“It is just that I never trust anyone if there is an alternative.”

You can really tell that Zelazny was flying by the seat of his pants when he wrote this series. He’s pretentious enough to end the previous book, Sign of the Unicorn, right in the middle of a conversation, then pick it up at the start of this one. So apparently we’re supposed to consider The Great Book of Amber really one single novel, separated into parts kind of like The Lord of the Rings is just “one” book. Right? Wrong. Zelazny then spends a large portion of the first part of The Hand of Oberon literally recounting everything that has happened in the first three books. The content that is original to Oberon isn’t much better—characters telling one another about events that have already taken place (rather than letting us witness these events) and multiple-page-long fistfights.

It has little bits of intrigue and power struggle here and there, but any weight behind these machinations is destroyed by shoddy writing which tries to cram a large cast of interchangeable characters into a short book that is already almost completely full of meaningless scenes. I usually try not to act like a snob about these things (there’s plenty of low-brow entertainment that I adore), but I simply cannot understand how so many people can read this book and think it is anything more than hack writing, let alone a pinnacle of fantasy literature or some kind of high art. There is a fitting quote for this situation that comes from a good low-brow work of art, Ben Stiller’s Zoolander. Quoth Will Ferrel as fashion mogul Jacobim Mugatu: “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.”

So we’re in the “real” Amber now because the one that all the characters have known until now was actually a fake Amber. Our hero Corwin explores this new Amber and finds the source of the Black Road amidst a damaged primal Pattern. To repair it, he needs to find the Jewel of Judgement—a powerful artifact that was used to create Amber. For the life of me I can’t remember if the Jewel was ever mentioned before, but I’ll give the benefit of the doubt and assume it was. But if it was so important, why did Corwin leave it in a pile of dead leaves in his backyard? Anyway, royal brother Brand steals it and now he can teleport and control the weather and all sorts of stuff. That’s our setup.

The characters are still one dimensional and interchangeable, which makes their explaining of the plot to one another—instead of the plot actually happening—that much more boring. There’s almost no character motivation or any sense of what exactly they’re all fighting over. Lots of boring exposition, wooden dialogue, and forced drama to get us to scenes that Zelazny must have had dancing around in his head but struggles to write in an engaging manner. The mechanics of Amber, how the world works, devolve into a mass of soupy nothingness.

There’s a “huge” plot twist on the last page of the book that is easy to guess if you’re paying attention when you read the first one, sucking most of the drama out of the thing. It’s all just very tiresome, not even to a level that could affectionately be referred to as pulp.