Blood of Amber

Merlin still isn't as cool as Corwin was, and this book, like the first in this sequel series, doesn't capture the magic of the first series. Merlin is a little bland and some of his decisions are a bit dumb. It's still a good read, fast-paced and full of action, but this set of books doesn't feel strictly necessary.

Lots of twists and turns, and the world Zelazny has built is really interesting. Zelazny's got a really unique, very readable writing style, and these books are so short and quick it's hard not to get caught up in them.

This is the seventh Amber novel by Zelazny, and the second in the follow-up five-book sequence about Corwin's son Merlin. In this book, Merlin, also called Merle, escapes the prison where his 'friend' Luke stowed him - at the end of previous book, Luke was revealed to be the son of Brand, the psychotic Amberite who tried to destroy the others in the original series. He is seeking revenge for his father, who the others had no choice but to kill, but it seems he's mixed-up because although he was responsible for the first few assassination attempts against Merle, committed every 30th April over about 8 years, he apparently stopped and someone else, possibly his mother, took over later. Merle discovers in this volume that various odd show more characters who approached him in book 1 are actually people who have been possessed by an entity who claims to want to protect him. That entity finally breaks cover and agrees to an exchange of information, but as Merlin insists on a quid pro quo, the sequence where they laboriously trade snippets is very tedious.

The plot of the present volume is rambling in the extreme. Zelazny could obviously write - I loved a section of description where Merlin walks down by the docks en route to a restaurant - but seemed here to be going through the motions plot-wise. A lot happens including blow-by-blow fight sequences which I found confusing and also unconvincingly detailed for someone caught up in the adrenaline of a fight, various people try to kill Merle and he spends a lot of time discussing who this could be and also refusing to confide in people, including his uncle Random, now King of Amber, who might be able to help him. Yet he naively trusts Luke who has admitted to making attempts on his life and appears to continue to have his own agenda. A lot of characters arrive and depart, almost on a revolving door basis, and don't add much to the story, and more are introduced in passing - e.g. two more siblings of his fathers turn up in the form of Trumps (the cards the royal family use to contact each other) whom I believe were mentioned in the first series as being thought dead long before Corwin was born - and I would guess these characters probably feature in later volumes. There are sudden rather jarring flashbacks to Merlin's upbringing at the Courts of Chaos where he had terrible fights with a person who hated him for no apparent reason his brother and it seems pretty obvious that the shape-shifting sorcerer who trails him in this volume and eventually attacks him must be that person, yet he doesn't draw the obvious inference even when he thinks back to how this person behaved. Instead he is unable to work out who might be trying to kill him, despite the fact that this person tried at least twice when they were growing up, once by trying to shoot him in the back.

It is also far too 'easy' for Merle compared to his father - in the earlier story, Corwin was enough of a superhero: he had the ability to travel through Shadow, that is, from world to world, was a master swordsman, had above human healing powers, an extended lifespan (when banished to our Earth, he lived there for hundreds of our years), and could use the Trumps - special cards developed by his grandfather - some of these abilities developed through walking the Pattern, an energy grid used to bring the worlds into being originally. All these powers were shared with his siblings and made his family powerful enough, in my opinion. But Merlin also inherits powers from his mother Dara who is one of the Chaos party, so he can use something called the Logrus to create spells including an invisibility one, and he can shape-shift into other forms including that of an apparently fearsome beast (he uses this ability to best a demon at one point though it isn't shown as the chapter ends and the next one switches to after he has done so). He can also reach into Shadow and pull out new clothes whenever he needs them or a sword or just about anything else he needs. Frankly, this makes him far too boring a character and his general naive stupidity doesn't endear him to the reader either.

The book ends as its predecessor did - Merlin is now a prisoner somewhere, this time in a very surreal placeLewis Carroll's Wonderland. With the lack of real character development or a half-decent plot, I can't believe it would be worth the bother of tracking down the final three volumes of this (I have only the first two) as there is no real incentive to read on. show less

Out Of The Frying Pan And Into The Pattern: Merlin starts this volume by breaking out of a locked cave, challenging a cave demon, and spending his rest period watching a battle at the Keep of the Four Worlds while chitchatting with a deserter. So much for idle relaxation - Merlin keeps frantically jumping from one death threat to another always avoiding the falling horde or slashing claws by a hairs breadth.

Blood of Amber reveals a layered series of plots all of which want Merlin either dead or under close control. Relatives, friends, and potential mates all are suspect while the fate of Amber hangs in the balance - and perhaps the fate of all that lies in shadow as well. For the alternate Pattern created by Corwin to stave off the show more advance of Chaos has begin to create reverberations of its own and shadow storms are beginning to wreak havoc.

At some point, the reader will realize that all the intricate moves that comprise the action in Blood of Amber are getting too rapid to keep good track of. At this point one must simply go along for the ride from wasteland to wonderland. It is the nature of Zelazny's writing that this remains fun, rather than dissolving in the same chaos that threatens Amber. show less

Well - still definitely a piece of a series. The infodump at the beginning was rather annoying - too much info if you just read the previous book, and I suspect not enough if you hadn't. And at the end...whoopee, Merle's imprisoned again. Too similar to Trumps of Doom's ending for me. There's a lot of info added in the middle of the book, and quite a lot of action at various points. But overall, it feels a bit like a treadmill - or a Red Queen's Race; all that to end up in pretty much the same place he began.

Het zijn absoluut intrigerende boeken en ook goed geschreven, maar totaal emotieloos en dat maakt dat ik er totaal geen probleem mee heb om een deel zo lang te laten liggen. Drie sterren dus, ondanks de kwaliteiten van het boek.

Things are getting quite interesting for Merlin son of Corwin. He's got a shapeshifting protector following him around keeping an eye on him. He needs the protection, though, because he's got friends like Luke - who either wants to kill him, or not. Then there's Luke's mother, who's already tried to kill him five or six times. Then there's his half-brother Jurt from the realm of Chaos who seems to want to mesh the Chaos succession ritual with a personal vendetta. Of course, there's always his sentient computer program, Ghostwheel, who's trying to figure out what he his while everyone else is trying to figure out how to use him to achieve even greater power and influence. Then there's this Mask fellow who appears to want to kill both show more Luke and Luke's mother (Jasra) AND Merlin. Oh, and there's also the usual intrigues of the Court of Amber. And that's chapter one.

The action is fast and furious. The plots are twisty and confusing. The fact that psychedelic drugs and shapeshifting seems about as common as the common cold make keeping track of the various characters a challenge. Motives are of the utmost importance to Merlin, but keeping track of changing alliances and the threads of motivations is difficult in the extreme. On the plus side, it's a quick read, very entertaining and things move quickly, so one's interest is fully engaged. show less

One thing I noticed early on in the series that I've failed to mention is that when Zelazny moves his character through shadow it reads almost like poetry, not the forced trying to be like Tolkien poetry that once fantasy writer seemed to have to insert to have a "proper" fantasy. The descriptions aren't formatted like poetry it just sounds like a very poetic movement.