Roger Zelazny

F. Brett Cox offers an intriguing look into the work of Roger Zelazny. This is a thoughtful and critical examination of an author worth studying.

This book is by an academic, so of course it reexamines the received wisdom about its subject and says, "Wait on, there's more to it than that." 

Which, in this case, is no bad thing. Nor is it written in a high academic style; it should be easily accessible to anyone who enjoys Zelazny's fiction. 

I myself am a huge Zelazny fan; I have read all but one of his novels (<i>Bridge of Ashes</i> being the exception), and a number of the short stories in one collection or another, and I own most of them in the form of battered second-hand paperbacks, each of which I've read several times, and some a lot more often. So I was pleased to see that the author of this book is questioning the idea that Zelazny failed to live up to his early promise and became an excessively "commercial" writer, pushing out books quickly to make a living and leaving them with inadequate depth and development. 

It's not that there's no truth to that at all, of course, but what some critics saw as the author not doing enough work the author himself apparently saw as trusting the reader to do that work; a phrase in his letters about making up his mind to stop after he's shown a thing to the reader and not go on piling up the verbiage is quoted several times. Personally, I've always enjoyed his lean prose: the way he can evoke a person or a place with a couple of memorable lines and then move on with the story; the way he never wrote a really long book, and yet his best books seem epic in scope. 

Could he (as Joanna Russ complained) have spent more time writing "the story inside the story"? Certainly he could, but that wasn't necessarily what he was setting out to do, or what his readers wanted of him. 

This book includes a fascinating interview, in which Zelazny talks about how he experimented in every book, usually working on something he saw as a weakness, and how he always tried to put in enough of what he knew he could do well that if it turned out that his experimental part didn't work, the book as a whole still had a good chance of working. I think that's why, to me, his books always seem fresh and adventurous, boldly exploring premises that most writers wouldn't be capable of coming up with, let alone doing justice to. Even with Dilvish the Damned, the most stereotypically sword-and-sorcery of his series, which he admitted he kept around to have something easy to work on, he wasn't just trudging through the tropes and making it out of box mix; there's a sense of wonder even in those stories. 

So this book got me thinking about that. It also brought to my attention that a lot of Zelazny's main characters, especially early on, are violent revolutionaries/terrorists, something I hadn't been conscious of. He also began writing women who had arcs and protagonism towards the end of his career (a major valid complaint about his early work is that the women are more or less furniture, not that many other male authors of the time were doing any better), which I had to have pointed out to me; I'd got used to thinking that he couldn't write women with any agency. 

Something I was watching for, but didn't see, was a discussion of how so many of his characters have an absent father figure or are otherwise obsessed with their fathers (like Tak in <i>Lord of Light</i>). There's a brief mention of how important fathers often are in the stories, but it doesn't draw out that these are often <i>missing</i> fathers, the ultimate example being the main character in <i>Doorways in the Sand</i>: not only is he an orphan, but his substitute father figure (his uncle) is also absent for most of the book, and the uncle's return is an important turning point. See also Corwin, Merlin, and the young man in <i>Roadmarks</i>, to give a non-exhaustive list. Still, it's a relatively brief book, and it can't drill down into every theme of Zelazny's. 

What it did do, for me, was give an interesting chronological discussion of Zelazny's life (briefly) and work (in some depth); show me some trends and developments I'd missed, partly through reading the books in no particular order; get me thinking about my own writing and what I want it to be; and, of course, make me want to re-read some Zelazny.

I received a pre-publication version for review via Netgalley.

Oooh, it's been a while since I've read a critical monograph. Or at least one on a whole author, as against a BFI or 33 1/3 on an individual work. And yes, there's a very thin and porous line between these and literary biographies, but somehow you can tell, can't you, if only through the lexical code of that unglamorous cover. Cox, bless him, does his absolute best to set out his stall as something of a revisionist, arguing against the received wisdom that Zelazny was an SF prodigy who, once he turned pro, allowed himself to subside into a hack fantasy writer - but as the book goes on you can sense his enthusiasm for his thesis ebbing; when Cox talks about A Rose For Ecclesiastes or Lord Of Light, there's a fire and spark that's entirely ebbing by the time he's trudging through unavoidable potted plot summaries of the Amber books, doggedly attempting to find points of interest in unpromising territory like the literary equivalent of a tourist guide to Swindon. And that's somewhere around books 3-5 of Amber, never mind its subsequent continuation. All the same, Cox does make a compelling case that even at his most commercial, Zelazny never stopped experimenting, always content with having done so even when critics and/or readers weren't terribly keen on the results. And as with the classic 'Where did it all go wrong, Mr Best?' story, it's hard to entirely buy into a narrative of wasted promise when right to the end Zelazny seemed so content with both life and work: there's a telling anecdote in which his daughter recalls him coming out of his office and announcing "God *damn* I'm good at what I do." And, albeit inconsistently so, he really was.

In general, even if the argument Cox claimed he was going to make doesn't fully survive contact with reality, he has plenty to say about the recurring themes within Zelazny's work. "To fully understand the energy and power of Zelazny's best work requires the reader to move beyond the well-analyzed issues of myth, immortality, and the hard-boiled hero and consider also the steady movement within those works from maintaining individual autonomy via terroristic violence to existing within a larger community, from blowing the system up to living within it." Which on the one hand I applaud, and lords know there are plenty of people who could do with convincing of that nowadays – but equally, as an artistic journey it does sound like a summary of what went wrong with everyone from Wordsworth to the Stones. Cox has definitely done his homework, delving into Zelazny's output right back to his master's thesis 'Two Traditions And Cyril Tourneur: An Examination Of Morality And Humor Comedy Conventions In 'The Revenger's Tragedy'" – which his supervisor refused to submit, and doesn't that just make it even more tempting a prospect? And which also shows how early the fascination with dubiously heroic protagonists took him. More than that, though, Cox's book is clearly grounded in a thorough excavation of the reviews and commentary around each significant Zelazny publication, both mainstream and within SF fandom, which is interesting in the simple terms of tracking the rise and fall of his reputation, but also yields gems such as this, from a Fantasy & Science Fiction review by Sidney Coleman: "For Zelazny's purposes, a solid world would be as useless an object as a solid violin. The function of the thing is to resonate." One figure who keeps cropping up is Samuel Delany, a name often paired with Zelazny's for reasons beyond assonance, and who demonstrates the insight into his peer that you'd expect: 'Delany notes that Zelazny's early work, unlike the classic view of immortality as more curse than blessing, suggests that within an infinitely long life, "each moment becomes infinitely fascinating because there is so much more to relate it to; each event will take on new harmonies as it is struck by the overtones of history and like experiences before... No other writer... can evoke so much hunger for the stuff of living itself." Which is of course so much more interesting, because mortals saying they never wanted immortality anyway is about as convincing as humans writing stories where Batman beats Superman. Hell, these days in particular, who could look without envy at the Set from Zelazny's The Graveyard Heart, who use suspended animation to become "like those gods of old who appeared at the rites of the equinoxes, slept between processions, and were remanifest with each new season, the bulk of humanity living through all those dreary days that lay between"?

If there's a flaw here, it lies in very occasional missteps regarding the wider context. So Cox is very good on Zelazny, and good on material relating to Zelazny at one remove, but beyond that will occasionally apply a broad brush he shouldn't, as when he says, regarding Corwin in the first Amber book, that "the glibly erudite, cynical, physically gifted but emotionally challenged protagonist" is already recognisably Zelazny, but "not a character or voice traditionally associated with the high fantasy tradition". At which, especially as a James Branch Cabell fan, I cannot help but snort. Still, this is a minor complaint. Though in terms of the overall reading experience, it probably helps this book that, after all that output neither Cox nor I wanted to think very much about, Zelazny did at least exit on a high with the delightful A Night In The Lonesome October. On which Cox can expand, his initial enthusiasm returning, as he points out exactly why this late novel has garnered a devoted fanbase all of its own – yet also, in among the celebration, still find useful observations to make. For instance, given we have seen that the default Zelazny protagonist was "a long-lived adventurer of poetic inclination uncertain of his place in the universe", isn't it interesting that here at the end he proved that he really was still experimenting, because rather than write from the point of view of the immortal Jack the Ripper, or one of his fellow players in the game, he told us the story as seen by the Ripper's dog?

Rounding out the book, along with a bibliography and such, there's also an amusingly combative interview in which, even in 1972, the questions open with a strong assumption that Zelazny is now just churning 'em out, to which he responds with wit and grace throughout - including, at one point, a paragraph which the interviewers acknowledge as the most elegant 'no comment' they've ever seen. Although when he talks about always wanting to keep experimenting, not just doing more of the same, you can hear the future ghost of at least the second half of Amber snickering at the door. Still, that notwithstanding, this book reminded me how much great work he did – to some of which I can still look forward.

(Netgalley ARC)