Review: Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny by F. Brett Cox
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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 (Bridge of Ashes 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 Lord of Light). There's a brief mention of how important fathers often are in the stories, but it doesn't draw out that these are often missing fathers, the ultimate example being the main character in Doorways in the Sand: 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 Roadmarks, 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.

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