1976
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
SPOILER ALERT (for this and the three earlier installments of The Chronicles of Amber)
A lot more happens in this fourth episode of The Chronicles of Amber than happened in the previous three.
Zelazny filled the third episode, The Sign of the Unicorn, with a lot of unspoken flashbacks and character-to-character retellings of what had gone on so far. In The Hand of Oberon, the plot suddenly surges ahead, story lines advance quickly, and several mysteries are unmystified.
At the end of The Sign of the Unicorn, Benedict, Corwin, and Corwin’s trusted aide Ganelon are led by a unicorn to another version of the Pattern. Ganelon, somewhat unusually (and, I may say, suspiciously) perceptively, suggests that this Pattern may actually be the real Pattern, and that the Pattern they know is just a copy.
This version of the Pattern, however, is damaged. Someone has stuck a dagger into the pattern, destroying it where the dagger struck. Impaled on the dagger is a Trump card of a guy who looks a lot like Random, but who none of them have ever seen before. Eventually they figure out that the mystery Trump card is that of Martin, Random’s son, whom he didn’t know existed.
At this point, in the form of a discussion between the siblings, Zelazny gives us a really helpful summary of the cabals that were angling for Oberon’s kingdom in the previous books. There were two—one of Bleys, Fiona, and Brand, and another of Julian, Eric, and Caine—actively working against each other, as well as against their other siblings.
After the cabal recap, Random goes off to find Martin, while Corwin goes to tell Random’s wife, Vialle, about the stabbed card. After telling Vialle, Corwin revisits his old dungeon in Amber, where he uses Dworkin’s old sketch on the cell wall to transport himself to Dworkin’s studio and confronts Dworkin. At this point, he learns two key things:
The first, as he had (somehow) suspected for a while, is that Dworkin is Oberon’s father—Corwin’s grandfather. And the second is that Dworkin and Oberon have a crazily evil plan to destroy the real, broken Pattern—and thus everything in Amber!—to start fresh. This is understandably appalling to Corwin, and he wants to try to repair the Pattern instead. The only way to do that, though, is to walk the pattern while wearing the Jewel of Judgement, and the problem is that if you do that, you might die.
While Corwin is debating this in his head, Dworkin attacks him, and Corwin is only able to escape by picking a Trump at random—which transports him right smack into the Courts of Chaos.
Corwin fights off a bunch of Chaos attackers and escapes again, this time via Gerard’s Trump. Corwin then finds out from Fiona herself that the Brand/Bleys/Fiona cabal was the one that found the primal Pattern and stabbed Random’s son Martin over it in an attempt to open the doors to the Courts of Chaos, with the somewhat misguided idea that they could ally with them to take the throne of Amber. Brand is the one who actually stabbed Martin.
If Corwin is going to use the Jewel of Judgement to repair the primal version of the Pattern, he needs the Jewel of Judgement. Which, as we may remember, he stashed in a compost pile next to his house in upstate New York. He rides through Arden on one of Zelazny’s patented psychedelic hellrides to get it, pursued by a crazy manticora, which is in turn killed by Julian, who tries to ingratiate himself, claiming he was only trying to save Corwin somehow by blinding and imprisoning him for all those years in the dungeon at Amber.
Corwin shakes Julian off and keeps going. However, when Corwin gets to his house in New York, the compost heap is missing. Brand has been there first, and already has the Jewel!
At this point Fiona joins Corwin and claims that she and Bleys are back on Corwin’s side and aren’t working with the Courts of Chaos anymore, but that Brand is. She says Brand has gone off to walk the primal Pattern to destroy Amber. Corwin is able to stop Brand mid-Pattern-walk, but Brand escapes, still wearing the Jewel of Judgement.
Ganelon then comes up with a (again, I may say, suspiciously) good plan: to have Benedict go to block Brand instead of Corwin, since Benedict can get there first and has an arm given to him by the Courts of Chaos, so it might be a more even fight.
And just when we’re starting to get really suspicious about how Ganelon is coming up with all this brilliant planning and analysis all of a sudden, he reveals himself to be something entirely other than a simple faithful friend and servant to Corwin!
Even though this book furthers the plot a lot more than the previous four, and more actual action actually happens, it still also contains plenty of the free-associational impressionistic imagery we expect from a Zelazny Amber offering. Corwin’s ride from Arden back to 20th century Earth is extremely trippy; time and space are distorted, with grass and cobblestones intertwining with meteors. At one point he rides a translucent trail over space, during which he sees multiple moons.
And there is an absolutely beautiful scene when Corwin at last arrives at the Courts of Chaos; half the sky at the Courts is night, with dancing stars, and the other half is full of shimmering, shifting bands of color, and the two halves spin slowly around each other as the sky turns.
The Hand of Oberon also contains plenty of Corwin’s sarcastic attitude and snappy, anachronistic modern analysis of fantasy events. The best example is when he finds out that not only was Dworkin his grandfather, but that the unicorn was his grandmother, and his only reaction is to say that he has “mixed feelings” about being descended from a unicorn.
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