Whereupon Paul takes the road to the Last Exit to Babylon and once again explores a classic of the Roger Zelazny oeuvre, Roadmarks and finds some pleasures, but also some potholes as well.
The road goes ever on and on and he must follow it if he can. The he in this case is Red Dorakeen, one of those people who have the knack of finding the temporal highway that connects times and places across history, from the neolithic to the far future. What he is and what he is about is a mystery, partly even to him, but especially to the lives of those he intersects. From two AIs in the form of books, to an alien robot to his own son, to his greatest enemy, all of these lives intersect and tangle on the Road.
Their stories are the matter of Roger Zelazny’s Roadmarks, first published in 1979.
Red Dorakeen fits in with a lot of Zelazny protagonists, like Corwin of Amber, Sam, and Conrad. Wanderers, adventurers, older than they look or even think that they are. Missing memories and murky pasts, to the reader as well as themselves. Self appointed guardians or righters of a wrong, even if they only themselves see as a wrong. Mostly loners, although there is always a woman, like Dara, or Kali, or Cassandra, who intersects their life, sometimes rather sharply.
And then there is the Road. A little more limited than the endless shadow of the Amber multiverse, the Road does span alternate branches or worlds as well as places. It’s possible to make a new branch, or make an old lost branch something again (as Red tries to do in the book: he wants the Greeks to once again win at Marathon), but there are no Courts of Chaos, no Founts of Power, here. But the variety of the road and the places once can reach it on Earth, from the Last Exit to Babylon to 12th Century Byzantium, to 27th century Earth (a future that was reminiscent of another time travel novel, The Corridors of Time by Poul Anderson).
But most of the action takes place in and on the road itself. The road is a timeless place, for wanderers, the lost, the forgotten, the misfits. It has a life, a culture, a rhythm of its own. There are wonders to be found…but Red’s life is not one of peace. No, he is driven, and striven by his passion to “set what right what has gone wrong” and change history. Even he isn’t quite sure what he is doing and why. At first. He acts on instinct, on reaction, in response to the Black Decade before he is finally roused to take proactive action himself.
But then there is that bit on memories I just mentioned. It turns out as Red progresses, as he has encounter after encounter, memories of who and what he is slowly returns. He keeps this close to his chest, and Zelazny teases it out for the reader until the denouement, when all becomes clear. In the meantime, Red’s point of view is half of the book, the “One” chapters. The “Two” chapters which alternate with Red’s relatively linear development, jump all over the place, in terms of the characters in them, where they are in the narrative, and their relationship to the story. Some of these feel bits of other stories that intrude onto Red’s plot themselves, although they all do connect in one way or another. Mainly, they connect through Red’s adversary who has declared a vendetta, a “Black Decade” against him. Thus, Red is beset by a variety of assassins who are dealt with and deal with each other in a chaotic, haphazard fashion.
I forgot, on this re-reading, how funny and amusing some of the book could be. It can be a droll sort of humor, but when your fearless assassin does not perform as he should or could, even with your perfect control over him, and he explains patiently why (and later reiterated by Red), well, I find that funny. Or when the Marquis de Sade finally gets control of…well, I best not spoil THAT bit. And for all that Red is under the Black Decade, it is a remarkably lighthearted book for the adventures and misadventures he gets into, and the stakes never feel as strong as all that.
But yet there is emotional depth and resonance here for the fact that the book is lighthearted. There are intimations of what it means to be long aged (several of the characters are, after all, including Red) and what that does to a person. Red actually gets younger as the story goes on, for reasons never completely explained but make sense if you look at who and what he is. Perhaps the novel is a meditation upon aging, death and changing who and what you are because in the end you cannot do what you have been doing, forever. Or if you cannot change yourself in this time and place, you can help others change. Red DOES wind up building a small community of friends and allies from across time and space with him.
And that makes me think of the Pelgrane Press time travel RPG Timewatch. You could use the rules from that game to tell stories on the road. A lot of the things that make Timewatch timewatch wouldn’t quite work here, but it would be the best system I think to capture heroes who are wandering the road, investigating matters, seeing who is messing with time by trying to make side roads and making them the main roads, and of course running into all sorts of figures from history. Unlike Timewatch where you are mainly interacting with them in their own time periods (unless they are agents of Timewatch or a rival organization), in this campaign frame, that person pumping gas on the station on the Byzantine Cutoff might, in fact, be the Emperor Hadrian.
On that point, there are a lot of literary cameos and appearances in the novel. There are some minor characters from history, like The Marquis de Sade (whom I could not help but see in my head as Geoffrey Rush), and appearances by a certain leader of Germany, Doc Savage, and possibly others I did not recognize. Zelazny has a lot of fun with these character appearances and like, say, Howard Waldrop, doesn’t care whether or not you get the reference, they are there to be discovered). The Ais themselves, based on the personification of two books, is also delightful (and reminds me and prefigures a similar technique Gene Wolfe would use in A Borrowed Man).
Ideas get tossed off like matches in the endless smoking (blech) that happens in the novel, and frankly, while the novel is a lean and mean 192 pages (about 6 hours in audio), it is too idea-dense for the structure of the plot that holds it. It ultimately does not succeed as a novel. Zelazny tried to cram several plots and ideas into this novel at once– Red’s fight against his vendetta, Red’s true nature, the nature of time travel and changing time, Randy trying to find his father (and that seems to prefigure a bit of Merlin and Corwin in the second Amber Chronicles), the backstories of all the assassins and their various deals. Questions arise and are barely answered and a lot is left on the table, as it were. It can be rather frustrating.
Not for a sequel, I think, this story of Red is complete in and of itself, but there is plenty of room for more stories set on this endless road to times and places. And perhaps answer or develop some of the toss-off ideas we see here. I can also definitely see how Max Gladstone was inspired by this book in his own interdimensional and intertemporal novel Last Exit, and readers who enjoyed the one will definitely, I think, enjoy the other. Another recent touchstone is Tim Powers’ Alternate Routes, with phantom highways, entrances and exits, and a very disconcerting place on the other side of them.
The core ideas, however, remain a bit unexplained and underutilized, and while I left the novel satisfied with what I had, I think there could have been, and perhaps should have been more. In this day and age, the novel probably would be padded out to a trilogy, to its detriment, but in my tastes in this and age, it is a little too spare for its own good. Revel and enjoy what you have here, and drink deeply, but sadly, it is all too short a draught.
It must be finally said, though, that for a moderate haul (6-8 hours) of a road trip, the audio narration is fantastic and if you are the kind of person who enjoys “road books” while driving on the road, then Roadmarks will definitely fit that bill. Sure, you might stare at that woman at the gas station, wondering if she really is Anna Komnene after or while listening to this book, but that’s the hazards of reading and enjoying a book such as Roadmarks.
(Amber Ltd., 2021)
