As with certain other authors who passed away while their best-known material was still popular and selling at a decent pace, the estate of the late, great Roger Zelazny has authorized new works set in the Amber universe, and bearing the Zelazny name on the cover.
The most recent of these is Shadows of Amber, fourth in a series penned by John Gregory Betancourt.
How, one might ask first, came Betancourt to bear the standard for Castle Amber?
Zelazny's most devoted and successful disciple, Steven Brust, would seem to have been the perfect choice to carry the Amber mythos forward, if indeed it had to be continued at all, after the death of its creator. Both he and Neil Gaiman approached Zelazny at one point, expressing interest in writing stories set in the Amber universe, according to Gaiman.
Zelazny wanted nothing to do with that, however, preferring to do all the Amber writing himself. His estate, one can only assume, saw things differently after his death, and John Betancourt ended up taking over the franchise.
So now we find ourselves four-fifths of the way through a new cycle, this time told to us from the trademark first-person point of view by Oberon, first king of Amber and later progenitor of the nine squabbling princes of the original books.
The first three books wrapped up the story of how Oberon came to found the city of Amber and become its king, amid treacheries orchestrated by both the rival lords of Chaos and his own siblings. Clearly, that sort of thing runs in the family.
The new novel picks up a few years later, with Oberon now struggling to accept the responsibilities and limitations imposed upon a monarch. He now has to think of the good of Amber first, but he still yearns to party and carouse; a trait that will, no doubt, eventually give us the many princes and princesses of Amber, born to so many different mothers.
Beyond this basic setup, the plot is minimal. Oberon blunders from one incident to the next, learning a little more each time about the larger conspiracy seemingly swirling around him. It all ends with a cliffhanger more shameless than anything from the original Zelazny works.
So aside from a coherent plot, what's missing from the Betancourt books? The poetry. The sheer literary force. The staggering power of the subtle sentence structures and felicitous turns of phrase. All this is missing, and much more.
With most well loved literary works in any genre, a direct line can be traced backward from each generation to the one before it, on and on into the dim past. This is no less true for Zelazny's Amber books. He himself openly acknowledged the inspiration provided to him by Philip Jose Farmer, and particularly in his World of Tiers books. In the introduction Zelazny wrote for the third Tiers novel, he specifically notes this influence, including his appreciation for Farmer's invention of a godlike family of squabbling siblings with an all-powerful, absentee father. Zelazny even dedicates one of the original Amber books to characters from Tiers!
Farmer, in turn, acknowledges his debt to Edgar Rice Burroughs, going so far as to include a Tarzan scene in the first Tiers novel. And Burroughs came straight out of the pulps of the early twentieth century, along with Robert E. Howard and so many others.
Burroughs took the early pulps, knew he could do better, and gave us vivid, widescreen action on a grand scale, with a vast imagination and creativity. Farmer took up the reins and modernized it all, adding richer characterization and situations at once more real and more fantastic. Zelazny picked up precisely where Farmer's abilities left off, making of this modernized pulp a lilting, soaring prose poetry that rose far above its antecedents. Where Burroughs and Farmer described for us a scene, Zelazny lived it, breathed it, and conveyed it to us with lyricism and panache, aching beauty and delightful humor.
This handing-down of style and substance, with each generation adding something new and original to the mix, resulted in the unique style so prevalent in the works of Zelazny, finding its most accessible and widely appealing form in the Amber novels, with their unique combination of high fantasy and Raymond Chandler-esque grit and noir.
Are these new additions by Betancourt worthy of the late master? Do they build on Zelazny's work, or at least capture any of that poetry and wit that passed out of this world in 1995? Do they make the world of Amber, its sons and daughters and all those others who watch in Shadow, live for us again?
Hardly.
They do, however give us new stories involving a handful of characters from Zelazny's work. That is the best, and the worst, that can be said for them.
