An Amnesia Story Done Right: Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny

One of the first pieces of writing advice that I ever recieved, right alongside “never end a story with the words ‘it was all a dream'” and “never introduce the main character by having them look at themselves in a mirror” was “never write a story where the main character has amnesia.” Which struck me as kind of fishy, since I enjoyed both The Bourne Identity and Final Fantasy VI. But amnesia stories can also be done really poorly, and in fact, most of they time, they are. So I filed that writing “rule” away as a useful suggestion and went on with my writing.

Fast forward a couple of decades, to when I recently discovered Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles in Amber series. The book starts off as a stereotypical amnesia story, where the protagonist wakes up in some sort of hospital and has no idea who he is or how he came to be there. In the hands of a beginner, this story could have easily gone off the rails, but Zelazny is a master storyteller, and it hooked me almost immediately from the beginning and didn’t let up until… honestly, I’m four books in at this point, and I’m still just as hooked as I was with the first chapter. It’s pretty good.

But how can this be so? It is, after all, an amnesia story, breaking one of the first rules suggestions of writing? I can think of a few reasons.

First of all, even though the protagonist has the worst possible (and therefore most unbelievable) kind of amnesia, he isn’t totally helpless. In fact, he’s uncannily good at noticing important things and talking his way out of difficult situations, starting with the hospital where he wakes up, where he immediately realizes that the nurses are trying to keep him drugged so he won’t escape, but by walking out while they aren’t watching, getting to their supervisor before they can restrain him, and threatening him just enough with legal action that the supervisor decides to let him go—but not before he also extracts the name and address of the person who admitted him, a woman listed as his sister. So he shows up at her house, not even knowing his own name, but manages to bluff her so well that she can’t even tell if he has amnesia or not (or so it seems). And then his brother shows up, and they’re attacked by a bunch of supernatural beings, whom he dispatches with an antique sword, thus discovering his considerable skills with the sword… and the novel takes off from there.

Besides possessing a sharp, perceptive mind and an uncanny ability to think quickly on his feet, the protagonist also has some uncanny physical abilities that give the novel an immediate sense of intrigue. Besides his excellent swordsmanship, he also has an almost supernatural ability to heal quickly from wounds—hence, why the nurses fail in their efforts to drug him.

I suppose another reason why the amnesia story works so well is that everything plot point builds logically off of the next, as I’ve just demonstrated by outlining the events of the first couple of chapters. In a bad amnesia story, things seem to happen almost at random to a protagonist who has been rendered almost totally helpless. Not so with Nine Princes in Amber. Without this logical progression of events, the sense of chaotic randomness would overcome the sense of mystery—but with it, the amnesia itself creates a very intriguing sense of mystery that immediately draws you in.

And even though the protagonist loses his amnesia and regains all most of his memories before the end of the first book, that intriguing sense of mystery continues throughout the next books, because even with all of his memories, there are so many things that he just doesn’t know—not so much about the world, but about the political situation with his conniving family, and all of the events that have transpired in his absence.

And that’s the other thing that makes Nine Princes in Amber such a great amnesia story: the way that we get to discover the fantastical world right alongside the main character as he rediscovers it. And it really is a fantastical world. The basic premise of the series is that the one true world in all the universe is the fantastical kingdom of Amber, and all other worlds—including our own Earth—are but shadows cast by it. The immortal (but not invulnerable) princes and princesses of Amber have the power to “walk through shadow,” or travel between these shadow realms, but mere mortals can only traverse the boundary if one of the royal family transports them. And it’s not just the landscape and people that change from shadow to shadow, but the physical rules of the universe, as well as time and space itself, until you reach the realms of chaos on the outer edge of all existence.

The fact that the protagonist starts off with amnesia means that we get to see and experience the wonder of all of this as he rediscovers it—but because he is indeed one of the princes of Amber, the plot doesn’t slow down at all once he rediscovers the fantasy world and gets all his memories back. Without the amnesia frame story, it would have either been a slow-paced fantasy that evokes a great sense of wonder, or a fast-paced fantasy that’s difficult to follow. Instead, we get the best of both: a fast-paced fantasy that still manages to evoke a great sense of wonder, without losing you along the way.

Which leads me to the final reason why Nine Princes in Amber is such a good amnesia story: the fact that the amnesia is not the main thing that drives the story. Midway through the book, Corwin (the protagonist) finally walks the Pattern and recovers all his memories, which resolves the amnesia subplot—but by then, the main story arc is already well underway, and it doesn’t let up until… well, probably the last book in the series. But because it turns out that the amnesia was just a subplot, and not the overarching story plot itself, we’re able to get a satisfying resolution to it in the first book, instead of getting endlessly strung along by something that increasingly feels like a contrived plot device. And it turns out that there are very good reasons for Corwin’s amnesia, relating to the magic and the political intrigue in Amber. The form of amnesia depicted most often in fiction is an extremely rare condition in real life, so the magical elements underlying it actually lend more credibility to the story, rather than taking credibility away.

All in all, Nine Princes in Amber is a surprisingly good read, and a great first book in an amazing series. These books were published more than fifty years ago, but I’m only just now discovering them, and I can say that they hold up quite well after all these years. I’m currently in the middle of book 4, but I already have lots to say about the others, so you can expect to read quite a few posts on the Chronicles of Amber over the course of the next few weeks.