9 Princes in Amber: Ch. 5 Pt. 3
Apr. 8th, 2025 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chroniclingamber“9 Princes in Amber” starts out with very fast paced short chapters but soon they get longer… and still fast paced.
Raymond Chandler’s advice to writers was that if you didn’t know what to do next send a guy with a gun through the door. This is advice that Zelazny really took to heart in this book. The guys coming through the door don’t necessarily have guns, but they do keep coming through the door. It’s nonstop.
In this case it’s a guy named Dik who came in to empty the wastebaskets and ashtrays. Amber is a fantasy land with sorcerers and unicorns and also people smoke cigarettes and leave their dirty ashtrays lying around and someone has to come in and clean them up.
I feel bad for Dik.
Can you imagine? You walk into a room, you’re doing your thing, and suddenly some dude jumps up from behind a desk and starts talking at you? You knew him when he was younger, he vanished, you assumed he was dead, now he’s back. He’s back and he’s threatening to kill your boss. And he’s not just saying “I’m gonna kill my damned brother!” No. He’s got a whole speech and he’s making you listen to it and he apparently wants you to pass on the message to your boss that this guy’s going to kill him. That will surely go over well!
Corwin gives his florid little speech and claims that Dik’s all in for him and then another guy with a gun enters the room. Metaphorically. There’s no gun – guns don’t work in Amber.
Instead Eric strolls in, ready to hear the florid little speech. Or perhaps he’s overheard enough to get the gist of it. Or maybe he just knows Corwin well enough that he can predict what Corwin will say. Corwin’s so excited to see his big brother that he starts talking like a jerk – “putting a most obnoxious twang to my voice.” This is such a Little Brother thing to do. It really is. Just think about it. You’ve killed your ridiculous little brother, then found out he wasn’t dead but you manage to keep him prisoner, then he pops up again and starts talking at you in an irritating voice. He hasn’t seen you in hundreds of years, he has no idea what the political situation is, but there he is being irritating and threatening you.
At least it gives Dik a chance to get out.
Eric enters the library and the brothers almost immediately start fencing. And the thing about Zelazny is that he fenced (and did a lot of other martial arts) so there’s actual choreography and terminology and stuff and I can’t really follow what they’re doing but Zelazny knows what he’s about. There’s a reason so many fans are eager to see this on the big screen – or the small screen. There’s a ton of duels.
They duel with swords, yes, but also with their wits. They exchange some taunts, some bragging. Corwin realizes that he’s either improved while in exile or perhaps has always been better than he thought but Eric’s conviction that he was the better of them colored Corwin’s perception. Either way he starts getting the better of Eric as Eric’s people come running. Corwin chooses to make quick his escape and Erik flips him off and cusses him out as Corwin ducks back into his hidey hole to escape.
This story, told from Corwin’s point of view, paints Eric as this unreasonable crazy sadistic selfish madman starved for power. But the brother Corwin trusts most has allied with him, and in this scene Eric expresses regret and that the Crown is a burden. Later books paint him in a much better light, although I don’t know how far ahead Zelazny planned Eric and his motivations… the later books are more complex in general.
An injured Corwin, just a few minutes ahead of an armed force, uses the Trumps he absconded with to contact his brother Bleys, one of the red heads. Bleys accepts his call and pulls him through the Trump to him, the first time we’ve seen that specific use of them. It’s just like… it’s like a videophone teleporter. I really wish I could remember what it was like to read this for the first time, to have a guy raise a piece of colorful pasteboard to his face, gaze into it, and have it come alive and pull him bodily to another location. That’s just so cool, you know? So cool and so portable.
(I also think it’s brilliant how in many ways Trumps are like cellphones long before cellphones existed – people call you at the WORST, most inconvenient times, including when you’re in the middle of something or talking to someone else via Trump. There’s no call waiting, though, and no voicemail. People can pick up an extension and listen in. There’s a party line option. Ok, ok, heading pretty firmly into spoiler territory – of a decades old book.)
Anyway, Bleys zips Corwin through to him and Corwin was hurt worse than he realized and passes out. Bleys could have totally killed or imprisoned him but instead decides to use him to further his shot at the Throne. He, also, hates Erik. After waking up from fainting, Corwin settles in with some hard alcohol and some tobacco, as one does while recovering from blood loss. Bleys commiserates with him about how awful Erik is and how great it’d be to kill him. Just straight up murder him. He doesn’t seem too surprised that Corwin is still alive – most people take it in stride, actually.
They have a late night brotherly gossip session and it’s kind of sad. They all seem to dislike if not outright hate each other, or at least Corwin does.
That’s just sad, you know? That’s really sad.
Soon after having that little maudlin revelation Corwin decides to fuck Eric up a little more. He Trumps his big brother, who’s tucked into bed, and insults him a little more as a final good-night before taking himself to bed.
An interesting thing as that Corwin claimed to have an army and Bleys does have an army, but Corwin does NOT have an army. At all. We know that werewolves exist in Amber, there’s non-human beings in Amber, and Bleys… seems to have some of them as his personal army.
References:
Raymond Chandler’s advice to writers was that if you didn’t know what to do next send a guy with a gun through the door. This is advice that Zelazny really took to heart in this book. The guys coming through the door don’t necessarily have guns, but they do keep coming through the door. It’s nonstop.
In this case it’s a guy named Dik who came in to empty the wastebaskets and ashtrays. Amber is a fantasy land with sorcerers and unicorns and also people smoke cigarettes and leave their dirty ashtrays lying around and someone has to come in and clean them up.
I feel bad for Dik.
Can you imagine? You walk into a room, you’re doing your thing, and suddenly some dude jumps up from behind a desk and starts talking at you? You knew him when he was younger, he vanished, you assumed he was dead, now he’s back. He’s back and he’s threatening to kill your boss. And he’s not just saying “I’m gonna kill my damned brother!” No. He’s got a whole speech and he’s making you listen to it and he apparently wants you to pass on the message to your boss that this guy’s going to kill him. That will surely go over well!
Corwin gives his florid little speech and claims that Dik’s all in for him and then another guy with a gun enters the room. Metaphorically. There’s no gun – guns don’t work in Amber.
Instead Eric strolls in, ready to hear the florid little speech. Or perhaps he’s overheard enough to get the gist of it. Or maybe he just knows Corwin well enough that he can predict what Corwin will say. Corwin’s so excited to see his big brother that he starts talking like a jerk – “putting a most obnoxious twang to my voice.” This is such a Little Brother thing to do. It really is. Just think about it. You’ve killed your ridiculous little brother, then found out he wasn’t dead but you manage to keep him prisoner, then he pops up again and starts talking at you in an irritating voice. He hasn’t seen you in hundreds of years, he has no idea what the political situation is, but there he is being irritating and threatening you.
At least it gives Dik a chance to get out.
Eric enters the library and the brothers almost immediately start fencing. And the thing about Zelazny is that he fenced (and did a lot of other martial arts) so there’s actual choreography and terminology and stuff and I can’t really follow what they’re doing but Zelazny knows what he’s about. There’s a reason so many fans are eager to see this on the big screen – or the small screen. There’s a ton of duels.
They duel with swords, yes, but also with their wits. They exchange some taunts, some bragging. Corwin realizes that he’s either improved while in exile or perhaps has always been better than he thought but Eric’s conviction that he was the better of them colored Corwin’s perception. Either way he starts getting the better of Eric as Eric’s people come running. Corwin chooses to make quick his escape and Erik flips him off and cusses him out as Corwin ducks back into his hidey hole to escape.
This story, told from Corwin’s point of view, paints Eric as this unreasonable crazy sadistic selfish madman starved for power. But the brother Corwin trusts most has allied with him, and in this scene Eric expresses regret and that the Crown is a burden. Later books paint him in a much better light, although I don’t know how far ahead Zelazny planned Eric and his motivations… the later books are more complex in general.
An injured Corwin, just a few minutes ahead of an armed force, uses the Trumps he absconded with to contact his brother Bleys, one of the red heads. Bleys accepts his call and pulls him through the Trump to him, the first time we’ve seen that specific use of them. It’s just like… it’s like a videophone teleporter. I really wish I could remember what it was like to read this for the first time, to have a guy raise a piece of colorful pasteboard to his face, gaze into it, and have it come alive and pull him bodily to another location. That’s just so cool, you know? So cool and so portable.
(I also think it’s brilliant how in many ways Trumps are like cellphones long before cellphones existed – people call you at the WORST, most inconvenient times, including when you’re in the middle of something or talking to someone else via Trump. There’s no call waiting, though, and no voicemail. People can pick up an extension and listen in. There’s a party line option. Ok, ok, heading pretty firmly into spoiler territory – of a decades old book.)
Anyway, Bleys zips Corwin through to him and Corwin was hurt worse than he realized and passes out. Bleys could have totally killed or imprisoned him but instead decides to use him to further his shot at the Throne. He, also, hates Erik. After waking up from fainting, Corwin settles in with some hard alcohol and some tobacco, as one does while recovering from blood loss. Bleys commiserates with him about how awful Erik is and how great it’d be to kill him. Just straight up murder him. He doesn’t seem too surprised that Corwin is still alive – most people take it in stride, actually.
They have a late night brotherly gossip session and it’s kind of sad. They all seem to dislike if not outright hate each other, or at least Corwin does.
It is strange, I guess, to have kin and to be without kinship.
That’s just sad, you know? That’s really sad.
Soon after having that little maudlin revelation Corwin decides to fuck Eric up a little more. He Trumps his big brother, who’s tucked into bed, and insults him a little more as a final good-night before taking himself to bed.
An interesting thing as that Corwin claimed to have an army and Bleys does have an army, but Corwin does NOT have an army. At all. We know that werewolves exist in Amber, there’s non-human beings in Amber, and Bleys… seems to have some of them as his personal army.
References:
- Uneasy-lies-the-head is a Shakespearean reference – specifically to the play “History of Henry IV, pt II.”
- “Wish in one hand and do something else in the other, and squeeze them both and see which comes true.” is a kind of roundabout way of saying “wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which fills up first.”
