I finished my second time through Vellum, by Hal Duncan, and I’m trying to put my impressions in some sort of order. (I also finished Cloud Atlas, but I might have to reread that before I can comment coherently.) The short version on Vellum is, the ideas are great but the execution is just enough off-centre to irritate. I’ll be buying Ink, the sequel, and I’ll keep reading Duncan, but I hope his next novels have an editor with a slightly heavier hand. That said, if you’ve got a taste for complex storylines and reinterpreted mythology, Vellum is probably worth a look. Read on for details…

The good

As I said, the ideas behind Vellum are great. I was originally hooked by a review (by Russ Allbery) pushing lots of my buttons: “mythology of angels … glorious subversive moral ambiguity … Sumerian mythology … fragmented and extremely non-linear … an unclassifiable mix of non-traditional fantasy and smatterings of SF” sounds pretty damn good to me. (That’s not anything like a fair summary of the review — it’s worth reading as counterpoint to this one.) It’s true, the world of the novel mixes Sumerian and Christian mythology (and much more besides) into a larger structure that is both satisfying and open-ended. I don’t think the morality is as ambiguous as Allbery makes out, despite being distinctly subversive (it’s a pretty clear inversion of the Christian pantheon of angels, fallen and otherwise, although this might become more complex in the sequel), but the angelic thread is only one of a number of myths that Duncan is weaving together; they are unified by an underlying reality, the “Vellum” of the title, and a conception of archetypes linking individual people in various alternative worlds and histories to each other and to the Vellum itself.

It’s a hard concept to get a firm grasp on, certainly not your standard parallel worlds SF trope; nor is it a traditional time-travel mythos, although both these ideas are closely related. The fabric of the Vellum seems to transcend these descriptions, which contributes to the difficulties both with understanding and describing the plot: “the same” characters turn up in different worlds, at different points in history, but their actions do affect each other via their archetypal linkages. I’m reminded a little of trying to conceptualise the four-dimensional nature of Einsteinian general relativity: you start by saying “well, time is like a fourth spatial dimension, right, and all moments are sort of present all together, you know?” and they say “all at the same time, you mean?” and then you realise that you’re not really getting anywhere.

Which is to say, the metaphysics of Vellum will make your head ache. I presume (I hope) Ink will clear up some mysteries, such as the connection between the Vellum as underlying level of reality, and the Vellum as simply an expanded world through which one of the characters is journeying. Another point I’m unclear on is the relevance of the “Book of All Hours” this character is carrying (also the title of the series as a whole). It turns up in various guises but the “map of everything” aspect —apparently the “real thing”, insofar as that makes any sense at all— seems rather insignificant given the powers of the copy —apparently “not the real thing”, with the same caveat— carried by the angel Metatron, which contains a record of the destinies of all living beings.

Add to these metaphysical complications the fact that Duncan is retelling some myths that won’t be familiar to most readers, and reinterpreting some that probably will, and the result is pretty kaleidoscopic. That I managed to follow anything at all is a credit to both the author and the publishers; many of the not-quite-parallel threads are given highly distinctive narrative voices, and the publishers have also used font switches (some subtle, some less so) to indicate some of the various historical/mythological levels of the story. (I have the UK edition, apparently the American publishers made some different typographical decisions, but I don’t know how deep the difference runs.) These were much more noticeable on second reading, although I still didn’t get anything like the full story figured out. Vellum is the perfect subject for one of those complex directed-graph plot explanations, if only someone were willing to break it down.

I’ve put the plot and storyline complexity under “the good” because it gave me enough simple story to keep me involved; it didn’t confuse me to the point of giving up. When a novel tells this many interrelated stories, each new section adds to the reader’s understanding of all those that went before. Indeed, I no sooner finished the last chapter than I began again with the first, and picked up much more on second reading than on the first. (If you’re not willing to read Vellum a second time, you should probably keep notes or something…) Unfortunately, rereading again so quickly highlighted some pretty substantial defects, which I’ll cover next.

The bad

I said in the introduction that I hoped Duncan’s next offering has a heavier-handed editor. I think Vellum shows signs of being written fairly quickly, start-to-finish, and not being substantially altered afterwards. The character Samuel Hobbsbaum, for instance, is given a throwaway introduction halfway through the first volume, then reappears to play a significant role in the second. Since he only gets a single page in the first volume, it seems like Duncan didn’t originally intend to reuse him, and maybe even added the name to the first entry later (obeying Occam’s razor and not needlessly multiplying linguists).

Another stylistic vagary I took exception to is a sort of heavy-handed building of suspense. On the second page, the narrator “wip[es] away some of the blood that [runs] down from [his] forehead” and begins a multi-section discussion of the history of the book he is reading — only much much later do we learn how the theft of the book left him cut and bleeding. It’s not the lack of information I’m objecting to, but its placement as a “hook” leaving the reader in suspense is so obvious it seems clumsy. The same clumsiness is shown again in the second volume, in the storyline concerning the town of Endhaven. The narrator refers to “the rag-and-bone man” so often, and with such studied casualness, that the reader is left knowing both that he will be significant to the story, and that we are supposed to know this… long before these suspicions are confirmed.

A related sort of clumsiness is a tendency for characters to over-explain (“telling instead of showing”). Sometimes it seems Duncan has had this clever idea and he wants to make sure the reader gets it (as when, in an alternate reality corner of the Vellum where our racial divisions correspond to different mythological races such as Gnomes and Fairies, a character spells out WASP “as White, as Angelo-Satyr and as Protestant”). Other times there’s background knowledge he’s not sure the reader will have, and he gets a character to info-dump (Jack Carter’s friend knows about phonetics but he doesn’t, so that he can explain what he’s learned and conveniently enlighten the reader as well). It’s an old problem, and Duncan doesn’t hit quite the right note in solving it — both of these examples make it just a little too clear that the characters are saying things for the author’s reasons, not their own.

My final stylistic quibble concerns the various narrative voices that Duncan uses to keep the various storylines separate. Some of these (the retelling of Sumerian myths, Seamus Finnan’s history) are totally distinct from the others. But some of the others struggle to keep their voices distinct — Phreedom’s story, the students; I have the feeling that these are characters Duncan empathises more directly with, and writes with less conscious artifice. (The most clearly distinct voices have somewhat simplistic distinguishing features — written accents, a singsong “mythic poetry” style; these don’t come across as gimmicky, but the more nuanced differences in voice seem to be lacking from the contemporary characters.) Certainly their voices are more similar to the personal style Duncan’s blog is written in, and they suffer some blending for it. The shame of this is that these stories are extremely significant, indeed central to some of those brain-bending complexities I mentioned earlier, and —particularly in the students’ case— the lack of distinct voices makes unravelling the mixup more difficult.

The beautiful

I’ve been more negative than I intended, and I don’t want to give the impression that Vellum isn’t worth the effort. It will bewilder you, sure, and some of that confusion could perhaps have been avoided by giving the reader more cues. It will frustrate you, sure, and some of that frustration is the result of clumsiness. But it will twist your brain into unfamiliar shapes and prod bits of it that don’t usually get prodded. It proposes a mythological/metaphysical substrate big enough to build just about anything on (Lovecraft crops up, as you might expect, but also Prometheus, Babel and the confusion of tongues, and —tangentially— the Rolling Stones). Despite all the mythological overtones, it’s defiantly humanist (if I have this term right; as in secular humanism, taking responsibility for our own moral developement, &c.). And, despite the stylistic complaints above, when Duncan gets going he writes like one of his angels.

Perhaps the finest invention of Vellum is the Cant. This is the language of the angels, with the capacity to reach out to the Vellum itself and change the world. It’s the language the Book of All Hours is written in (“It’d have to be one fucking huge book,” said Joey. “Maybe the language it’s written in is more … concise.”). And when the characters speak it, you know just by the alien rhythms of the sentences. Even better, when Seamus Finnan speaks it, his folksey Oirish accent blends with the Cant and becomes more than cliche, you can track how much he is present and how much the archetype is speaking by the language he’s using. I’m willing to forgive Duncan all his treatment of the contemporary voices in return for the various dialogues with Seamus in the second volume.

I’ve also given the impression, I guess, that you’ll be wrestling with difficulties and plot threads throughout the novel. In fact, the pacing is carefully modulated to give the reader some relief (mainly through Reynard’s journey through the Vellum) just when you need it. After the climax of the Lovecraftian journey to the lost city of the Kur, the relief of the Hilbert’s Hole episode left me laughing loudly to myself. (Yes, I know that last sentence is totally cryptic. I don’t want to spoil the surprise for anyone. Believe me, it’s worth waiting for.)

The point is, in between all its mythic archetypes and tragic destinies and poetic grandeur and so on, Vellum has moments of pure silliness and charm, as well as explosion-packed action sequences, and even a couple of love stories that don’t end totally badly. (Okay, maybe only one.) If I’ve dwelt on the difficulties here, it’s because my brain is still twisted out of shape by them. And if I’ve emphasised the book’s shortcomings, it’s because I don’t want to sound like an abject fanboy. It’s not a book for everyone, that’s for sure. And I think Hal Duncan will produce better work — it’s his first novel, after all. But if you’ve got this far through the review, you’re probably the sort of person who will enjoy Vellum. And if you happen to be a compulsive map-maker… well, let me know when you’re done, I’d be fascinated to see it.