That’s one confusing novel.
Corwin wakes up in a hospital in New York with amnesia. But the cover of the book has castles and swords!1 Well, as it turns out Corwin is one of nine princes of Amber, the greatest city that has ever been. It is medieval-Europe, but it is said to be the greatest, so who am I to argue? He will need to get back there and fight for the crown with his siblings.
That’s the basic premise. What threw me off the guard (except of starting in modern-day NY) is the pace. I’m no fantasy know-it-all, but it appears that this genre likes to take it’s sweet time. Authors describe every tree by every road2. They love to build their worlds, lore, characters. Zelazny doesn’t care about any of that. A huge battle where 20 000 people die? A paragraph seems like a proper length. Magic system? Yeah, let’s throw a few sentences here and there. The main character background, looks and goals? Let’s not bother. This is a short book (my version had just over 200 pages), but with standard wordiness, it could be a thousand pages long leather-bound brick, that would serve as a nice weapon.
This also means that Nine Princes in Amber is extremely shallow. There is nothing underneath - just a few awful characters, a few OK, and our Corwin. If there is any subtext, I must have missed it. And yet, I loved it. It’s pulp, but it goes so fast that I never got tired of it. It went so fast that I had no time to get bored or lost2. Guess that’s why The Chronicles of Amber is one of the most popular Fantasy sagas out there. It is inoffensive, not challenging in any way, but it’s cool. It knows it, and doesn’t pretend it.
I enjoyed it for what it is. It’s the greatest mindless fun I’ve had in ages. It’s not hardcore fantasy, and this may be why I liked it so much as I did. If anything, it’s Magnum P.I. of the genre.