I had read Nine Princes in Amber some time ago, but knowing that each subsequent novel in the Amber series by Roger Zelazny is heavily dependent on the events of the previous novel, I broke my rule of only reading books I Should Have Read by Now to read a book I had read before. It was to be a quick re-cap, an introduction to The Guns of Avalon, the second book, but as I got about halfway into that one, I realized I had read it before, too. Oh well. At least I knew for sure that I had never read Sign of the Unicorn, or any of the other Amber novels. (All of the Amber books are available in one volume, by the way, and that's how I've been reading them.)
Sign of the Unicorn picks up very soon after the conclusion (which is rather dramatic) of The Guns of Avalon. Corwin of Amber, the protagonist of these novels, probably sums up the situation best a few paragraphs into the story:
Me, back less than a week. Most things, still unresolved. The court of Amber, full of suspicion and unrest. This, now: a death to further jeopardize the brief, unhappy prereign of Corwin I: me.
Yes, Corwin is more or less in charge in his homeland of Amber now, but he has had quite a struggle against, among other things, a few-hundred-year bout of amnesia, long-term imprisonment, and some rather significant injuries. Okay, so they’re rather horrific injuries. As he implies in the quote above, there’s a lot more to do if he is to be king, and the greatest collective obstacle will be his ambitious, conniving, untrustworthy brothers and sisters.
Corwin’s not that great of a guy himself, but he’s still our hero, with his irreverence coming across as charming and amusing in Zelazny’s light, engaging story-telling style. Sign of the Unicorn was really fun to read (as were the first two books) with plenty of action, stories within stories told by other characters, and a few sort of dreamy sequences as Corwin navigates “Shadow” (everything we think of as the real world and every other possibility as well, all reflections of Amber) and as he goes to a place called Tir-na Nog’th (“reasonable behavior for any Amberite with a serious problem.”).
In Sign of the Unicorn, we get a bit of explanation and gain some more understanding of how serious and complex the conspiracies have been among Corwin’s siblings to take over the throne of Amber. They’re all so nasty, we really want Corwin to win. We’re left hanging at the end of this story, however, with Corwin and his friends lost and confused. But “All roads lead to Amber,” so there is some hope that our irreverent hero will survive to fight the conspiracies at least a while longer.
A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now
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