Mark Lawrence's Reviews > Nine Princes in Amber

I got this at random while hunting the science-fantasy shelves of a no longer existing bookshop opposite Ealing Broadway station around 1981. I used to go through the tube station twice a day on my way to and from school. Twenty years later an IRA bomb blew up about 20 yards from the front door. 45kg of homemade plastic explosive.

Anyway - the book - I was immediately taken with it. It's written in the first person and starts in the real world where our Prince Corwin (just Corey at this point) is suffering amnesia in a way that was far less cliched (or even not at all) back in 1970 when Zelazny wrote him.

Corwin has a lively, "cool", interactive voice that leads you through the story. We discover, along side him and his recovering memory, that he's part of a large family with at least 8 brothers, all princes in a royal family that seems to lord it over ... well ... everything.

Zelazny gives us a multiverse that Corwin and his family can navigate simply by travelling through it and adjusting the world as they go, thus moving from one reality to another by degrees.

This first book is all about discovery. Corwin is reclaiming his memory and his birthright while finding out why he was sidelined in a hospital on the fringes of reality. He storms back into his brother's court, bluffing to cover the remaining holes in his memory.

He finds himself in the midst of a power struggle that has flared in the wake of their father's disappearance. Some of Corwin's siblings are reaching for the throne and the rest lining up behind them.

There's also a puzzling dark power rising, but that's mainly for later books.

Lots of fighting, large battles fought, escapes, returns, revenge in this one. We're also given interesting shades of magic. Firstly the 'trumps' - decks of cards with the family's likenesses on them that can be used to talk to each other and also to summon one to another. Then 'the pattern', a maze that can be walked with great difficulty and allows at the centre, a more general teleporting (though there's much more to it).

All in all, a great mix of swords & sorcery & sci-fi & urban fantasy.

You can get all ten volumes of the series in The Great Book of Amber. I've read them all! Go me. I found the quality tales off (pun intended) throughout, so the rating for the whole cycle (two cycles really, as the last 5 books have a different main character) averages to a 3*.



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