Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

psychological walking wounded who despite lifestyles that (superficially at least) we would all envy are
nevertheless consumed by internal devils and immoral imperatives.
However despite being larger than life the characters always remain credible. This is one of Zelazny's
greatest strengths -- that he can make you believe in these grotesques and cheer for their triumphs,
weep for their tragedies. That alone would mark him as a writer of immense skill. The reader always feels
involved in the novel.
He returned to the theme again in Creatures of Light and Darkness. Similar in scope to Lord of
Light, this time the gods are taken from the Egyptian pantheon. The novel was much less successful
than its predecessor, probably because Egyptian mythology is less familiar to modern audiences and the
reworking of the material remained obscure as a result. I found the book quite confusing and hard to
follow.
Three times is the charm. Zelazny returned to the theme of man aspiring to godhood once more in Isle
of the Dead, published in the same year as Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969-1970 was a
very prolific year for him). This time he created his own pantheon instead of milking an already existing
earthly one. Francis Sandow (a man from the twentieth century) becomes a god of the alien Pei'ans. He
is Shimbo of Darktree, Shrugger of Thunders (what a lovely phrase).
The novel charts his return to a world he created many years before, Illyria and his dark masterpiece the
Isle of the Dead. To his horror, after his years of absence and neglect, he finds it devastated and
polluted, emptied of people. It is the creation of another Pei'an god, Belion. The gods must contest to
resolve this.
I think that Isle of the Dead is the strongest book of the three.
One of the disadvantages of Zelazny's decision to use an existing pantheon in Lord of Light and
Creatures of Light and Darkness is that it made it hard to control the flow. Whether he liked it or
not, invoking that mythology dragged with it all the baggage of inherited legend it had accumulated over
the years. It invoked images that sometimes were inappropriate because of the archetypal nature of the
particular myth, and that tied his hands. The books often read as if the writer was struggling against his
own characters simply to satisfy the demands of the myth-as-is, rather than the myth-as-he-would-likeit-to-be.
With a newly invented pantheon and a blank canvas in Isle of the Dead there was more
freedom to explore and I never felt (as I did with the earlier books) that dead weight of centuries of
earth-bound tradition. It was a freer, more satisfying book as a result. Not everyone would agree with
me (and the fact that Lord of Light won a Hugo and is famous and Isle of the Dead did not win a
Hugo and is relatively obscure speaks for itself).
Francis Sandow returned in a later novel, To Die in Italbar, a novel of the plague and an examination of
the fine dividing line between healing and slaying. Many doctors have the touch of death.
The works that followed these early triumphs began to show a general decline and he produced a
stream of books (mainly fantasies) which were often pedestrian and plodding, indistinguishable from a
thousand others (the Dilvish books, for example). During this time he seemed to be concentrating on
his Amber series, an open-ended novel which started promisingly but eventually degenerated into soap
opera. Other books were, perhaps, written with his "left hand" as the Amber books developed.
The first of the Amber series, Nine Princes in Amber, introduced a typical Zelazny hero; a man with
no memory of his past. Gradually through incident and interaction with people who clearly know who he
is (and assume that he does too) he learns that he is Corwin, a prince of Amber. Amber is the centre of
the universe (in a sense Amber is the universe) and the reality we know, and many other realities as well
are just shadows cast by Amber. Ousted in a palace coup, Corwin has spent many years living in one or
more of these shadow worlds. This book and later ones chronicle his ever more elaborate (and
confusing) attempts to regain his rightful position in Amber. Thwarted on every side by friends and
relatives, making and breaking alliances, Corwin struggles on. After a while a sameness develops, a
feeling of over-familiarity. Boredom sets in. The tale is too long in the telling.