Customer Reviews

Vellum: The Book of All Hours

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

Vellum is a non-linear re-imagining of the world's myths and religions through an end-of-the-world scenario, intertwining many thematic elements of horror, science fiction and fantasy. I loved reading it, it was challenging, grand, audacious, and engaging. If you enjoy reading challenging fantasy/sci-fi/horror and can tolerate non-linear narrative than you will love reading this novel. Though as a reader that enjoys non-linear narrative it is not without its literary criticisms. Warning there is a lot of homo-erotic imagery (which doesn't quite cross the line of gratuitous).if you have problems with that, best to avoid this work.

Overall Vellum follows the story of six or seven characters through different incarnations and histories which are intertwined through myth and history and legend through to the end of this world and the next. The overriding thread that ties these characters through all of their different incarnations is the Vellum, the Book of Names, the Book of all hours, in which all that exists or will exist in this existence, or the next (or the existence next-door) is written. The characters are members of the Unkin whom have the word of god, or their mystical names placed on their very being. These characters are the incarnations, re-incarnations, and re-iterations of the various gods, spirits, angels and demon archetypes. They play and re-play their parts throughout histories both real and imagined from the beginning of the world to the end, through this world and the next and are inferred in an infinity of other worlds throughout the book. Hal Duncan has drawn parallels of the different spiritual archetypes and strung them together into a narrative that encompasses the genres of classic and contemporary horror, post-modernism, cyber-punk and pulp sci-fi-fantasy. The cast is a who's who of "Finches Mythology" from ancient Sumer to Contemporary Gothic Horror archetypes with a heavy reliance on your catholic Angels, Fallen Angels and Demons. The main theme of the novel is the duality of good and evil, the connectedness of all the world's faiths, and the place of man in the scope of reality between faith and science. The main characters defy fate and religion and pay their prices as they are fated as they experience Armageddon, Ragnarok, or whatever end of the world scenario you subscribe to. Other than that, explanations are either too short to give justice to the depth of the narrative, or so long that the map becomes the territory (pun just realized, but apt). The novel begins, has a middle and a satisfying ending (which is better than many novels) though not necessarily all in that order.

The bad:The DNA of this book is all over it. Styles are largely cribbed from other authors, the influence of William Burroughs, HP Lovecraft, and Kurt Vonnegut are the most obvious (Joyce is also quoted by other reviewers and I will take them at their word, I haven't read Joyce so I wouldn't know), other influences read like the best of SF library of Phillip Dick, Phillip Farmer, William Gibson, Neal Stephanson, Anne Rice to those Myst novels (though Hal Duncan's imagining of the literary mechanism is so far superior to those disappointments it is not hardly worth mentioning). The transitions are often jarring, the parallels are sometimes tortured and not all of the ideas fit together in one neat package. Sometimes the novel seems to wander from the main story to be a love-letter tribute to a favorite author (Lovecraft dominates the whole middle of the story).

The good: The characters are engaging, likable, hatable or inscrutable as necessary through all their incarnations. The story and characters and the interplay between them defy labels without becoming convoluted (possibly confused). What is bad about this novel is also what is good, (there is a hypocritical element here) though the styles and themes have been explored before the author executed them deftly without ringing as just a derivative of other authors work. This is almost something new, the post-modern pure sci-fi/fantasy/horror novel (without all the heroin and navel-gazing) that still holds together as a complete story. The audacity and the scope of the novel is also encouraging. That it is written with great heart makes this a great read. Hal Duncan is a hell of a writer and I hope he is able to visit the same muse for his following works (Ink is out now, and I intend to read it). If you are a fan of Vonnegut, Pynchon, Burroughs, Lovecraft. you will probably really enjoy this novel.

Buy it; if you like being challenged by good literature. If you love scrutinizing Vonnegut and Pynchon, unraveling Burroughs or imagining the unspeakable horrors of Lovecraft, you will probably enjoy this.

Avoid it; if you are not a fan of non-linear narrative, or just want a distracting page-turner. If you have issues with the homo-erotic, you will want to steer clear. If you are intrigued pick up Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49" or Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions" as a trainer.

The Crying of Lot 49 (Perennial Fiction Library)
Breakfast of Champions
Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

Hal Duncan's Vellum is an intermittently beautiful, sometimes disturbing, occasionally thought-provoking and often difficult work. Bearing through those difficulties is a worthwhile journey for the reader, however, and Duncan has quite nearly invented a new form of fiction with this book. Without giving too much away, it is fair to say that Duncan links a series of characters to the recurring myths of western history, from Mesopotamia to the present day, linking those stories to pivotal events of both a large and private, personal-scale, from the Christian mythos of the fall of one-third of the angels from heaven, to the murder of Matthew Sheppard in Wyoming in 1998. Duncan pulls each of these events from their place as distant archtypal tragedies or isolated personal horrors and places them squarely at the whirling center of a universal conflict between forces that cannot simply be described as 'good' or 'evil.' This conflict extends, in Duncans hands, across one and many possible chaotic, violent futures. Through this millenia-long cycling, Duncan follows a cast of recurring and slowly developing characters who, we come to realize, are as pivotal to one another as they may well be to mankind. If there is a key weakness to Duncan's first volume, it is the pace at which we come to know these key characters. In many ways, they become clear as individuals only in the book's final (and strongest) third. Readers who persist in tracing their circuitous paths, however, will find that this is a work that lingers long after the last page.

I tried to like this book, really. I read 150 pages before tossing it aside, but my literature warning lights were flashing long before that. There are some good ideas here that could have been very, very interesting. In fact they were interesting, I just got tired of wading through pages and pages of tortured prose trying to elevate itself to the status of literature.

The basic concept here is one group of superhuman beings versus another. Angels versus demons, all mixed up with ancient gods and supernatural beings. Ah, cool. Let's tie the mythology of all cultures together, uniting all the those stories of gods and goddesses together with the christian mythology of angels and demons and tie it all to an underlying premise that makes everything make sense. Then let's tell a really good story around it. Oops, forgot the really good story. Also forgot interesting protagonists, compelling plot, and page-turning suspense. Decided instead to substitute tortured, wandering prose, uninteresting and venal characters with some massive chip on the shoulder because they're homosexual, and a collection of chapters that follow three different story lines, never particularly well, and without ever really tying anything together.

There are books that do make you work hard for an enjoyable payoff. When they are well done though they dribble out rewards for you along the way, escalating to ever better satsifaction with the novel. This is not one of those books. This book provides no rewards along the way but instead sets up a tautology that dictates you must suffer the authors world-views, angst, self-doubt, prejudices, and fears in order to appreciate this work. Bollux. Give me a writer who can tell a story and who doesn't subject me to his personal hang-ups. This books pretends airs and grandiosity, but is simply hollow and irritating. Want a good Angels/Demons war story? Try The Shivered Sky by Matt Dinniman. The premise in Vellum is better but the story-telling in the Shivered Sky blows this book away.

Hal Duncan, Vellum (Del Rey, 2005)

Wow. The first twenty-five pages of this book are amazing. Thoroughly captivating stuff, especially for book geeks. A university student, guided by research in amazingly out-of-the-way places, stumbles upon the Book of All Hours hidden in the rare books room at his university. The Book of All Hours is an amazing thing that opens up doors to other worlds. You read this stuff and you know this is going to be one fantastic adventure tale, the kind of thing you will devour in one sitting, forgoing food and sleep, and then will press on your kids, and their kids, and your friends, and their kids, and so on as long as you live.

And then you hit page twenty-six, and everything gets bollixed up.

Reynard Carter is the protagonist of those first twenty-five pages, and when he's getting screen time, this is a good book. It never quite reaches the heights of those first twenty-five pages again, but it's still good. He, unfortunately, is a character in very little of the ensuing manuscript (what of it I was able to read, anyway; I gave up in disgust a little less than halfway through). His polar opposite is a character with the painful name of Phreedom Messenger, and for coming up with that name alone Duncan should have all of his writing utensils taken away from him forevermore; it doesn't help that her portion of the book (as large as Reynard's is small) is as dry as the dust her motorcycle's always kicking up.

The "original" tag being constantly bandied about perplexes me; all of the qualities that people find so original about this book were done, and far better, in Gaiman's American Gods. Okay, so Gaiman's missing an infinitely large parallel world in which to run around. (Here's hoping he rectifies that eventually.) But, really, if you're looking for myth reworking and amusing, compelling characters who personify those myths, how is Gaiman's name not the first one that comes to mind? (The mythpunks are burrowing through this particular burial mound as well, though in far more subtle fashion, and doing it with the kind of style and panache most writers only dream about.)

There is a great deal of potential in this book; I couldn't find any of it realized. It's possible, judging by a number of reviews I've read, that I didn't stick with it long enough. This may be so, but there's a limit to how much I'll suffer for someone else's art. Vellum is way, way over that line. (zero)

I really wanted to like this. I'd just come off a stint with Neal Stephenson and China Mieville, so I kept thinking that perhaps my expectations were set too high. Not so, though - it was sheer stubbornness that made me finish this, and while I'd occasionally have moments where it seemed that I was having insights and piecing the story together, I finally got to the end and would be hard pressed to explain what happened.

The premise is interesting, to be sure, assuming I'm understanding it. It's the implementation that falls flat, though. I hate to parrot what others have said much more eloquently above me, but the constant jumping about between characters, scenes, and points of view made the whole book fairly incomprehensible and not engaging. Changing the type face is a bit pretentious, too.

I'd like to see more of the vision that drove this project, but please, please, please, not as this frenetic montage of clippings that never seem to piece together.

Save your money and grab some Joseph Campbell and some books on comparative religion if you want a more well guided tour through some of what's alluded to in here.

I really wish I could give this book a good review, since the idea behind it is quite original. But sadly, I can only give this one star.

The setting is our earth and it's counterpart dimensions. Accessed though the "vellum" a barrier that once crossed, allows the traveller to transverse time and identity. It is a non linear place, and so the plot is non-linear and unfortunately confusing.

The main characters are living all of thier previous and future lives simultaneously, and interact with these lives and each other enough to make the characterizations shallow and oddly uninvolving. Each character is layered with more backstory than personality, leaving them ambiguous and unsympathetic.

Although the ideas present in this book are intrigueing intellectually, I felt completely emotionally excluded. The Joycean prose just serves to add more confusion into the non-linear plotline.

I hope that the author takes a more "organic" approach to his next novel. He obviously has talent, intellect and great ideas.

For plot and characterization with more "heart", and a comprehensible storyline I would recommend American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

It's hard for me to put my finger on my exact feelings of this book. If I had one word in which to describe it, I suppose the word would be "disjointed." It was very clever, expertly written, and I loved the mythology and the correlations between everyone.

The problem I had with it is more a matter of my own personal taste than a true criticism of the book. With such a convoluted story and so much jumping from one reality to another, one version of the same character to another, I never felt like I really knew the characters and I was unable to get attached to them. To me, the most important thing in any story is the characters, so this hindered my enjoyment and made it hard for me to force myself to continue.

This had been recommended to me by someone on a House of Leaves forum, and I was very excited, as that was one of my favorite books. But House of Leaves was extremely focused on its characters, giving one a very deep look inside their heads. Where with this one, I couldn't always guess what a character's true feelings are.

If one likes a challenge and a lot of mythology, and doesn't mind not getting to know characters very well, then this is very much worth reading. Actually, it is worth reading no matter what, I'd say.

To sum up this novel in one word is nearly impossible, but I will try: epic. Duncan interweaves tales of characters both new and old (literally) as they are incarnations of various myths and stories from many different cultures. One character is alternately an Irish WWI veteran, Prometheus (the "fire-bringer") and, in some ways Lucifer (remember that the word means bringer of light). Another is an incarnation of a Sumerian mythological character, a 21st century cyber-punk and the love interest of said WWI veteran.

At the heart of the novel, though, is the conflict between the Covenant (some would say angels) and the Sovereigns (demons of a sort). The Covenant represent rationality and logic, and wish to impose this upon the world whereas the Sovereigns embody chaos and fierc individuality. This is a conflict that is unequivicably universal in that it not only occurs in society, but internally in all of us (Freud would probably refer to the id and the superego).

But Duncan's work hints at an intriguing positoin: that this duality is not necessary. When the two meld together in Phreedom/Inanna a third path opens up, one that I can only assume will be explored in the forthcoming sequel Ink.

Throughout this work, Duncan continues to explore "third" alternatives as most characters act and interact in threes. There are the Thomas/Phreedom/Seamus, Guy/Jack/Puck, Metatron/Carter/Pechorin trinities, just to name a few.

In the end, though, this novel is stunningly brilliant. The weaving and interweaving of myths, archetypes, and characters takes on an almost Joycean level (complete with wordplay that owes much to Finnegans Wake-- for instance, the Macromimicon, supposedly made up by Liebcraft. An allusion of coures to Lovecraft and the Necronomicon, but also if you dissect Macromimicon as another name for the Book of All Hours, it truly "mimics" "all" in that it supposedly records all causalities).

To be fair, the novel is difficult. It traipses across realities and characters shift in and out of them, sometimes the names are the same and other times, they are different. It can be hard to follow exactly who is whom and what is happening, but if you are truly willing to invest the effort, this is an astounding novel, moreso because it is a debut.

Vellum leaves the reader confused and exhausted, and dying to watch TV's "Charmed". I did finish the damn thing. It took me almost six weeks because it was so easy to put down.

It's as though a manuscript, well-written and interesting, were cut into all its separate paragraphs and tossed into the air to fall on the print room floor where it was recomposed at random by the printer's illiterate son.

As I slogged through the hideously complex weave of this schizophrenic mindfart, I began to wonder if it was just a bad book or if I held in my hands the work of a genius far above my capacity to grasp. Perhaps Duncan will be the Shakespeare of a generation of genetically enhanced intellectuals, but I think that's a stretch.

I finished Vellum with no firm grasp of who the story's main characters are or how they interact with each other or which are the protagonists or the antagonists. In spite of the author's evident, if not gratuitous, erudition, I was left wondering what the story was and no idea of what happened in those 463 pages. If it is high art, it's a literary Jackson Pollack.

I shudder at the thought of a sequel. If it is as difficult as the first, it's a waste of vellum and ink.

I too started this book and threw it aside. Glad it was a library book and not something i paid for. Started off great like another reviewer said and then collapsed into chaos. It gave me whiplash trying to keep track of what was going on with who and when and where...and finally i just didn't care.
It seems like there are 50 voices all going in different directions and different times, because the voices and time frame seems to change with every paragraph you have no idea where you are in the story and the original story line which begins the book (which was great) disappears entirely.

This is self-indulgence at its worst, who could have possibly edited this thing?

I'm always suspicious when most of the reviews are from other writers.