COURTS OF CHAOS

This volume concludes a remarkably popular sword-and-sorcery chronicle about the children of Oberon, a swarm of rival royal siblings in a corner of space/time (""Amber"") whose continued existence involves a sort of jiggery-pokery hopscotch court called ""the Pattern."" The madly shifting alliances of Corwin (the narrator), Brand, Fiona, Random, Deirdre, and the rest are sorted out in the final battle of Amber with its enemy and opposing principle, the Courts of Chaos. Often clever and thoughtful writer, Zelazny here is an anything-goes artist who slaps together Yeatsian imagery and paradoxes of cause and identity with the aid of a perfunctorily realized fantasy-landscape and a style of jarring unpredictability. Admirers of the series profess to find in it all sorts of Jungian resonances and manipulation of witty incongruities. The rest of us will be rather relieved to see it end.