The Great Book of Amber

I'm giving this 3 stars on average, but I'd rate the five Corwyn books somewhat higher and the five Merlin books somewhat lower.

This might be the most macho fantasy book I have ever read in my life.
It's nice, but it can get a little too much.

didn't finish. The first 30 pages were fantastic - a man wakes up in a hospital bed with hostile nurses and no memory of who he is. He has to think his way out, gaining information little by little while never letting on that he knows nothing. That part was great. Everything after his memory loss seemed super boring.

There are two storylines in this volume, each comprising five books, each about 600 pages long.

The first is a wonderful parallel-world story, intricately plotted and well told. Book one (which is the only book that can be read as a standalone story, though open-ended) introduces the world of Amber, its relationship to this world, its properties and inhabitants, as well as the protagonist's main quest. From the second book onwards, this quest becomes ever more complicated, and entangled in conspiracies on a growing scale, up to the impending destruction of the world as we know it (which, though a spoiler, can't really surprise anyone familiar with such stories). Indeed, Zelazny works with many clichés, but is always able to present them as subtle, ironic, or metaphorical, as needed. By the end of the fifth book, all threads resolve quite satisfyingly, and with a sense of closure.

Then the sixth book (written seven years later) begins, starting off with some surprising changes – a little reminiscent of the first book, but just self-referential enough to make it seem deliberate and pull the reader in. In the course of the eighth book, however, it appears that Zelazny is losing control over his story, and starts to throw in plot elements that have only one thing in common: that they come as a surprise and contradict earlier suppositions about how the universe works. The more frequently this happens, the more irritating it gets, as there is a growing suspiction that that's all these elements are: increasingly desperate attempts to create suspense, to establish that all is not what it seemed to be. But by the end (more or less the whole of book ten) even basic interest is waning – the events appear to be just randomly put together, and when anything can happen, nothing is unexpected anymore. There remains a dwindling hope that it will all end as a joke, a dream perhaps, or a test. But instead it just ends where it could have ended 400 pages ago, without so many distractions.

Ultimately, therefore, the second storyline is a huge disappointment after the well-honed first one. One wonders what Zelazny might have thought.