Good bye and hello, as always.
Jan. 19th, 2012 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
f4f3I had the evening to myself, for the first time in I don't know how long. There are lots of things I should have done - my tax return is getting urgent, there's some techie stuff to do, there is one letter that I need to write and really don't want to, lots of things I could have done - take myself out to dinner, mess around on itunes, watch one of a lot of DVDs I have stacked up.
Instead, I got out volumes four and five of Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series, and reminded myself that what I love to do when I am on my own is read. The Amber books are one of the first places I read Fantasy done with style. Zelazny has a laconic, dry voice, closer to Chandler or Hammet than Tolkien or C.S. Lewis. I'd read those guys when I was 13, but I hadn't discovered Chandler or Hammet. These days there are a hundred fantasy writers who think that when the plot flags you should have a guy come through the door with a sword, but back then Zelazny was unique, and I fell for him like a ton of bricks down a staircase.
The Zelazny Hero is a wonderful thing. Like a Heinlein Hero with a sense of humour. Corwin, hero of the first five Amber books, is the cool uncle you always wanted to have. Super strong, functionally immortal, catnip with the ladies and the second (pardon me, maybe the third) greatest swordsman around, he would be a fine piece of wish-fulfilment if not for his weaknesses. He loses, for a start, gets blinded and thrown in a dungeon. And so ends book one. He's easily led, by brothers, women, shiny trinkets. He also raises an army of furry clawed guys who think he is a god, and then leads them to universal slaughter. But every page has a line of description, or a piece of dialogue, that I would be proud of.
As a sequence, the Amber books don't follow the rules. Coming in groups of five, they don't suffer from what John Clute calls "The Sperm Called Trilogy", with all the good stuff up front, a fast moving tail and nothing much in between. It's fairly obvious that Roger had no idea where the series was going in book one, and he's still pulling novel ideas (and ideas you could base a novel on) out of nowhere in book five. In that book alone there's a scene with horse-stealing Little People, a wise cracking crow, a pathetic werewolf, and a hell ride from order to chaos. And that's an aside to the main plot of sibling rivalry and oedipal angst. Oh, and it all hangs on the horn of the unicorn.
All of which is a long way of saying that if you put me in a room, on my own, I will read. My first love, my greatest comfort, what's made me the strange thing that I am.
As Corwin says at one point, sometimes it's damn hard to tell the dancers from the dance.
Instead, I got out volumes four and five of Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series, and reminded myself that what I love to do when I am on my own is read. The Amber books are one of the first places I read Fantasy done with style. Zelazny has a laconic, dry voice, closer to Chandler or Hammet than Tolkien or C.S. Lewis. I'd read those guys when I was 13, but I hadn't discovered Chandler or Hammet. These days there are a hundred fantasy writers who think that when the plot flags you should have a guy come through the door with a sword, but back then Zelazny was unique, and I fell for him like a ton of bricks down a staircase.
The Zelazny Hero is a wonderful thing. Like a Heinlein Hero with a sense of humour. Corwin, hero of the first five Amber books, is the cool uncle you always wanted to have. Super strong, functionally immortal, catnip with the ladies and the second (pardon me, maybe the third) greatest swordsman around, he would be a fine piece of wish-fulfilment if not for his weaknesses. He loses, for a start, gets blinded and thrown in a dungeon. And so ends book one. He's easily led, by brothers, women, shiny trinkets. He also raises an army of furry clawed guys who think he is a god, and then leads them to universal slaughter. But every page has a line of description, or a piece of dialogue, that I would be proud of.
As a sequence, the Amber books don't follow the rules. Coming in groups of five, they don't suffer from what John Clute calls "The Sperm Called Trilogy", with all the good stuff up front, a fast moving tail and nothing much in between. It's fairly obvious that Roger had no idea where the series was going in book one, and he's still pulling novel ideas (and ideas you could base a novel on) out of nowhere in book five. In that book alone there's a scene with horse-stealing Little People, a wise cracking crow, a pathetic werewolf, and a hell ride from order to chaos. And that's an aside to the main plot of sibling rivalry and oedipal angst. Oh, and it all hangs on the horn of the unicorn.
All of which is a long way of saying that if you put me in a room, on my own, I will read. My first love, my greatest comfort, what's made me the strange thing that I am.
As Corwin says at one point, sometimes it's damn hard to tell the dancers from the dance.
