I get the impression that at various times in his career Roger Zelazny got awfully lazy; it's testament to the quality of his best work that he's considered a top-rate SF author, despite abortions like the second five Amber books and other disasters blighting his back catalogue. Frequent readers of Ferretbrain may remember my intense dislike of To Die In Italbar, and how I accused Zelazny of essentially handing in his first draft without bothering to tidy it up at all.

I get the same impression from Jack of Shadows, although mercifully this time we're treated to a half-decent first draft. Nonetheless, a little more work could have tightened this one up, fixed the pacing, and generally made it a superior work.

Some of the problems with the structure of the book may come from the circumstances of its original publication - as a two-part serial in an SF magazine. Then again, that's only appropriate, because this is a novel mainly about division - within society, and within individuals. The book is set on a planet where one hemisphere always faces the Sun, and one always faces away. In the East, where there is perpetual day, science rules, in the eternal night of the West magic rules unchallenged. The denizens of both halves of the world have their own ways of making their sides inhabitable, preventing the nightside from freezing and the Eastern hemisphere from boiling. Jack of Shadows is a denizen of the nightside, human yet inhuman, apparently soulless like all the nightlanders, and like all the nightlanders possessing more than one life - whenever a nightlander dies, so long as he or she still has lives remaining to them they are resurrected in the Dung Pits of Glyve.

Like any decent sword and sorcery hero (or antihero) Jack is a thief, and at the start of the novel is executed for attempting to steal the fabulous gemstone, the Hellflame. But he's also one of the Lords of the nightside, one whose realm is mobile - he rules anywhere where light casts a shadow. As such, he's part of the feudal political landscape of the nightside, and it does not escape his attention that his execution was the result of a trap set by his rival, the Lord of Bats. Emerging from the Dung Pits, Jack heads East to seek revenge by using an Easterner supercomputer to recover the secret magical key of absolute power.

Like I said, this novel was originally published as a two-part serial, and it's reasonably easy to see where the dividing line is. The first half of the book consists of Jack emerging from the Dung Pits, meeting various people in his journey across the night land, and eventually winning through to the East. The second half of the book begins years later, as Jack's research in the East has come to fruition, and follows him as he goes back West, takes over the hemisphere, meets his soul, is ultimately reconciled with it, and overturns the entire basis of the world. The problem comes with the pacing: the first half simply drags, and concerns itself almost entirely with a single journey. The second half is crammed with events and goes past at a lightning pace, but feels rushed, as if Zelazny had to struggle to cram all the various incidents in.

The first half, with all of Jack's encounters with people from his past, is clearly meant to set up the second half, where the ultimate results of those encounters come to fruition. However, that means that half of the book is entirely devoted to setup, nothing else, and the other half is entirely devoted to resolution, nothing else. (It must have been particular boring for readers back in the deal who read it in its serialised form, who had to wait an entire month before the second half of the story was published and things could finally start happening.) It is brutally apparent that Zelazny simply tore the two halves of the story out of the magazine, slapped them together and sold them as a novel, rather than revising them at all, and this is a shame: had the pacing issues been fixed, this would be a superior book. While the structure of the novel does resonate nicely with the theme of binary division, sometimes theme has to take a back seat to readability and keeping the reader interested.