Ink: The Book of All Hours (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: chi lance, chi blasts, chi gun, Jack Flash, Joey Narcosis, Captain Carter (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This stimulating and bruising sequel to Scottish author Duncan's neo-Joycean Vellum (2006) projects the endless battle between good and evil onto a kaleidoscopic multitude of parallel alternative realities. Duncan's debut introduced bionanotech-enhanced humans, who clashed with ordinary humans in a 2017 apocalypse. The Carter family of Glasgow guarded the God-commissioned titular Book, but now the scribe and angel Metatron has hidden the Book somewhere in the infinite folds of a realm called the Vellum and is preparing to die. Meanwhile, a host of eerie characters, including foul-mouthed Jack "Flash" Carter, Puck-figure Thomas Messenger and Jack's shrink, Guy Renard Carter, search for the Book. Full of riffs on myths from throughout human history as well as allusions to Euripides'Bacchae, this enormous, stinging, poignant hymn engenders a terrible beauty all its own. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

In the sequel to Vellum (2005), the Covenant has been broken, but the angel and demon unkin still compete for power over the worlds of the Vellum. Playing out against a backdrop of futurism and fascism and little pockets of stagnant order--havens, where the bitmites make all the things humans have ever dreamed up possible--the split parts of Mad Jack, Joey Narcosis, Phreedom, and the rest of their crew seek to rewrite the Book of All Hours and bring the angels and demons to their knees for good. Duncan's multilayered storytelling--a mad ride through alternate histories of the twentieth century and beyond--makes for a complex and tangled narrative whose strands are slowly woven together to a satisfying denouement. As in Vellum, Duncan draws on classical sources in Ink, this time Euripides' Bacchae and some of Virgil's pastoral works, to great effect. Ink delivers beautifully on the promise of Vellum, with an excellent mixture of adventure, danger, and the fantastic. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey; 1st soft cover edition (February 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345487338
• ISBN-13: 978-0345487339
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #662,390 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Just not worth it, May 15, 2007

By	R. Stephens - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Just finished Ink, which I read straight after finishing Vellum. I wanted this to be a great book (although I would have settled for a really good one), but unfortunately it just feels like my time was robbed. The duology has some really cool imagery, good use of language (some might find it too flowery in places), some interesting play with history, some neat takes on religion--but despite all that, it just doesn't add up to much of anything.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hard to Read, Hard to Put Down, November 1, 2007

By	John E. Mack (New London, Minnesota United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I remember when T.V. Guide used to rate televised movies that it gave a "two-star" rating to Charleton Heston's version of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" and a three-star rating to "Batman Returns." And I remember thinking that surely a second-rate "Caesar" deserved a better rating than a first-rate "Batman." I had similar thoughts about Duncan's "Ink." The book has considerable flaws -- for example, it is an incoherent mess. But its learning is so pervasive, its concept so grand, and its plotting so intricate that I hated to give it less than five stars when I have given five stars to, e.g., a Suzie Grafton mystery novel.

Perhaps the least bad way to read this book is to treat it as a series of loosely connected short stories involving the same (or similar) characters placed in different settings in different worlds. This book and its predecessor, "Vellum," is based upon the idea that the universe is a series of alternative worlds somehow connected to each other by "folds" in an overworld (or something like that -- as is often the case with this book, it is hard to tell whether Duncan's vision is inscrutably subtle or merely incomprehensible). Moreover, each of the different "worldlets" can be altered by the actions of the characters both in that world and in some other word (and apparently in the overworld as well). In turn, the worlds, the worldlets, and the overworld are somehow controlled by a book, called "The Book of All Hours" which exists, in various forms, in the various worldlets, and this book in some manner controls the fate of the world and worldlets themselves. How this plays out is a bit confusing. Finally, it appears that doing something -- it is not clear what -- with the Book of All Hours can cause the worldlets to coalesce (or collapse) into one (or perhaps more) universes.

Anyway, the characters are put through their paces in different stories in different settings in different worldlets. Whether these different stories are supposed to be simultaneous, serial, or whether the notions of time itself are irrelevant or plastic is not always clear. But it is fascinating to observe how what purports to be the same human material acts very differently in very different contexts -- a theme that has not received as much fictional treatment as one would think it deserves.

Duncan attempts to wrap all of this disparate material up in the last fifty-or-so pages. His long (too long?) denoument imagines his surviving characters in one world where they seem to enjoy one unified and rather peaceful existence. In my opinion, Duncan's mountainous plot has given birth to a mouse, but his alternative may have been to leave his magnum opus in shaggy-dog land.

Perhaps the most interest comment on Duncan's efforts was found in Fantasy and Science Fiction's review of "Vellum." The reviewer concluded that he really had to read to book over to be certain he got what it had to offer. I only wish I could be sure that Duncan has enough to offer to make the effort worth its while. Maybe T.V. Guide had it right, after all.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Confusing, incoherent, and a bit too glib, July 8, 2009

By	D. Seward (Ashland, MA - USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

After struggling through 150 pages or so of this book, I'm going to put it down. I made what may have been an important mistake in reading this before Vellum, but I honestly doubt it. This story is too discordant to really make any sense in the long run.

It's not that this book is too complex for me to figure out - I've read a lot of fantasy and classic literature both - it's just that it borders on nonsense. Duncan follows a central cast of characters through a few instances that are possibly parallel universes. There's a sci-fi trope, some bizarre reenactment of a classic Greek play, and possibly some other incidentals. I can't ever really tell which iterations of the characters I'm following.

As far as I can tell, this confusion is the premise of the book - the world has devolved into an overlapping series of potentialities. It feels like Duncan had read some theoretical physics and wanted to explore Multiverses or parallel worlds. There's a brief moment of narrative clarity when you see that this is actually the result of some otherworldly plotting by angels or something, but this glimmer of explanation is abandoned as quickly as it is shown to the reader. Perhaps this is explained in Vellum.

As a personal, stylistic complaint, Duncan spends far too much time alliterating. The book is an incessant stream of just-out-of-place words that start with the same letter, which became irritating after 30 pages. By 150 pages it had me grinding my teeth. Others may appreciate the style; the playfulness with words fits with the whole concept of Vellum & Ink, reality fractured into the possibilities of writing. But for me it was simply irritating.

I can tell that Duncan had a grand vision of something here, but the execution is flawed to the point that I would rather abandon the book and author than go back and read Vellum or forge ahead with this work. This book will only appeal to you if you do not require a followable story; Duncan is a talented writer who can paint a vivid picture with his words, but the visions he creates are dissonant to the point of frustration, and through that to boredom and detachment.