be_unafraid

Finally got around to reading (well, listening to) the Chronicles of Amber. Rather liked the Corwin Cycle; the Merlin Cycle, not so much. In the first five books, the world was still new; in the last five, there was more politics and less poetry.

When I think back to the series now, I remember two things: the style - first-person epic, serious-yet-not - and Tir-na Nog'th.

First, the style. I really wonder what it sounds like to a native English speaker. I have seen various complaints on Zelazny not being `a master of prose` but I can't evaluate them since I haven't actually read the books (listening is quite different). By ear, I love his style. This, for example:

"Riding, riding, through the wild, weird ways that led to Avalon, we went, Ganelon and I, down alleys of dream and of nightmare, beneath the brass bark of the sun and the hot, white isles of night, till these were gold and diamond chips and the moon swam like a swan. Day belled forth the green of spring, we crossed a mighty river and the mountains before us were frosted by night. I unleashed an arrow of my desire into the midnight and it took fire overhead, burned its way like a meteor into the north. The only dragon we encountered was lame and limped away quickly to hide, singeing daisies as it panted and wheezed. Migrations of bright birds arrowed our destination, and crystalline voices from lakes echoed our words as we passed. I sang as we rode, and after a time, Ganelon joined me. We had been traveling for over a week, and the land and the sky and the breezes told me we were near to Avalon now."

This was read to me by the author himself, and I still remember his voice. Zelazny isn't a very good reader, which is particularly noticeable when he reads Sign of Chaos: he pauses in all the wrong places and sometimes seems to be unsure of what exactly he has been trying to say when he wrote a particular sentence. He isn't a bad reader either, though, and his reading style has an interesting effect which may or may not have been intended. Corwin, in his reading, is curiously hesitant at times; at other times he lunges into fluid poetry. These switches are quite appropriate given the changes he has been going through after waking up in the hospital. Shadow Earth has had some effect on him, an effect that he cannot fully evaluate, hence the uncertainties, the stops to rethink and regroup. I probably wouldn't have read that into the character had I just seen the printed words of his monologues.

And yes, Tir-na Nog'th. Again, it's not the printed words I remember, it's the voice, sing-song and soothing, telling a tale of a strange place.

". . . And so I came to Tir-na Nog'th. When the moon rose and the apparition of Amber came faintly into the heavens, stars showing through it, pale halo about its towers, tiny flecks of movement upon its walls, I waited, waited with Ganelon and Random, waited on the highest crop of Kolvir, there where the three steps are fashioned, roughly, out of the stone. . .
When the moonlight touched them, the outline of the entire stairway began to take shape, spanning the great gulf to that point above the sea the vision city held. When the moonlight fell full upon it, the stair had taken as much of substance as it would ever possess, and I set my foot on the stone. . . . Random held a full deck of Trumps and I'd mine within my jacket. Grayswandir, forged upon this very stone by moonlight, held power in the city in the sky, and so I bore my blade along. I had rested all day, and I held a staff to lean upon. Illusion of distance and time . . . The stairs through the Corwin-ignoring sky escalate somehow, for it is not a simple arithmetic progression up them once motion has commenced. I was here, I was there, I was a quarter of the way up before my shoulder had forgotten the clasp of Ganelon's hand. . . . If I looked too hard at any portion of the stair, it lost its shimmering opacity and I saw the ocean far below as through a translucent lens. . . . I lost track of time, though it seems it's never long, afterward . . . As far beneath the waves as I'd soon be above them, off to my right, glittering and curling, the outline of Rebma appeared within the sea. I thought of Moire, wondered how she fared. What would become of our deepwater double should Amber ever fall? Would the image remain unshattered in its mirror? Or would building blocks and bones be taken and shaken alike, dice in the deepwater casino canyons our fleets fly over? No answer in the man drowning, Corwin-confounding waters, though I felt a twinge in my side.
At the head of the stair, I entered, coming into the ghost city as one would enter Amber after mounting the great forestair up Kolvir's seaward face. I leaned upon the rail, looked across the world.
The black road led off to the south. I could not see it by night. Not that it mattered. I knew now where it led. Or rather where Brand said that it led. As he appeared to have used up a life's worth of reasons for lying, I believed that I knew where it led.
All the way."

"The moonlight is intense in Tir-na Nog'th, silvers over the facing sides of all our imaged places. . . . Stick in hand, I passed forward, and the strangelings moved about me, appeared at windows, on balconies, on benches, at gates . . . Unseen I passed, for truly put, in this place I was the ghost to whatever their substance. . . .
Silence and silver . . . Only the tapping of my stick, and that mostly muted . . . More mists adrift toward the heart of things . . . The palace a white bonfire of it. . . Dew, like drops of mercury on the finely sanded petals and stems in the gardens by the walks . . . The passing moon as painful to the eye as the sun at midday, the stars outshone, dimmed by it . . . Silver and silence . . . The shine..."

"Ghost flowers throb on their stalks all about me, ghost shrubs spill blossoms like frozen firework displays."

"I place my left foot on the step, rest my left hand on my knee. Distracting but bearable, the throb of my healing gut. I wait for the blackness, the emptiness, to be drawn, appropriate curtain for the theatrics with which I am burdened this night.
And it slides aside, revealing a hand, an arm, a shoulder, the arm a glinting, metallic thing, its planes like the facets of a gem, its wrist and elbow wondrous weaves of silver cable, pinned with flecks of fire, the hand, stylized, skeletal, a Swiss toy, a mechanical insect, functional, deadly, beautiful in its way..."

I'll have to listen to the first five books again sometime. There's nothing deeply philosophical that I have - or likely will - get out of them, but these are good stories to listen to on certain rainy evenings.