Although listed as ten novels in one book, it really is only two. The first five follow the chronicles of Prince Corwin of Amber as he sets about the task of competing with his siblings to take the vacant crown. The second five follow the adventures of Prince Merlin, Prince Corwin's son. Despite the fact that the tales of Merlin follow chronologically, it is really stand alone from Corwin. Now that the division is clear, I have rated Corwin's saga differently than Merlin's.

In truth, I read the first five novels a long time ago in the seventies as they were being released. I loved them then and, after this second reading, love them still. The whole multiverse worlds of shadow and the traversing between them is extremely well done. Sure, the tale involves a lot of palace intrigue, family in-fighting, detailed sword play and more, but to me, it is the variety of the shadow worlds that makes this epic fantasy so enjoyable. As a reader, you travel with Corwin from one unique world to another and encounter a variety of characters and places, some of which are drawn from mythology. I gave the first five books of this series, the adventures of Prince Corwin, a solid five star rating.

Throughout all ten novels, one thing is consistent, and that is the mastery of the English language by Roger Zelazny. For some readers it might be best to keep a dictionary close at hand as his use of words, both obscure and uncommon, may prove too much of a challenge for anyone not an avid reader. For me, I reveled in each word I found beyond my knowledge as an addition to my own.

Prince Merlin's adventures feature much of the same as Corwin's, but with one weakness-a properly flowing plot. Unlike the first five books which was easy enough to track, the last five had a helter-skelter feel to them and the ending less than the acme I expect in such works. Therefore, I could only rate Merlin's tale as three stars. Though still enjoyable, not in the same league as Corwin's.

Combined, you get a four star rating for the collection. Not really fair as I would highly recommend the Corwin section to any reader of fantasy as a must read, while Merlin's tale not so.

I’ll readily confess that I’ve dipped in and out of Roger Zelazny’s Great Book of Amber for many months, partly because other books intruded, partly because of the natural break half way through the tome, and partly because no work since George RR Martin’s ongoing Song of Fire and Ice has generated such conflicting emotion within me.
Zelazny’s most famous work is a ten book series, which is divided into two five book story arcs. The first was released in the Seventies, and follows a Prince of Amber, Corwin, as he enters the machinations of his extensive family in a quest for the crown. The second, released through the late Eighties and Nineties, is the tale of Merlin (or ‘Merle’) who is Corwin’s son, and caught between Amber and the Courts of Chaos. They are quite different works and it is tricky to review the whole book without considering the two separately.
The Corwin arc (1970-1978) comprises of the first five books which can be thought of as one continuous tale as they run, via occasionally irritating cliff hangers, into one another. The hero, Corwin, awakes in a psychiatric hospital in the US from where he escapes and begins to piece together his past which he has forgotten. This simple literary tool works well, as we gradually learn of the extensive milieu Zelazny has created in manageable chunks. Corwin learns he is one of nine Princes of Amber, the royal family of a magical realm of order, in the shadow of which all other worlds exist. Our own earth exists in such a ‘shadow’ and true Amberites, once they have walked a mystical Pattern in Amber, can traverse the shadows. There are various rules to this passage, and time travels at different rates in the various shadows.
Corwin learns that some of his brothers and sisters have conspired to try and bump him off, and he sets about returning to Amber with some who remain loyal to him, to try and claim the crown. This forms a good chunk of the first five books, as Corwin meets a number of his siblings, many of whom plot and connive in a suitably Borgias manner. The characters are well drawn, the dialogue good and the plot interesting. I struggled at times with Zelazny’s rather lazy style, with stretches of monologue explaining what we knew already again and again, and the book was a bugger for ‘telling’ and not ‘showing’ which irked somewhat. The shadow travel was fun at first, but at times we have three or four pages of broken text describing passage through a myriad collection of shadows which I tended to skip.
The fifth book finishes well, and I was happy to pause there and reflect: great world-building, good plot, intriguing characters, plenty of twists, style a little clunky and wearing, but overall I really enjoyed it.
The Merlin arc impressed me less. It picks up the story a number of years later with Corwin’s son on a shadow earth. Merlin has half Amberite blood, his other parentage being Amber’s diametric opposite realm, The Courts of Chaos. As part of his upbringing he has trained as a sorcerer, but has chosen to complete his schooling in the universities of shadow earth. For most of this time there has been an annual attempt on his life, and it is this which draws him back to Amber and into a bizarre and convoluted plot involving both Amber and the Courts. Unlike the well paced plot of books 1-5, it is all over the place. Characters from the first books pop in, and out, with the feel of a soap opera. The twists are confusing, and the characters’ personalities alter inexplicably (picture, ‘I’ve tried to kill you for the last three books, but now Mom says to back off a bit, so, umm, sorry, lets be buddies.’). Merlin is a likeable character, but as his power increases we never feel he is in any real danger—and the tension dissipates.
It is still a fascinating work, but the themes from books 1-5 are screwed around with a little too much—the Pattern turns out to be sentient, as does its opposite number, the Logrus, and these entities, presumably on the cosmic level of Galactus, chat to Merlin and his comrades like irritated schoolteachers. Then when we hit a scene in Wonderland it goes truly bonkers, almost out of control with the sub-plots. By the final pages you are left with a feeling that there should be something else, that the threads are resolved lazily, and that it should have been better.
Zelazny sadly died without revisiting the series in full, and there are aspects of the books that would have been clarified in future works. There were several short stories, unfinished upon his death, which begin to tie up some loose ends, but as I’m reviewing the book and not the Amber multiverse, I’ve restricted my review to the sizeable ten book collection.
So is it worth a read? Yes. Undoubtedly it’s a superb exercise in world-building, and there are excellent characters and touches (the Trumps, shadows, the Pattern). Admittedly it got like a soap opera in the end, but it was still fun and always interesting even if it did fizzle out somewhat.

4 stars is a misleading rating for this collection of 10 books. The first 5 (Corwin Books) deserve a full 5 stars. The Corwin books (1-5) are among my favorite fantasy books of all time. Thanks to fellow GoodReads member "I. Curmudgeon" for recommending them.

Books 6-10 (Merlin Books) deserve 4 stars each...not as good as their predecessors but still good books in their own right. Merlin, son of Corwin, is a much more sympathetic protagonist than his old man...and less interesting by consequence.

Taken as a whole, this series deserves 4.5 stars. Since I only give 5 stars to what I consider to be "perfect" books, I had to round down to 4.

it’s so seventies! Dudes road-tripping into side worlds, phone numbers in matchbooks in phone booths. Also, Zelazny gets the perversity of myth: brothers who know their deadly feud is irrational, but fight to kill anyway, lakes of blood spilled for a mood.

The start of this series is great, but jeezum crow, what was HarperCollins thinking with the format of this edition? They went through all the trouble of getting the rights and printing the thing, but the fifteen-pound tome is physically difficult to read, laughably inconvenient to transport, and inexcusably devoid of any kind of supportive structural writing--like an introduction, a foreword, an about the author, an about the series, or even a table of contents!

Wikipedia tells us that the Great Book comprises all ten books of the Amber series, a story told in two five-book cycles that were published between 1967 and 1991 and have come to be regarded as some of the most seminal works of SF ever written. We would have no idea of any of this, however, simply by reading the Great Book of Amber, which begins on its page 1 with page 1 of the first book of Amber (without even a title page!) and screams through until page-the-last, which, you guessed it, is page-the-last of book ten. The Great Book sure was edited with some surprising assumptions about we the reader, but it's hard to peg down just what the thinking was behind it all. Was it that we won't care about knowing when the books came out? That we already know? That knowing more about the books' context will spoil the fun? That we don't care about Zelazny--a nowadays little-known author who was a titan of the SF world, and whose writing retains a glittering vitality and prescience? (Is it not exciting to discover, for example, that Zelazny's first novel tied with Dune for the Hugo award!? His first novel! With DUNE!) There's not even a table of contents to tell you that the next thousand+ pages are really ten books, which are really two sets of five books, and there are no dividers or distinctive decorative elements to distinguish one book from another. I just don't know what anyone was thinking with this book--either how they expected new readers to pick it up, or how they expected anyone to enjoy physically reading it. Why not a two-volume set (or a three-volume with the stories!), even a boxed set, with some cool notes about Zelazny's impact on SF, his history of writing, his other blockbuster award-winning books (he had tons!), and something to make me jazzed up about what I'm about to read? This is a packaging fail for HarperCollins, and a sad one at that; for yet another turn of the glass, these great books are going to be relegated to the "I'll read it later" pile when what awaits is an unforgettable journey into fantasy.

This series is utterly unique, crazy enjoyable, and will always hold a central and honored place in my mind. The original series (the first five books)is what you HAVE to read. It's fantasy with no debt to Tolkien, a mindblowing concept, great ambiance, and perfect execution. And then you can read the second series to revisit Amber, but I don't think you'll top the enjoyment you get from your first visit.

Well, it took about two months, but I finished the "Great Book of Amber." I feel a little better knowing that it was technically TEN books in one, but only moderately better. It was partially due to things going on in the "real world", but for some reason this book was a fairly slow read for me.

My initial reactions after the first "book" were that:
1) I enjoyed the world/characters
2) I thought the author was very imaginative and had some cool ideas
3) I didn't like the narrative voice
4) The copy-editing was awful (numerous typos/grammar errors)

After having finished the entire saga, I would say that those reactions stand but I would expand them a bit and add a couple of other comments.

n  World/Charactersn
The world itself was very intriguing...the concept of a "true" reality and everything else is a "shadow" of that reality is cool. It's not a new idea per se (I've had soooo many discussions in similar veins in many of my English classes as we talk about meaning and ideas...discussing Plato's concept of the "real" or "true" ideal thing and everything else is just a reflection that helps to understand or draw near to the ideal). But it was still cool.

It was both comforting and annoying to have so much of the story based in our "own shadow Earth." It was good to have a foothold that was familiar and relatable. Still, it seemed that by relying on our "own" Earth so much and using it as the comparisons for Amber, it almost made Amber become the shadow and Earth become the ideal. This was never presented as the case, and was often spoken of in the contrary, but the overarching presence of Earth in terms of plot usage and in terms of the characters comparing points in Amber to memories on Earth made the distinction difficult at times.

In terms of character development, I really liked Corwin being an amnesiac to begin with so that I was learning everything with him. It also helped set the tone of knowledge development for the rest of the stories since lack of knowledge was an underlying plot driver...since the 'amnesiatic reader' was already in place, it was easy to continue that mode and provide lots of questions and expository monologue.

By the end of book 10, I felt like I'd read Dickens' Bleak House or some other novel with a ridiculous amount of characters each with their own individual plot threads drawn out to indeterminate conclusions. All of these were seen from a singular point of view and loaded with the narrator's own insight and bias, which made the multiple characters' threads all that much more difficult.

I loved the characters and many of them were well developed and rather unique. A lot of them were composites of one another and blended together at times. This was especially true of their voices which were indistinguishable.

n  Imagination/Plotn
While I can see a lot of external influences creating various plot elements and concepts (such as Plato's ideal as mentioned above), I applaud the author for a very imaginative world with dynamic characters and a very intriguing plot line. While the novel itself is likely wholly classified as "Fantasy" on a large level, I could almost see it sub-classified as "mystery"/"suspense" or possibly "political thriller."

Because of the "amnesiac reader" syndrome, the plot arc was able to change many times through the ~1200 pages and still maintain a good flow. The overarching plot remained largely unchanged from a general sense...in that the plot was that of a power struggle...the players seeking the power changed over the course of the novel, mainly as the scope of the power changed. First it was a struggle for intellectual power, then for a throne, then for vindictive power, then a struggle for knowledge or freedom from persecution (not quite sure how to classify Merlin's first stories as power struggles), then for power over enemies, then larger power struggles between the powers of the universe.

The overall plot was actually fairly simple. Where it got complicated was in the delivery of the plot as well as the wide range of subplots within the adventure.

I rather enjoyed a lot of the subplots and the deviations from the main plot mainly because they helped maintain momentum which was vital because frankly I felt the story really dragging at many points. In looking back, I suspect that the main plotline could be followed through effectively in about 1/3 of the real estate used (so ~400 pages instead of ~1200).

The subplots helped maintain my interest level as a reader while also providing small nuggets of information that was vital or at least intriguing with relation to the main plot.

My biggest complaint in terms of the wide variety of subplots was that there were SO MANY individual plot threads partially developed. I would have HATED to have read these as 10 individual books published every year or two. Each "book" ends only resolving a portion of the plot lines it introduced or followed (and sometimes completely ignored points introduced in previous books).

The easiest break point is to call books 1-5 the "first story" and books 6-10 the "second story", but that too is oversimplification since at the end of book 5 you have a ton of plot points that are unresolved and never brought up again in 6-10 and at the end of book 10 you have numerous plot points just dropped for good. Since there are literally dozens of plot lines explored through each "book", this is a ton of information that the reader is invested in but never achieves resolution for.

I've spoken briefly to the delivery of the plot. It was effective initially because of Corwin's state of being. It was intriguing throughout the entire story because it kept the reader as much in the dark as the main protagonist trying to figure out the mystery/conspiracy. My main complaint with the delivery method is due to the narrative voice which is one of my initial observations and complaints so it deserves its own section.

n  Narrative Voicen
I've already commented that I found that even though there are dozens and dozens of characters, most of them had nearly indistinguishable voices. That in itself was confusing at times. Add to that the sections with full pages of dialogue with no identifiers. Numerous times I had to back up to near the beginning of a dialogue and then count from the first identifier...HOPING that the author stuck with a normal pattern (which was a very optimistic hope, since he very frequently diverted from convention with regards to spoken word...sometimes within multiple speakers within what page/paragraph formatting would designate for a single speaker...for example: "What do you mean?" Eric asked to which I replied "Nothing". It's not awful...and not as bad as no identifiers, but was still troubling).

In addition to the same voice throughout everything, the voice itself annoyed me at times. I understand that Corwin and later Merlin (the primary narrators) spent a lot of time on "our Earth", but it still felt that there was far too much of what felt like earth-specific jargon. This sort of goes to the first point. If I write off Corwin and Merlin (and perhaps also Fiona and some of the others who loved earth) as just really liking Earth...that's one thing. To then take those same conversational nuances to other characters, many of whom never ventured from Amber or the Courts of Chaos or wherever else they lived...that's stretching it too far. My biggest pet peeve was the "Whatever" usage.

My other complaint with the narrative voice doesn't have to do with the dialogue voice, but rather with the narrative presentation itself.

"All my life", I've been taught "show, don't tell". Perhaps this novel is the case study that first coined that phrase. Pulling a number out of my butt, I would say that this novel is 80% tell vs 20% show. The plot delivery is nearly always handled through expository monologues either from the narrator himself or as presented by a supporting character.

I acknowledge that the novel is done in first person and that as such he "has to" tell us what's going on. My point is that he can "tell" without "telling"....describe the action, describe the scene, describe the emotions...describe rather than explain.

n  Summaryn
I really did enjoy the creativity and imagination used throughout the story. I also really had fun with the political intrigue and conspiracies at a universe level. It was very entertaining in that aspect.

However, the "tell" vs. "show" presentation made this novel almost a chore to get through at times. It truly felt a tedious read on numerous occasions and I almost gave up on it. When I finally reached the end and found so many plot threads unresolved, I almost wished I had given up rather than push to the end hoping for a solid resolution.

Still, enough was resolved that I can't hate myself for finishing it.

My suggestion might be to hope for an abridged version or perhaps a movie. In lieu of that, go for it. The story itself and the ideas it might get you thinking about are definitely worth pushing through even the boring segments.

***
3 stars

Dense and imaginative. Weak characterization holds it back from from modern appeal, but Zelazny is, at times, insane in the best way. The difficult prose implies a lot in a genre that benefits from being very literal, and Zelazny wants you to know that he knows what Real Fighting is like. Corwin’s cycle gets stronger as it goes on. Merlin’s cycle starts strong but becomes increasingly convoluted until it becomes near-impossible to keep track of all the interested parties. I know that all my praise has been tepid, but I cannot emphasize enough that conceptually, there is no other fantasy novel like this.

Want to read about a multiverse before the concept was in vogue, featuring aspects of Platonic philosophy and politically bickering immortals who rule over reality?

Well, my friend, your only option is Amber.

I tried SO hard to get through this book. Honestly I did, now I'm about 400 pages in and I can't, just can't, keep reading it. He goes into tremendous detail about nothing and the plot moves so slowly its impossible for me to keep reading. When it got 'exciting' it was good but there is to much down time in the book. Also for a fantasy world he references a lot of cultural things, that just took me out of the book, (think of a baby crying in a movie theater).

Well, I FINALLY finished the whole series. I must say, the first two and fourth were probably my favorites. It's hard to rate the series on a whole, but I felt that it dragged on in many places, ecspecially since the chapters are so darn long. There were a lot of moments where I had to force myself to push through and continue. However, there were some fascinating moments including epic battles, Pattern walking, hellrides and very dramatic family moments.

It's rare that a book I read when I was 11 holds up to the high standards I had for it. 15 years later I find that I am just as engaged, just as amazed, and even more eager to write like Zelazny. I am so happy that the characters and story lines still have that power over me, and now that I've reread it, I can safely keep Amber on my list of top 5 books.

FINALLY finished this Goliath. Huge tome and was a little slow in parts. Overall it kept my interest and was a pretty good read. Didn't really care for the ending because after 1158 pages it was not solid and could have continued on lol. Won't be reading it again that is for sure!