Crisis of Infinite Identities
I finished Hal Duncan's Vellum last week, much to my relief. The novel was a Xmas present from Mel, which she picked solely on the basis of the jacket copy - which suggests that this novel will be a kind of supernatural, angelpunk, urban fantasy bit of apocalyptica. I usually approach anything which posits a "vast war between angels and demons, Heaven & Hell" with a grain of salt (which in this book is good for warding off both sides of the eschatological divide) as the tale is probably over-worn. However, I went into the book willingly and forcibly did not do any prior research before starting it. This was, perhaps, a mistake.
I won't be coy. The Amazon reviews for the novel are overwhelmingly drear. I don't know if Mr Duncan polices the Amazon reviews for trolls and flames as carefully as other authors do (or if he does it at all), but it is the rare review out of 25+ that is higher than a three star. Most are two or less. Even the spotlight reviews are not very complimentary (although they are mostly balanced). I'm not quite certain what the critical ethical guidelines are for reading other reviews before launching my own, I've usually refrained from doing this (yes, my diatribe on 300 is a big exception to this) - but curiosity got the better of me. I was not surprised by many of the level-headed criticisms (not that the frothing hatred was surprising either) applied to the novel. Myself, I did not hate the novel - but is does remain like a splinter or a hangnail in my mind: something I am worrying at, prodding, allowing to fester insidiously and persistently.
But here's a cut for my thoughts in specific.
In summary, Vellum concerns... Actually, that's part of the problem. It's damned hard to tell anyone what the book is about. There are multiple narratives, non-linear timelines, and overlapping character arcs which muddy-up the novel. Okay, I will try to make this coherent.
In Summary, Vellum establishes the existence of a multiverse reality in which there are certain people, unkin, who have learned to manipulate the language or code of reality. This ability allows them god-like power over the rest of reality and (partial) access outside the static realm of one's own personal facet of the multiverse. In one (or many, or all) of these Earths (the novel is pretty consistent with the idea that all action happens on Earth - whether it be one which is terraformed slightly or drastically differently, or one where an alternate history from ours prevails), there is a dispute being waged between two camps of unkin, The Covenant (whom we are told to identify as "angels") and the Soverign(s) (whom we are told to identify as "demons" - although the source for these designations is hardly a neutral party) over who will control the destiny of their Earth. However, complicating this are neutral, unknown, or unaligned unkin who are either unwilling to choose, defiant of both sides, or uninformed as to their nature. A significant fraction of the novel's action involves the conflict between these two camps, and the efforts they take to force three unaligned unkin into choosing one side or the other. Duncan intelligently notes that neither side cares which side is chosen - as long as all unkin choose one or the other, all the better to fortify their allies/enemies and the system that perpetuates both.
Of course, this is not the only story which is told. The first few dozen pages introduce us to a tangential narrative in which a scholar locates a mythical tome called The Book of All Hours, which allegedly spells out all of creation (all of the created creations, perhaps more) in the most minute detail. "From This Throne, All History Doth Unfold..." as it were. However, upon discovering it, he finds that he has been shot out of his own reality into the multicosm of the Vellum. These tales contain some of the more conventional fanciful fiction backdrops - impossible geographies and abandoned civilizations with awe-inspiring artifacts (the airship-cathedral Search Engine was probably my favorite). It is also among these tales that the reader begins to understand that all the characters occupy a reality separate from our own - whether it is small notes about which side won World War II or larger leaps where Sidhe are the dominant ethnicity in the Western Hemisphere).
Erratically interspersed between these two "major" storylines are dozens of other tales - most of which concern other versions of the very same characters the prior paragraph had been referring to. These tales (some of which only last a few jagged paragraphs) draw attention to the warped mirror analogues of the characters which populate the Vellum's multicosm, most of whom are trapped in warped analogues of the very same action - transposed onto 1960's America, the trenches of the Great War, the Slaves of the American South, or some other less familiar territory. Few other, more substantial tangential storylines also interweave with these, but it would take quite a long time to get through all of them - even in summary. Seriously, it took me three decent-sized paragraphs to even give a basic thrust of what the book is about.
Critically speaking, this is an ambitious novel - even more so since it is Duncan's first. It tackles ancient mythologies, biblical narrative, contemporary history and attempts to meld all of them into a shared and singular foundation for his characters. I have never looked at a book and said, "Damn, I really wish I knew more about Sumerian mythology. It would really help me understand what the hell is going on here." This novel made me do that. Not that Duncan doesn't give you enough to work with. Sumerian (or even pre-Sumerian) mythology is threaded into the narrative next to the action of the first half of the novel, allowing the reader to paddle with the plot's narrative stream (yes, I mixed the fuck out of that metaphor - if you can't follow that, you'll never make it through this novel). I still felt guilty that I didn't know more, couldn't quite see the wires, nor peer through the literary smoke & mirrors. I knew Duncan was playing with the mythology, screwing with the anthropology and the biblical scholarship. This was a comparative religion tossed salad, a goulash of comparative literature. The problem is that I can't tell if I'm dealing with a masterful execution or a jumbled, confused paraded as innovation. That rings my bullshit gong with a jackhammer and I can't stand it.
And I know that Duncan is not a stupid person. I know he's not faking it (well, not exactly, anyway). I've skimmed over his blog. He's a verbose person who can kick out a serious, thoughtful, erudite discussion. I fear that my brain glossed over after the first few screens of the blog entry I was reading. That might have been because I was at work & my brainpower was less than optimal. Regardless, I can see in the novel and in real life that this is not a person who just fucks around on paper and hopes it all works out. I can see he has a plan, I can see that he knows what he is doing, and is executing it the way he feels is best. He is as methodical as he is imaginative (And the book is extremely imaginative in many ways). I just can't always agree with the results.
Problems with the novel.
One, the characters are not very well fleshed out. One of the focal principles in the internal logic of Vellum is that one's identity is marked and shaped by one's true name - what the unkin call a "graving". Unfortunately, for the characters (as literary characters and as, you know, people) is that these gravings can be altered - which fundamentally warp and reshape the personalities, identities, and characteristics of the particular unkin. This happens to several of the main and supporting characters. This has the regrettable result of not only unseating the character's psyche and unraveling their memories and values, but also results in unmooring the reader's emotional connection to the character. On its own, a reader might be able to watch with some pathos as a character is "re-written" into a new person with new values, motivations, impulses, and attitude. However, mixed with the kaleidoscopic narrative which switches from Bob-Prime to Bob-One to Bob-Alpha to Nega-Bob to Bob-Prime to Faerie-Bob, with little but (perhaps) a typographical style change to delineate between the six (or more) versions of the character in various and variant timelines - the reader can just plain get lost. By the time a reader is able to re-establish which version of Bob we are supposed to be paying attention to (another problem: it becomes difficult at moments to distinguish exactly which version of the character carries narrative primacy), the reader's confusion may overwhelm their pathos for what is occurring. By the time that one of the main characters, Phreedom, has established herself as a fully fleshed-out and principle player in the story, she exits the story. Her brother Thomas, one of the other unaligned unkin, never really exhibits any serious characterization in the entirety of the novel. His actions drive the majority of the first half of the novel, but we are no closer to understanding him by the time he exits. His purpose seems to be nothing more than an analogue for the mythological/pre-historical Tammuz (to play off of Phreedom's Inanna) and (of all people) the contemporary Matthew Shepard (more on this in a minute).
Two, the tangential narratives act more like a mirror maze than a jewel. They tend to confuse and distract from the principle narratives rather than highlighting the themes and narrative parallels. There are moments when these do highlight what the reader has to assume as being the principle plot action. However, for every one of these that does, you have other tangents which are followed for far too long. They might be interesting on their own - Jack Carter's (the name being utterly meaningless to pinpoint which Jack Carter we are talking about) epistolary journey to the origin of the unkin was captivating, but largely unnecessary. It was great, but could have been withheld and made into a short story or novella of its own. In fact, many of these other tales would have made damn fine short stories (the tale of Endhaven being another good example) as they really add nothing to the overall arc of the novel as it stands. Sure, some of these potential stories would have made construction of a continuity absolutely chaotic - although once you had the key (they are not all the same characters operating in the same timeline or world), it might be fun to play with who goes where to what events. But in the scope of any novel, this is just effluvia that should have been excised where it was not directly contributing to the plot.
Three. Speaking of which, there's not much of a plot. Okay, okay, we're all living in the twenty-first century, in the realm of hypermodern literature. Do we really need a coherent plot? Do we need narrative drive? Well, no, not religiously. But there is probably a tolerance threshold that an author can expect his audience to have. When you're juggling around multiple perspectives, multiple variant histories, memories, extended flashbacks of dubious origin and reliability, character morphing and persona analogues of high-rank replication-integrity, and thick, heaping helpings of obscure mythology and comparative, all-inclusive literature....it might help to have a damn tight plotline to carry the reader through. A life-line to grasp on to while the reader is tossed on the stormy seas of literary innovation. This life line, as it were, is raggedly frayed and may not hold the weight of this 450+ page tome (and that's at an outsized TPB - you could kill rabbits with this book if it were a MMP). Trimming the fat on this book would have helped a lot, not that I mind reading a long novel - but I don't want to feel like I'm on a forced march.
Four. The first part of the novel have a significant theme inspired by the hate crime surrounding Matthew Shepard. This is mainly portrayed in the tangential narrative involving Reynard Carter (the scholar who locates the Book of All Hours) and the multicosmic analogues of himself and his college friends (one of whom, is named Jack Carter [no relation], causing all kinds of confusion as the story goes on). While I don't want to suggest that hate crimes (especially this one) should not be discussed, or that they don't have a place in a primarily fantasy/sci-fi genre novel. But I didn't exactly see what purpose there was in constantly retreading the issue as demonstrated in the character of Puck. I understood that Duncan was illustrating that the Vellum has echoes of all events present in all variants of the world, that some events are consistent and repeated (ad infinitum, ad nauseaum) throughout the worlds. I understood that Duncan was reiterating the principle that one's multicosmic variants were essentially doomed to repeat certain programs, almost identically, and that escaping into the greater Vellum was perhaps the only way to thwart one's destiny. But I have to question whether the novel really benefited from concentrating overwhelmingly on this one event or the character's homosexuality incessantly. It almost robs the event of its own significance, making what should be reasonably seen as a shocking tragedy and an atrocity as something commonplace and unremarkable. I think the emphasis that was placed on Puck's death(s) undercuts itself, and should have been limited to the Thomas/Tammuz arc and not in the Reynard/Vellum arc (despite the fact that Thomas/Tammuz/Puck are all aspects of each other). I understand that the first part of the novel deals very closely with grief as a theme, but the card was played a little too much and to the detriment of the reader's attention.
Five. This is a little petty and I'll have to apologize for it beforehand. The sequences with Seamus were torturous to read for any length. While he remained a background, supporting character - he was fine. Irish brogue is fine and great in small doses. However, when it appears that probably a third of the words in the novel are summed up in the sentence: "Sure, and you know fookin for sure, and for fooking sure, you know and fookin sure and fookin and sure fookin." Jesus Mary & Joseph, I GET IT. I understand the bastard has a brogue thick enough to lay bricks with. There has got to be a better way for you to establish that the a characters speaks in a dialectical, idiosyncratic manner. The repetitiveness of the language palpably detracted from the interest I had in Seamus' arc in the second half of the novel; a major, possibly crippling impairment.
Okay. I can tell this novel wants to be good. Hell, it wants to be fucking brilliant, earth-shatteringly monumental, an icon to which all subsequent novels will have to be compared. And it's close. Pretty close. Not very close, but close enough. Less than a mile, more than an armspan - something like that. To take a look at the cover blurbs, which are quite complimentary, I realize that they are only so in a particular fashion. Very Obi-Wan Kenobi, this acclaim is true, from a certain point of view. It is probably true that this novel expands on what a fantasy novel can be, how it integrates devices that are not commonly seen in genre fiction (non-linear storytelling, multiple disconnected narratives, etc.). To call it innovative fantasy is not unreasonable. However, like all skirmishes of innovation, it is an experiment. And experiments are not always safe, reliable, or flawless efforts or creations. Vellum is a novel with flaws, even if its author has his heart and his head (mostly) in the right place. I can't think of any other early-career author who could confident that they could try executing (structurally, narratively, thematically) a novel like this. This is fantasy at play in the fields of (post)modern literature. It would take a weighter mind and better scholar than I to unravel all the layers of literary devices (no, these are more like siege engines) and the trickery at play in this novel. I'd love to be able to do it, show you how it works, reverse engineer the novel for you. Can't do it though, I know when I'm out of my depth, a bit beyond my personal discipline as a critical analyst. I'd have to call in a specialist on this one (feel free to volunteer). I can see that a lot of people might try to imitate the play that Duncan works with here. I can see most (if not all) of them failing miserably & pathetically. This was not an easy novel to write, much as it is not an easy novel to read. But it is, perhaps, a bit too ambitious a project for a novelist to launch into for his debut novel.
In essence, Duncan is performing world-building in Vellum. This is a fantasy novel, pure and simple, so world-building is to be expected. Only instead of using Tolkien or Howard or any of a host of other conventional fantasy writers as primary inspiration, he's using Frazier and Campbell. And that's great, that gives the mythology resonance and gravity & all that good chunky stuff you need to make a fantasy story of divinities incarnate ring true. But the novel only needs to do this, and really not too much more, since it is clear that there is a sequel or continuation to this tale (as there is a clear lack of any resolution or conclusion to any of the principle plotlines). But this tale (and its author) would have turned more heads by dealing with the story simply & cutting the fat. I am certain that Duncan may yet master this beast he's foaled, but in the meantime he probably should concentrate more on the conventional foundations of a good novel before running wild with permutations. The devices he uses in this novel would have been better placed in at least the second or third volume of this tale - sometime when his audience would be familiar enough with the internal logic and continuity to withstand significant tampering and upheaval in it.
Yes, this novel is a case of putting the cart before the horse. Or, to be mythological about it, Duncan taking Phaeton's place in the literary chariot. I will note that, once again, typographical tools do not significantly contribute to the novel's clarity and are rendered essentially superfluous. I got used to being mostly confused and didn't want to add my own marginalia to keep track of which variant reality the story was operating in. Would I recommend this novel to others? Well, only with heavy disclaimers. 1. It's not an easy read. 2. It makes you think more about how the author is writing rather than what he is writing. 3. The lack of linear plot or any resolution (and I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to conclusions, or at least fade-outs), or much in the way of explanations of what is happening or why it is important. 4. Seamus' brogue will probably make your face bleed.
I almost suspect that Vellum is designed much like the Lord of The Rings, where the whole story is supposed to be in one gigantic volume, but has been edited down to several separate novels. I am tempted to read the second volume, Ink, to see if Duncan builds any more on his tale from a narrative standpoint. However, I'll probably skim the reviews after posting this to see if it continues in this vein or not. He's too clever of an author to dismiss entirely, but he just might be too clever by half. I've got pretty little patience for that.
-12th.
I won't be coy. The Amazon reviews for the novel are overwhelmingly drear. I don't know if Mr Duncan polices the Amazon reviews for trolls and flames as carefully as other authors do (or if he does it at all), but it is the rare review out of 25+ that is higher than a three star. Most are two or less. Even the spotlight reviews are not very complimentary (although they are mostly balanced). I'm not quite certain what the critical ethical guidelines are for reading other reviews before launching my own, I've usually refrained from doing this (yes, my diatribe on 300 is a big exception to this) - but curiosity got the better of me. I was not surprised by many of the level-headed criticisms (not that the frothing hatred was surprising either) applied to the novel. Myself, I did not hate the novel - but is does remain like a splinter or a hangnail in my mind: something I am worrying at, prodding, allowing to fester insidiously and persistently.
But here's a cut for my thoughts in specific.
In summary, Vellum concerns... Actually, that's part of the problem. It's damned hard to tell anyone what the book is about. There are multiple narratives, non-linear timelines, and overlapping character arcs which muddy-up the novel. Okay, I will try to make this coherent.
In Summary, Vellum establishes the existence of a multiverse reality in which there are certain people, unkin, who have learned to manipulate the language or code of reality. This ability allows them god-like power over the rest of reality and (partial) access outside the static realm of one's own personal facet of the multiverse. In one (or many, or all) of these Earths (the novel is pretty consistent with the idea that all action happens on Earth - whether it be one which is terraformed slightly or drastically differently, or one where an alternate history from ours prevails), there is a dispute being waged between two camps of unkin, The Covenant (whom we are told to identify as "angels") and the Soverign(s) (whom we are told to identify as "demons" - although the source for these designations is hardly a neutral party) over who will control the destiny of their Earth. However, complicating this are neutral, unknown, or unaligned unkin who are either unwilling to choose, defiant of both sides, or uninformed as to their nature. A significant fraction of the novel's action involves the conflict between these two camps, and the efforts they take to force three unaligned unkin into choosing one side or the other. Duncan intelligently notes that neither side cares which side is chosen - as long as all unkin choose one or the other, all the better to fortify their allies/enemies and the system that perpetuates both.
Of course, this is not the only story which is told. The first few dozen pages introduce us to a tangential narrative in which a scholar locates a mythical tome called The Book of All Hours, which allegedly spells out all of creation (all of the created creations, perhaps more) in the most minute detail. "From This Throne, All History Doth Unfold..." as it were. However, upon discovering it, he finds that he has been shot out of his own reality into the multicosm of the Vellum. These tales contain some of the more conventional fanciful fiction backdrops - impossible geographies and abandoned civilizations with awe-inspiring artifacts (the airship-cathedral Search Engine was probably my favorite). It is also among these tales that the reader begins to understand that all the characters occupy a reality separate from our own - whether it is small notes about which side won World War II or larger leaps where Sidhe are the dominant ethnicity in the Western Hemisphere).
Erratically interspersed between these two "major" storylines are dozens of other tales - most of which concern other versions of the very same characters the prior paragraph had been referring to. These tales (some of which only last a few jagged paragraphs) draw attention to the warped mirror analogues of the characters which populate the Vellum's multicosm, most of whom are trapped in warped analogues of the very same action - transposed onto 1960's America, the trenches of the Great War, the Slaves of the American South, or some other less familiar territory. Few other, more substantial tangential storylines also interweave with these, but it would take quite a long time to get through all of them - even in summary. Seriously, it took me three decent-sized paragraphs to even give a basic thrust of what the book is about.
Critically speaking, this is an ambitious novel - even more so since it is Duncan's first. It tackles ancient mythologies, biblical narrative, contemporary history and attempts to meld all of them into a shared and singular foundation for his characters. I have never looked at a book and said, "Damn, I really wish I knew more about Sumerian mythology. It would really help me understand what the hell is going on here." This novel made me do that. Not that Duncan doesn't give you enough to work with. Sumerian (or even pre-Sumerian) mythology is threaded into the narrative next to the action of the first half of the novel, allowing the reader to paddle with the plot's narrative stream (yes, I mixed the fuck out of that metaphor - if you can't follow that, you'll never make it through this novel). I still felt guilty that I didn't know more, couldn't quite see the wires, nor peer through the literary smoke & mirrors. I knew Duncan was playing with the mythology, screwing with the anthropology and the biblical scholarship. This was a comparative religion tossed salad, a goulash of comparative literature. The problem is that I can't tell if I'm dealing with a masterful execution or a jumbled, confused paraded as innovation. That rings my bullshit gong with a jackhammer and I can't stand it.
And I know that Duncan is not a stupid person. I know he's not faking it (well, not exactly, anyway). I've skimmed over his blog. He's a verbose person who can kick out a serious, thoughtful, erudite discussion. I fear that my brain glossed over after the first few screens of the blog entry I was reading. That might have been because I was at work & my brainpower was less than optimal. Regardless, I can see in the novel and in real life that this is not a person who just fucks around on paper and hopes it all works out. I can see he has a plan, I can see that he knows what he is doing, and is executing it the way he feels is best. He is as methodical as he is imaginative (And the book is extremely imaginative in many ways). I just can't always agree with the results.
Problems with the novel.
One, the characters are not very well fleshed out. One of the focal principles in the internal logic of Vellum is that one's identity is marked and shaped by one's true name - what the unkin call a "graving". Unfortunately, for the characters (as literary characters and as, you know, people) is that these gravings can be altered - which fundamentally warp and reshape the personalities, identities, and characteristics of the particular unkin. This happens to several of the main and supporting characters. This has the regrettable result of not only unseating the character's psyche and unraveling their memories and values, but also results in unmooring the reader's emotional connection to the character. On its own, a reader might be able to watch with some pathos as a character is "re-written" into a new person with new values, motivations, impulses, and attitude. However, mixed with the kaleidoscopic narrative which switches from Bob-Prime to Bob-One to Bob-Alpha to Nega-Bob to Bob-Prime to Faerie-Bob, with little but (perhaps) a typographical style change to delineate between the six (or more) versions of the character in various and variant timelines - the reader can just plain get lost. By the time a reader is able to re-establish which version of Bob we are supposed to be paying attention to (another problem: it becomes difficult at moments to distinguish exactly which version of the character carries narrative primacy), the reader's confusion may overwhelm their pathos for what is occurring. By the time that one of the main characters, Phreedom, has established herself as a fully fleshed-out and principle player in the story, she exits the story. Her brother Thomas, one of the other unaligned unkin, never really exhibits any serious characterization in the entirety of the novel. His actions drive the majority of the first half of the novel, but we are no closer to understanding him by the time he exits. His purpose seems to be nothing more than an analogue for the mythological/pre-historical Tammuz (to play off of Phreedom's Inanna) and (of all people) the contemporary Matthew Shepard (more on this in a minute).
Two, the tangential narratives act more like a mirror maze than a jewel. They tend to confuse and distract from the principle narratives rather than highlighting the themes and narrative parallels. There are moments when these do highlight what the reader has to assume as being the principle plot action. However, for every one of these that does, you have other tangents which are followed for far too long. They might be interesting on their own - Jack Carter's (the name being utterly meaningless to pinpoint which Jack Carter we are talking about) epistolary journey to the origin of the unkin was captivating, but largely unnecessary. It was great, but could have been withheld and made into a short story or novella of its own. In fact, many of these other tales would have made damn fine short stories (the tale of Endhaven being another good example) as they really add nothing to the overall arc of the novel as it stands. Sure, some of these potential stories would have made construction of a continuity absolutely chaotic - although once you had the key (they are not all the same characters operating in the same timeline or world), it might be fun to play with who goes where to what events. But in the scope of any novel, this is just effluvia that should have been excised where it was not directly contributing to the plot.
Three. Speaking of which, there's not much of a plot. Okay, okay, we're all living in the twenty-first century, in the realm of hypermodern literature. Do we really need a coherent plot? Do we need narrative drive? Well, no, not religiously. But there is probably a tolerance threshold that an author can expect his audience to have. When you're juggling around multiple perspectives, multiple variant histories, memories, extended flashbacks of dubious origin and reliability, character morphing and persona analogues of high-rank replication-integrity, and thick, heaping helpings of obscure mythology and comparative, all-inclusive literature....it might help to have a damn tight plotline to carry the reader through. A life-line to grasp on to while the reader is tossed on the stormy seas of literary innovation. This life line, as it were, is raggedly frayed and may not hold the weight of this 450+ page tome (and that's at an outsized TPB - you could kill rabbits with this book if it were a MMP). Trimming the fat on this book would have helped a lot, not that I mind reading a long novel - but I don't want to feel like I'm on a forced march.
Four. The first part of the novel have a significant theme inspired by the hate crime surrounding Matthew Shepard. This is mainly portrayed in the tangential narrative involving Reynard Carter (the scholar who locates the Book of All Hours) and the multicosmic analogues of himself and his college friends (one of whom, is named Jack Carter [no relation], causing all kinds of confusion as the story goes on). While I don't want to suggest that hate crimes (especially this one) should not be discussed, or that they don't have a place in a primarily fantasy/sci-fi genre novel. But I didn't exactly see what purpose there was in constantly retreading the issue as demonstrated in the character of Puck. I understood that Duncan was illustrating that the Vellum has echoes of all events present in all variants of the world, that some events are consistent and repeated (ad infinitum, ad nauseaum) throughout the worlds. I understood that Duncan was reiterating the principle that one's multicosmic variants were essentially doomed to repeat certain programs, almost identically, and that escaping into the greater Vellum was perhaps the only way to thwart one's destiny. But I have to question whether the novel really benefited from concentrating overwhelmingly on this one event or the character's homosexuality incessantly. It almost robs the event of its own significance, making what should be reasonably seen as a shocking tragedy and an atrocity as something commonplace and unremarkable. I think the emphasis that was placed on Puck's death(s) undercuts itself, and should have been limited to the Thomas/Tammuz arc and not in the Reynard/Vellum arc (despite the fact that Thomas/Tammuz/Puck are all aspects of each other). I understand that the first part of the novel deals very closely with grief as a theme, but the card was played a little too much and to the detriment of the reader's attention.
Five. This is a little petty and I'll have to apologize for it beforehand. The sequences with Seamus were torturous to read for any length. While he remained a background, supporting character - he was fine. Irish brogue is fine and great in small doses. However, when it appears that probably a third of the words in the novel are summed up in the sentence: "Sure, and you know fookin for sure, and for fooking sure, you know and fookin sure and fookin and sure fookin." Jesus Mary & Joseph, I GET IT. I understand the bastard has a brogue thick enough to lay bricks with. There has got to be a better way for you to establish that the a characters speaks in a dialectical, idiosyncratic manner. The repetitiveness of the language palpably detracted from the interest I had in Seamus' arc in the second half of the novel; a major, possibly crippling impairment.
Okay. I can tell this novel wants to be good. Hell, it wants to be fucking brilliant, earth-shatteringly monumental, an icon to which all subsequent novels will have to be compared. And it's close. Pretty close. Not very close, but close enough. Less than a mile, more than an armspan - something like that. To take a look at the cover blurbs, which are quite complimentary, I realize that they are only so in a particular fashion. Very Obi-Wan Kenobi, this acclaim is true, from a certain point of view. It is probably true that this novel expands on what a fantasy novel can be, how it integrates devices that are not commonly seen in genre fiction (non-linear storytelling, multiple disconnected narratives, etc.). To call it innovative fantasy is not unreasonable. However, like all skirmishes of innovation, it is an experiment. And experiments are not always safe, reliable, or flawless efforts or creations. Vellum is a novel with flaws, even if its author has his heart and his head (mostly) in the right place. I can't think of any other early-career author who could confident that they could try executing (structurally, narratively, thematically) a novel like this. This is fantasy at play in the fields of (post)modern literature. It would take a weighter mind and better scholar than I to unravel all the layers of literary devices (no, these are more like siege engines) and the trickery at play in this novel. I'd love to be able to do it, show you how it works, reverse engineer the novel for you. Can't do it though, I know when I'm out of my depth, a bit beyond my personal discipline as a critical analyst. I'd have to call in a specialist on this one (feel free to volunteer). I can see that a lot of people might try to imitate the play that Duncan works with here. I can see most (if not all) of them failing miserably & pathetically. This was not an easy novel to write, much as it is not an easy novel to read. But it is, perhaps, a bit too ambitious a project for a novelist to launch into for his debut novel.
In essence, Duncan is performing world-building in Vellum. This is a fantasy novel, pure and simple, so world-building is to be expected. Only instead of using Tolkien or Howard or any of a host of other conventional fantasy writers as primary inspiration, he's using Frazier and Campbell. And that's great, that gives the mythology resonance and gravity & all that good chunky stuff you need to make a fantasy story of divinities incarnate ring true. But the novel only needs to do this, and really not too much more, since it is clear that there is a sequel or continuation to this tale (as there is a clear lack of any resolution or conclusion to any of the principle plotlines). But this tale (and its author) would have turned more heads by dealing with the story simply & cutting the fat. I am certain that Duncan may yet master this beast he's foaled, but in the meantime he probably should concentrate more on the conventional foundations of a good novel before running wild with permutations. The devices he uses in this novel would have been better placed in at least the second or third volume of this tale - sometime when his audience would be familiar enough with the internal logic and continuity to withstand significant tampering and upheaval in it.
Yes, this novel is a case of putting the cart before the horse. Or, to be mythological about it, Duncan taking Phaeton's place in the literary chariot. I will note that, once again, typographical tools do not significantly contribute to the novel's clarity and are rendered essentially superfluous. I got used to being mostly confused and didn't want to add my own marginalia to keep track of which variant reality the story was operating in. Would I recommend this novel to others? Well, only with heavy disclaimers. 1. It's not an easy read. 2. It makes you think more about how the author is writing rather than what he is writing. 3. The lack of linear plot or any resolution (and I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to conclusions, or at least fade-outs), or much in the way of explanations of what is happening or why it is important. 4. Seamus' brogue will probably make your face bleed.
I almost suspect that Vellum is designed much like the Lord of The Rings, where the whole story is supposed to be in one gigantic volume, but has been edited down to several separate novels. I am tempted to read the second volume, Ink, to see if Duncan builds any more on his tale from a narrative standpoint. However, I'll probably skim the reviews after posting this to see if it continues in this vein or not. He's too clever of an author to dismiss entirely, but he just might be too clever by half. I've got pretty little patience for that.
-12th.