Ink (The Book of All Hours, #2) By Hal Duncan
VELLUM, the first book in this series, was my favorite book of the year and I was dying for INK to come out. But while there were many wonderful moments in this book, it just couldn't keep me engaged. I cannot live by meta-character alone, I guess. I'm sorry to say, it's one of the few books that after months of slogging through it, I gave up. That's right. Didn't finish it. Sorry. So many seeds of brilliance, so much potential, but far too indulgent. 9781405052092 Wow. This book is really good.
To try to sum up the plot of Ink and its precursor Vellum would take up much more space and time than I care to expend. But in a nutshell: The world has ended, reality has shattered, and seven people try to put together pieces of themselves that are shattered and scattered across reality while they try to find the mythical/ real Book that is the map/key to the universe. In a nutshell.
Ink is one of the more difficult simply to read. narration jumps back and forth between characters and plot lines, all of which revolve around similar characters with same names. Keeping the Jacks, Guys, and Joeys, etc. straight was difficult always and impossible a number of times. However, confusion has a purpose. What emerges from the jumble of narrative strings is not the story of many characters, but of the same characters in the same roles, Jack the hero, Joey the traitor/ enemy, Anna the warrior. Duncan creates archetypes out of these characters and after a while the reader can see these defined roles in whichever narration is being told.
There is so much more to be taken from this book that I'm not going to write about here. It's a challengeing book, no question, but one of the best I've read in years. 9781405052092 This book was a dense, twisty, wonderful conclusion of Duncan's The Book of all Hours. The group of friends from Vellum deals with the aftermath, just trying to get back what they had, or get something new or both or.. well, yeah Twisty, like I said. These books are worth the brain power necessary. 9781405052092 [...] jeśli Księga wszystkich godzin jest prawdziwą historią, o którą nam chodziła - zapisaną krwią na skórze aniołów - jak to, na Boga, świadczy o naszym człowieczeństwie?
Rzadko zdarza mi się wstawić tu coś poza zwykłą oceną danej książki. Bo jestem leniwa.
Z Atramentem, którego pierwszej części Welinu nie czytałam, postanowiłam jednak uczynić wyjątek.
Książce zarzuca się, że jest trudna i męczy czytelnika i faktem jest, że nie jest to lekka i przyjemna lektura. Szczególnie jeśli (tak jak ja) zignoruje się uwagę autora zawartą w pierwszych rozdziałach, która zdradza czytelnikowi jak powinien postępować z książką.
Pętle czasowe, rozbicia rzeczywistości, ci sami bohaterowie występujący pod różnymi imionami. Pozorny chaos, który ostatecznie tworzy palimpsest, a jednocześnie historię, którą jeśli czytelnik zechce można ułożyć w chronologiczną opowieść.
Duncanowi nie zależy na prowadzeniu swojego czytelnika za rękę, pozwala mu się zgubić, podrzuca wskazówki, które niekiedy naprowadzają na fałszywy trop. (Czy to jeszcze ten sam bohater? Czy już całkiem nowa postać? Domyśl się, sam zdecyduj.) Bawi się z odbiorcą, zadając przy tym niewygodne pytania. Czy okrucieństwo, rządza władzy i terror nie są wpisane w nasz gatunek? Dlaczego nie umiemy odmienić historii? Czemu Kain zawsze zabija Abla? Czemu wiedza sprawia ból?
W Atramencie szybkie i intensywne sceny walk, pełne wybuchów, pościgów i przemocy, która dla głównego(?) bohatera stanowi siłę napędową, przerywane są kronikarskimi opisami rzeczywistych wydarzeń z pierwszej połowy XX wieku. Duncan na 3 stronach streszcza nam największe okrucieństwa jakich dopuściła się ludzkość na przestrzeni pięćdziesięciu lat. To właśnie te zestawienia, a nie achronologia wydarzeń, czy zmiany imion bohaterów, czynią tę książkę trudną i niewygodną. Bo chociaż, na końcu pojawia się nadzieja, zjawia się też pytanie, czy nie będzie ona kolejną zmarnowaną szansą. 9781405052092 Here are all the reasons I loved this book numbered zero to zero (in no particular order):
0 -
Oh, wait - there are none.
Ah well, this is going to be a quick, one-star review then.
Read the first paragraph from Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible:
Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their own precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever
Then read the first paragraph from this book:
Yeah, you're right - I just couldn't be bothered.
What I want to say though is that Barbara's first paragraph and all of Hal's prose are, on the surface, quite similar in style but that's where the resemblance ends ... (cover your ears for the next part if you have a sensitive disposition) ... because Babs writes writing that makes love and produces beautiful babies whereas Hal's stuff is pure masturbation. He writes to no purpose that I can discern: his novel is storyless, his characters are formless, his prose is devoid of any colour but purple and his sense of when to stop repeating the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over again is completely absent.
So, yeah - pretty please don't read this book that I just spent the last 16 days of my life wading through (26 days if you include the time I spent reading the first book in the series). It won't make you happy. 9781405052092
It's twenty years since the Evenfall swept across the Vellum and the bitmites took reality apart, twenty years since Phreedom Messenger disappeared into the wilderness and Seamus Finnan was imprisoned in his own past. Twenty years of chaos but the Dukes, the remnants of the Covenant, still cling to power in their enclaves of order in the bitmite-devastated wilderness . . . in their Havens in the Hinter.
Across the folds of time and space, though, rogues and rebels are rising up against the Empire. From a mediaeval fortress where wandering mummers stage a Harlequin play based on Euripides's The Bacchae and performed in the Cant ... to Kentigern where another Harlequin, Jack Flash, wreaks havoc on a fascist state that thought him dead. From a 1939 Paris where Jack Carter and Seamus Finnan, heroes of the International Brigades, seek to rewrite history -- to a 1929 Berlin where a very different Jack seeks to save the world from a history he has helped make real. Locked in an eternal battle of chaos and order, it seems everyone must play their part now, as rebel or tyrant, hero or villain.
'It is, quite simply, stunning and the most powerful debut novel I've read since Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell ' -- Forbidden Planet International Ink (The Book of All Hours, #2)
Vítejte ve světě (či světech) rozbitých válkou andělů na cucky, kde prostor nedrží pohromadě a čas plyne všemi směry současně. Podobně na střípky je rozbitý i celý Atrament. Hal Duncan nemá se čtenáři moc slitování, jeho hrdinové existují v bezpočtu verzích v různých světech i příbězích, je to opět docela na budku:)
Ale je to fascinující. 9781405052092 I'd like to say that if you arrived here without reading the first book in the series, Vellum then you should go back and read that to avoid being confused. But I'm . . . not sure it really matters. In fact, I'm not even sure if reading them out of order would give you a markedly different effect than the right way round.
For those who made it through the first book, you probably understand about as much as I do. The unkin (read: angels) use the Cant to rewrite reality, which is overall termed the Vellum and contains much more than our world. Most of the unkin are derived from ancient myths and would like things to stay the way they are. There's about to be a war and a group of fresh unkin would rather stay out of it. Those people for the most part happen to be our main characters, who appear over and over again in different incarnations across reality, generally suffering variations of the same fates and straining to achieve a goal that . . . might be freedom? Or Phreedom, which is literally the name of one of the characters.
The first book was an unholy hodgepodge of pretty much every myth that Duncan could let his local academic library get him access to, all filtered through the story's sensibilities. Unfortunately for all of us, that sensibility more often than not bordered on outright incoherence. The story kept jumping from reality to reality, giving the characters slightly different names but not giving us much to hang onto either plot-wise or emotionally. Like a KISS concert set inside a Baz Luhrmann film, it was just too much of everything at once. The craft and the passion were there but after a while it felt more blugeoning than anything else.
Things improve slightly here. Not by much, but slightly. The characters are a little more established, although if you've forgotten anyone's motivations you're out of luck because not much gets reexplained. The idea of the war seemed to have been pushed to the backburner, or at least Duncan isn't interested in openly describing it. Strangely, it winds up paring things down slightly and instead of forcing us to frantically chase after myth drenched scenarios like a Whack-a-Mole game set to the wrong speed we're only really focusing on a couple scenarios at a time.
Unfortunately its not clear what those scenarios have to do with the main plot, or anything at all. You can't even be sure there is a main plot anymore. The opening scenes alternate with a play given to a Duke and a princess that appears to mirror the action in the other scenes but beyond that its not certain what you're supposed to draw from it. There's a plot that seems to be set in a V for Vendetta type future where the Futurists won and England is fascist. There's a long interrogation scene that seems to repeat itself with subtle variations every time. There's a kind of Indiana Jones type adventure going on somewhere else. There's Cold Men. There's . . . not a dance number but that's probably an oversight. What you do have are a lot of questions and a lot of answers but you can't be sure that you're getting the right answers to the right questions.
So having to only follow like three or four plots simplifies matters, especially as he lets the plots string out longer so you can settle into them for a bit. But instead of feeling like smaller portions of a larger war, it comes across as a series of pastiches for all the stuff Duncan wants to write about. Just about all of them are well done, although the one that seems the nearest to his heart is the strange cross between a Michael Moorcock Jerry Cornelius story and that Alan Moore Lustbusters backup from American Flagg . . . with the strange Wolfman Jack type commentary happening throughout, it has the most moving parts but like all the others its opaque as to how much of it is just mirroring the overarcing plot.
The downside to the pastiches is that after a while it makes you miss the more hyperactive approach of the first volume . . . without any sense that we're going somewhere definite with these the scenarios go on and on and on. Having made their point as an alternate versions of the reality we know they just keep on chugging along gradually taking over the book. We keep waiting for a war to start but then keep asking ourselves if this is the war itself or merely its aftermath.
If the characters were stronger than maybe it would help but, again, we aren't given much to grasp with them. Some of the characters get stronger scenes than others and an extended sequence in the epilogue gives us a better idea of what a more focused book might have looked like with everyone on the same page (and even the epilogue overstays its welcome, acting instead as a remix of some works by Virgil) but with variations of the characters scattered here and there working toward goals that aren't easy to infer you may find yourself wishing after hundreds of pages that some satisfying culmination may come of this.
It doesn't. If anything there's even less of a sense here that the characters are struggling toward a goal or working through a conflict as much as Duncan is writing all the stuff he ever wanted to write and cramming it into one book. Like Vellum, its all interesting and erudite and to his credit never comes across as smugly clever-clever the way that early Neal Stephenson can make me feel . . . but either I'm getting ossified in my old age with navigating complex plots (in his defense I did have a couple rough weeks at work) or he's so far over my head that astronauts are calling him in as a potential UFO. Normally I'm a sucker for weirdness or tapping into the primal sources of myths but boy, whatever frequency this one is broadcasting on isn't one that I'm able to receive. 9781405052092 Trying to stay on top of the plot of Ink as it fractures reality, space and different versions of these characters across the vellum is like trying to teach bees to juggle ham whilst also eating cake - Crazy, possibly quite dangerous and delicious.
The language, ideas and characters carry everything with the plots being dragged kicking and screaming along for the ride. Allusions and references abound like giant literary abounding things and time is split asunder amidst the chaos.
This and Vellum, (the prior novel in this duology) could possibly do with a spot more focus and some editing - the ending does feel like it fizzles out like a slightly disappointing firework, otherwise enormous mythical fun is to be had here.
9781405052092 I gave the first book in this series 4 stars. On its own, I would have rated it about 3.5, but I rounded up because I really admired the vision of the book, and I had high hopes that this second book would bring together the scattered ideas and shape them into a more cohesive whole. I guess that happened, but it ended up being a whole that I really didn't enjoy.
I think a big part of my problem was pacing. This book felt tremendously slow to me. I think part of that was just the style its written in. It's a very jumpy style. Like the first book, each chapter is divided into a large number of much smaller sections, averaging from one page to maybe five. Maybe I was just less tolerant of it in this book, but it drove me nuts. There would be a section of story from one timeline, a snippet of the same story being told in a different style, and then a snapshot of another timeline, and then it would cycle back through. This completely kept me from building up any momentum. I felt like I just slogged from section to section.
This book was also really focused on Jack. Jack is my least favorite character in this duology, to be honest, so that wasn't a thrill. The characters that I liked a bit better, like Phreedom and Finnan, had a much lesser role. Phreedom was the target of a lot of disapproval from the other characters, as well, which. It's not like anyone else makes good decisions. Why should she get all the criticism from the others for her bad decisions? And Finnan's story was pretty much completely disconnected from the rest of the book, so although I liked it a bit more than the rest, it felt like a waste of time when all I wanted to do was be done with the book.
Repetition was another big problem here for me. I understand that repetition is very much a key ingredient of the premise of the book, but there was just too much of it. I felt like I was reading the same storylines over and over again, which got very old. Plus, this is a pretty bleak story, so that made it even harder to read, and I certainly didn't really enjoy doing so.
Other minor quibbles: All the sex. All the drugs. So casually, so mindlessly. Bleh. It was a bit much for me. I don't dislike either of those things, but when it feels gratuitous, I hate it. There's just something in my basic character that takes sex and drugs pretty seriously, so it really bothers me when they're overused like this. Also, that everything builds on different pieces of ancient literature that I've never read and have no interest in reading. My lack of knowledge probably did not help my enjoyment of the book at all. I hate when I can feel points whooshing over my head.
These things aside, I still admire the vision of the books. It's a bold idea. I just think that the execution was lacking. 9781405052092 Originally published on my blog here in November 2009.
Book two of The Book of All Hours continues in the same vein as book one, Vellum. Like that, and you'll like this. Find that incomprehensible (which is quite possible), and this will be the same. (Note that it is a while since I read Vellum, so my description of how the two books relate together might not be entirely accurate.)
The Book of All Hours (the book within the book) describes, controls, or perhaps is, the multitude of universes. In the aftermath of the catastrophic Evenfall, chaos rules; now, everything is fragmented, yet some things remain constant between the different versions of reality. Jack Carter is a revolutionary, everywhere, connected to the metaphysics of the Book. But what is he trying to achieve? Is he even dead or alive?
The story is extremely fragmented, told in an exceptionally allusive style: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius meets Finnegans Wake. References run from pop culture (The Prisoner, the Sex Pistols, etc.) to ancient literature (a performance of the Bacchae as political satire by a commedia dell'arte troupe forms the structure of a long section of the novel, and one of Virgil's Eclogues is used in a similar fashion in the epilogue) to folklore (Puck, Reynard the fox). Theological discussion rubs shoulders with a thriller set in the thirties Middle East. Overall, it is a scintillating cascade of ideas, images, and styles.
Like other books of this kind, however, the narrative is hard to follow, particularly if you are a reader who wants to have a linear plot. It is also true that parts of the novel work better than others. (At least, it appeared to be the case to me, both here and in Vellum, but is could just mean that my concentration levels fluctuated.) It is likely to make more sense a second time around, and a repeat read is definitely something I will do.
In summary, The Book of All Hours will not be everyone's cup of tea, but I liked it. 9781405052092
Hal Duncan Ô 3 download
