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Nine Princes in Amber, by Roger Zelazny
(Not an actual review, just random thoughts.)
This book would actually work better as a manga or TV show, I think. Zelazny only really writes in one voice - taken out of context, it's hard to say whether any given line came from the angry exiled prince, the lazy trickster, or the talking dog.
So he's written this series about a bunch of eccentric siblings, all larger-than-life archetypes and neatly color-coded - whom we cannot actually tell apart all that easily, because his storytelling style is so dialog-dependent. This would be much less of a problem if we could see their faces.
The narrative voice itself is a little weird, because it wanders around so much in tone. Like, this conversation:
"So screwed up," huh. The narrator's upset in this scene, but the thing is, a lot of what he says sounds like this. A lot of what everyone says! The implied reason, for him and many of the others, is that they travel frequently, but people who have lived in several different cultural milieus don't actually usually mix their idioms so freely. What they do is code-switch: talk one way at a gas station in rural Tennessee, then switch to another when their cell phone rings and it's their friend who's the drummer for a London punk band. There's going to be some leakage - I mean, I've been back from Japan for a year and I still keep making an "X" with my forearms to say "wrong" - but these guys do it so much and so inconsistently that it can be jarring.
Aside from that, I enjoyed this book! Corwin is a pretty clearly-conceived and interesting character, regardless of the way he talks - sort of Archie Goodwin the Dark Lord, which is a combination guaranteed to please me. The worldbuilding was interesting, if subject to the eventual problems that all oozy relativistic settings are when you want the characters to have non-relativistic problems, like murders with a clear culprit. (I just started book three and it's clear that Zelazny regretted some of the ooziness potential. There's some visible retconning going on.)
Is there a name for the genre of stories about semi-godlike, larger-than-life, archetypal figures who wander around and mess things up for ordinary people by means of their interpersonal dramas? The genre would include this, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and Elizabeth Willey's The Well-Favored Man. The latter of which, now that I think of it, may well be fanfic of this.
This book would actually work better as a manga or TV show, I think. Zelazny only really writes in one voice - taken out of context, it's hard to say whether any given line came from the angry exiled prince, the lazy trickster, or the talking dog.
So he's written this series about a bunch of eccentric siblings, all larger-than-life archetypes and neatly color-coded - whom we cannot actually tell apart all that easily, because his storytelling style is so dialog-dependent. This would be much less of a problem if we could see their faces.
The narrative voice itself is a little weird, because it wanders around so much in tone. Like, this conversation:
"Save possibly for Benedict. He is gone these twelve years and ten, however, and Lir knows where his bones may lie. Pity."
"I did not know this," I said. "My memory is so screwed up. Please bear with me. I shall miss Benedict, an' he be dead."
"So screwed up," huh. The narrator's upset in this scene, but the thing is, a lot of what he says sounds like this. A lot of what everyone says! The implied reason, for him and many of the others, is that they travel frequently, but people who have lived in several different cultural milieus don't actually usually mix their idioms so freely. What they do is code-switch: talk one way at a gas station in rural Tennessee, then switch to another when their cell phone rings and it's their friend who's the drummer for a London punk band. There's going to be some leakage - I mean, I've been back from Japan for a year and I still keep making an "X" with my forearms to say "wrong" - but these guys do it so much and so inconsistently that it can be jarring.
Aside from that, I enjoyed this book! Corwin is a pretty clearly-conceived and interesting character, regardless of the way he talks - sort of Archie Goodwin the Dark Lord, which is a combination guaranteed to please me. The worldbuilding was interesting, if subject to the eventual problems that all oozy relativistic settings are when you want the characters to have non-relativistic problems, like murders with a clear culprit. (I just started book three and it's clear that Zelazny regretted some of the ooziness potential. There's some visible retconning going on.)
Is there a name for the genre of stories about semi-godlike, larger-than-life, archetypal figures who wander around and mess things up for ordinary people by means of their interpersonal dramas? The genre would include this, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and Elizabeth Willey's The Well-Favored Man. The latter of which, now that I think of it, may well be fanfic of this.
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Oh, and to give an answer to the actual question you asked: I've heard fantasy of this type described as 'mannerist fantasy,' and that's how Elizabeth Willey actually describes her fiction on her website...which unfortunately no longer seems to exist.