Vellum / Hal Duncan

Vellum

category: fantasy, author:

Hal Duncan

book 1 of Book of All Hours
original copyright 2005,
read in October 2010

Agamedes' opinion: 2 out of 10

I read the introduction; it made some sort of sense. Jumping around, incomplete & unclear, but there was some sense of the beginning of a story.

Then it all went downhill.

Open a magic book and look at the map on page 1. It looks like where you are -- but not quite. Page 2 zooms out on the map... and there are noticeable differences between the map and reality. Page 3, zoom out further, the map is purely imaginary... And guess what? The hero is now in that imaginary world...

Great, let's have some imaginary-world adventures... But no! There is no-one else there. The story keeps flicking backwards and forwards -- incomprehensibly.

Suddenly: there's an unknown character doing unknown things before heading off into the great unknown. "Do this," she is told. "Why?" she asks. "Because that's what we do, here," she is told. "Okay." Good... grief.

So we have a main protagonist who doesn't know where he is, doesn't know what he's doing and doesn't explain why "his" storyline keeps bouncing from one confusing time+place to another. Then there's the unknown protagonist who decides -- for no stated reason -- to go from an initial unknown place to another place with a name but no explanation, for no known reason.

Sorry, but at this point I gave up reading and skimmed, looking for a point.

I found the author's thank-yous, including thank-yous to people who had translated legends from Latin, Greek and Sumerian... Which, apparently, the author had then rewritten in his own fashion. Which makes sense: a lot of old legends seem to be written in Gobbledegook. They are, after all, originally written for people with a complete mythos which we do not share.

The secret of getting a good story from an old myth, is to rewrite the myth for the modern reader. Duncan seems to have simply copied the old myth. With all the attendant lack of meaning for the modern reader.

I have just downgraded my rating from 4 to 2. If you're a lover of ancient Sumerian myths -- feel free to set your own rating. If you can struggle far enough into the book to make some sense of it, feel free to set your personal rating of this book to a higher level.

The words are written in English -- yes, I have read worse in a published book. But as far as being a "novel"... Vellum is unreadable.

..o0o..

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