Writing Assignment on Roger Zelazny

Excerpt from Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny.


The woman behind the desk wore a wide-collared, V-necked dress of blue-green, had long hair and low bangs, all of a cross between sunset clouds and the outer edge of a candle flame in an otherwise dark room, and natural, I somehow knew, and her eyes behind glasses I didn’t think she needed were as blue as Lake Erie at three o’clock on a cloudless summer afternoon; and were the colour of her compressed smile matched her hair. But none of these was the reason I’d paused.
I knew her from somewhere, though I couldn’t say where.



I’ve always liked Roger Zelazny for his use of archetypal figures; heroism comes from heroes in his world, not from circumstance. In this excerpt we have the description of the protagonist’s supposed sister. A single sentence that goes on for 78 words without a break, the crystallization of an inner monologue, all of it would have been completely subconscious but for the fact that the hero is a Chandlerian Knight errant. An archetype of will and observation taking in every least detail in case it should become useful.

Chandler’s style is in evidence all the way through the first few chapters of this book, a heroic type that awakens into a world that is completely alien to him, a mystery to be solved. In the excerpt we have the complete first impression of the person who has claimed to be the protagonist’s, Corwin’s, sister. Every detail is there in the writing, laid out so that the reader gains as much insight into not only the situations and characters, but the mental processes of Corwin.

The attention to detail is very important, the colour of the dress, the cut and colour of her hair, eye colour. All described vividly with similes that can only lead the reader to imagine the woman as well as if she stood in front of them.

All of the details add to the story structure too. Every small detail roots the story in reality, taking the reader on a ride through the experiences of Corwin as he makes his way through strange and mysterious encounters that like breadcrumbs will lead him to the solution.

Chandler’s notion of a knight in the Chapel Perilous, determined to understand every mystery while keeping the essential core of himself intact lends itself well to this tale. We later find that reality as we, the reader, imagine it to be is an illusion. Zelazny’s hero carries us through a completely normal seeming world with a completely normal seeming mystery. Who has locked me up? who ordered I be drugged? The breadcrumbs lead to the sister, enforcing reality every step of the way with the dogged realism of the Chandler style. Only when the reader has been sucked into this world completely does Zelazny shift the focus of the tale from a Chandler crime tale into an investigation of reality and archetypes.

The excerpts almost long winded approach with minute attention to detail and the almost illustrative approach to his language roots us in the reality of the Chandler novel, only making the switch to the fantastic all the more interesting. The knight errant and all the other characters in this story act exactly the same no matter what situation they are in, flawed heroes, scheming brother, treacherous sisters, all could be taken from this book and placed right back into Chandler without any changes. Only the backdrop is changed, the story plays out with all the turns and twists you expect, but the alien landscape gives even more life to the archetypes playing out their role.

This kind of highly descriptive and emotive writing gives the story its depth and a hold for the reader to hang onto to. The alien settings, again minutely detailed like the above excerpt only function to frame the archetypes as they move about the stage. Without the archetypal, the detail becomes florid and repetitive. The archetypes without the backdrop of such detailed narrative become mere abstracts of human behaviour without meaning or purpose.

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