has survived an assassination attempt, has learned more about the Jewel of Judgment, and ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. Also, his relatives are noticing that his time on our own Shadow Earth seems to have changed him to a less self-centered and more idealistic person than they remember (the pervert!), although what he will end up doing about the now-vacant throne is still up in the air as the curtain falls. For what it's worth, near the end of the book Corwin finally gives a friend a full lecture on the Succession Issue, i.e. how many wives Oberon had (one at a time, though), which children came by each one, whether or not they are or previously were considered legitimate, and other details which I would have loved to know two books sooner. Ah well, there's still time to further develop the ramifications of this genealogical data! Sixty percent of the series down, forty percent to go!

This review dealt with the third Amber book. My reviews of the first and second books can be found at
http://www.epinions.com/content_23644442244
and
http://www.epinions.com/content_24108240516
if you want to expand your knowledge, although (as I said at the start) it's wiser to read the first book in the series before trying to plow your way through reviews of the second one, and so forth.

Recommended: Yes