Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} by Ink : The Book of All Hours 2. After the release of the bitmites -- hybrids born from a union between nanotechnology and the engraved souls of the dead -- everything has changed. Trying to create the worlds of human imagination, the bitmites have torn reality apart and cast the shade of Hinter over the . Small enclaves of civilisation, ruled by scattered Unkin, remain, stuck in an eternal present. In these barren lands, Reynard's little troupe of actors stages a mystery play for a duke of . Soon, this drama of sex, revenge and revolution becomes fatally interactive. In a different fold, 1949, the futurist movement has given the rivalling fascists a run for their money, and the former turn out to be far from the lesser evil. Jonathan, who calls himself Jack now (and for good reasons), enlists his brother, master thief Reinhardt von Strann, to steal the Eye of the Weeping , a magical artefact that is supposed to help him rewrite the course of history. Meanwhile, an eternity later, a small squad of inter-dimensional adventurers, whom we got to know, in other lives, as the Troupe D'Reynard, prepare for their ultimate mission: to secure the final draft of The Book of All Hours and keep the rogue from creating their god of wrath from its pages. The final battle takes place in 1929, in a city that was once known as Sodom, and which is about the be destroyed yet again. But this time, Mad Jack Carter is determined that even if he can't save the people of Sodom, he will find the one reality, the one possibility where one man is allowed to live: Tammuz, Thomas Messenger, the eternal victim of the ever-raging war. It makes little sense to read Ink without having read its predecessor, Vellum so in this review, I'll assume that you are familiar with the first half of The Book of All Hours . Like Vellum , Ink consists of two clearly separated parts, this time modelled on the concepts of "Winter" and "Spring". Ink shares all the defining features of the first instalment: The abundance of mythical and pop-cultural allusions, the parallel histories, the witty, sex- and-explosions-powered Jack Flash pulp action, the constant, tumbling ride through multiple worlds, most of them only glimpsed at and yet so rich that it feels that, beyond the pages of the book, they're fully realised. All of these features are dependant upon Duncan's amazingly powerful and versatile use of language. If Duncan didn't employ such a range of immediately recognisable voices, Ink would simply fall apart, shattered by its fragmentary style and its sheer abundance of -- well, pretty much everything. The only thing I missed in Ink was the Anna//Phreedom- character, who was an integral part of the first book, but is all but absent from most of Ink . The epilogue provides some compensation for this, but it doesn't really make up for the previous neglect of the only female character of The Book of All Hours . Despite its exuberance, Ink goes a little bit easier on the whole kaleidoscopic-reality thing than Vellum did. The prologue provides an account of "the story so far", which explains some of the more enigmatic elements of the first volume; and even though there are probably as many strands of narrative in this book as there are in Vellum , this time they feel more closely interconnected. In general, the narrative is much more linear. If Vellum spread out the puzzle pieces, Ink does a pretty good job at fitting them together. However, this would probably not be a Hal Duncan novel if the result was only one picture . Ink explores a number of concepts regarding the relationship of history and the individual with its capacity for change, joy and suffering. Duncan renders such abstract notions tangible by his highly intuitive imagery: When, for example, in an attempt to "make history right", a big blot of ink is spilled on a whole page of The Book of All Hours, turning the whole twentieth century into a jumbled mess, there could be no image better fitting for the century of the screwed-up great narratives of modernity. Despite some antique and pseudo-medieval overtones, it is clearly the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century with its two world wars and the holocaust, that Ink , even more than Vellum , tries to come to terms with. But The Book of All Hours is not a thinly veiled philosophical treatise: On the contrary, in its course, Ink compresses the whole mythology of The Book of All Hours more and more to the personal level, until, in the epilogue, we come to realise that all the struggling against an insufferable history of violence boils down to the confrontation of a single human being with an arbitrary death. Consequently, in the end, "making it right" is less about fighting empires and angels and rewriting history, but about saving Thomas Messenger. Without giving away too much, it can be said that one of the last subchapter-titles within the book frames this quest with bittersweet irony . and bittersweet, as is suggested at one point in Ink , is probably a more fitting description for the dialectical metaphysics of knowledge than good and evil. In the end, The Book of All Hours is a furious lament, a work of love and anger. It's very much about reality; not (or not only) in a metaphorical sense, but in its address of very real human experiences. Within the last pages of Ink , the novel fittingly reminds us that there's something out there that is dwarfing the richness, the reality, the terror and the complexity of this amazing piece of work: the world. Ink by Hal Duncan. Fortunately Hal Duncan is too brash and arrogant a writer to tie himself down so lightly. Ink , the sequel to Vellum and the concluding part of The Book of All Hours , is a mess, a sprawling, swaggering, aggressive mess. It is also one of the most ambitious books you're likely to encounter this year. And it comes as close to making sense of its predecessor as even the most optimistic of us might have hoped. The titles of the two volumes are suggestive. If Vellum laid out the pages of myth and story and the multiverse, Ink is about what is inscribed upon those pages. Or rather, how the various players in the game attempt to inscribe their own mark upon the Vellum. More precisely, it is a book that moves from chaos towards order. Vellum swept us up in a shape-shifting confusion of characters who were not characters but archetypes, roles not people. Ink continues with the shape-shifting, but now the roles are becoming more clearly defined and the focus of the work is narrowing down upon a small theatrical cast. In the first half of the book that is precisely what they are, a small group of travelling players performing a souped-up version of The Bacchae by Euripedes in a pseudo-medieval fold of the vellum. Meanwhile, swirling around this core the same archetypes are acting out different versions of the same drama in a variety of fascistic, blood-soaked avatars of the twentieth century. We can see them more clearly now. Don MacChuill who is also Don Coyote, a name which neatly enfolds Cervantes' knight and the trickster god, is both a foul-mouthed Scot and the distanced commentator on the scene. Guy Fox (a reference more to V for Vendetta than to Guido Fawkes?) is also Reynard or Reinhardt, the plotter, the writer. Thomas Messenger, Tamuz or Puck, is both the knowing object of homosexual desire and the perennial sacrifice. But the two who most occupy centre stage are Joey Pechorin, Joey Narcosis, the Judas figure driven to betrayal by desire and impatience; and Jack Carter, Jack Flash, Springheeled Jack, also Iacchus or Bacchus, the wild hero and also the lord of misrule. It is a very masculine company very given to violence. Duncan has a gleeful way of describing mayhem and murder. Any minor figure outside the sacred circle, indeed any casual passer-by, is virtually doomed to a messy death. But he's an even-handed writer: his central figures suffer equally, indeed at one time or another virtually all of them are subjected to graphic torture or callous cruelty. And since, within this multiverse, they are the equivalent of immortals, he does not have to worry too much about their survival, they will simply reappear whole in some other fold, or the scene will be re-shot with a different ending. One of the abiding themes of the book is an abhorrence of war and its consequences, but it is difficult to square this with Duncan's obsessive, almost pornographic interest in the minutiae of pain and injury. In such a male milieu, it is unsurprising that manifestations of sexual desire and satisfaction are entirely homosexual. Yet, until the end, is invariably linked with shame, self-disgust and usually death. It is as if Duncan is edging around something that is both attractive and discomforting at the same time. Certainly there is no comfort, no nurturing anywhere in this world. Those, of course, are attributes traditionally associated with the female figure in the myths and stories that Duncan has twisted and entwined into this narrative. And there is a woman in the sacred circle, Phreedom, also known as Anna or Anat, who is at various times described as sister or mother of one of the other archetypes though she does not do much to fulfil these roles. Significantly, it is only in the epilogue that she takes on the third role traditionally assigned to women, that of wife, so it is only in these last few pages that there is any sense of comfort and nurturing in the book. But Phreedom is absent from the first half of this volume, except as a passive observer (there are suggestions along the way that the five are searching for their lost companion, but such a quest is hardly a driving force in the narrative). When she does emerge into the action, it is with as much violence and bloodshed as any of her male colleagues, and this gender-neutral role remains her lot throughout most of the rest of the book. In this first part of the book the characters are more cohesive as a group, have more of a sense of purpose, than they did in Vellum , but they are still adrift in the multiverse, at the mercy of forces beyond their knowledge or control. That changes in the second part. Here the six have become a sort of trans-temporal A-Team, heading out on missions to identifiable and accessible points in the multiverse, assuming their archetypal roles as if in an episode of Mission: Impossible . Now they know the forces ranged against them, can find their way through the Vellum, and have a clear goal in mind. They are out to find the last edition of The Book of All Hours . The quest takes them to a version of Palestine in 1929, and what happens here will form the spine of this half of the book. War hero Jack Carter arrives on a quest to find his old professor, Samuel Hobbsbaum (an avatar of Seamus Finnan, the absent seventh member of the group and the one who inevitably is the key to it all). There he joins forces with a mysterious Prussian Baron, Reinhardt, a sexually promiscuous local boy called Tamuz, a violent Scot, MacChuill, and the surprising leader of a local tribe, Anat. Opposing them is the shadowy Russian, Pechorin. Stories and plays recur throughout the two novels as our way of constructing and understanding and shaping our world: the play the troupe performs in the first half of this novel, the radio broadcasts of Don Coyote throughout the book, and so on. Here the conflict is reproduced in passages from a host of different books, including a cowboy novel by Joe Campbell, a thriller by R. Graves and of course, inevitably and recursively, Ink by Hal Duncan. So we come back to that initial dread: it is indeed a novel about story. But story, not writing. The writers in this book, attempting to forge or revise The Book of All Hours , fail, causing more mayhem than they were trying to correct. But story wins; recasting the Bible to undermine our most comforting myths, and presenting the twentieth century as a blood-soaked echo of myths that go back before the earliest civilisations, story becomes not just the way we apprehend the world but the way we can finally throw off the yoke of the future and forge a world not doomed by its past. It is a daring concept, grandiose, florid, messy; and Ink comes nowhere near achieving its ambition. Oh but the ambition is grand; would that other writers might aim so high and fail so spectacularly. Notes from New Sodom. . rantings, ravings and ramblings of strange fiction writer, THE. Sodomite Hal Duncan!! Hal Duncan's debut VELLUM was published in 2005, garnering nominations for the Crawford, Locus, BFS and , and winning the Gaylactic Spectrum, Kurd Lasswitz and Tähtivaeltaja. He's since published the sequel INK, "Escape from Hell!", various short stories, and a poetry collection, SONGS FOR THE DEVIL AND DEATH. A member of the Glasgow SF Writer's Circle, and a columnist at Boomtron, he also wrote the lyrics for Aereogramme's “If You Love Me, You'd Destroy Me” and the musical, NOWHERE TOWN. Homophobic hatemail once dubbed him "THE. Sodomite Hal Duncan!!" (sic) He's getting a t-shirt made up. Represented by: Howard Morhaim Literary Agency (howard AT morhaimliterary PERIOD com) Contact Me: hal AT halduncan PERIOD com Twitter: @Hal_Duncan Contact. So the hatemail dubbed me THE. Sodomite Hal Duncan!! (sic) So I will wear that with pride, cuntfuckers. It's like The Outlaw Josie Wales only better, right? I mean, did he have a fully capitalised THE, an extra-long dramatic pause, and two exclamation marks? No, he did not. Chickenshit. Find me on: The Book of All Hours. Recent Releases. Also in Print. Ebooks Available. Recent Posts. Friday, January 29, 1999. About the Author. Hal Duncan is a scion of 1970s Scotland, a queer kid who left to study at Glasgow University and never looked back. In the early '90s, he joined the Glasgow SF Writer's Circle, torched everything he'd ever written, and wrote his first functional short story, "Slab City, April 16," published in the Flamingo Book of Scottish Short Fiction 1994. The gods having patently smiled upon his sacrifice, he figured maybe he should take this writing malarkey seriously after all, and set to work. His debut VELLUM was published in 2005, garnering nominations for the Crawford, Locus, BFS and World Fantasy Award, and winning the Spectrum, Kurd Lasswitz and Tähtivaeltaja. He's since published: the sequel INK and a collection of four stories in the same Book of All Hours mythos, ERRATA; the novella ESCAPE FROM HELL!; a poetry collection, SONGS FOR THE DEVIL AND DEATH; two chapbooks, THE A-Z OF THE FANTASTIC CITY and FABBLES: 1; and numerous short stories in magazines or anthologies. He's also worked as anthology editor himself, on CALEDONIA DREAMIN'. His first short story collection, SCRUFFIANS! will be released from Lethe Press in April 2014, alongside a non-fiction book RHAPSODY, a book-length study of strange fictions. Hal is represented by Howard Morhaim Literary Agency. Work in Other Media. Hal has written two musicals: the "gay punk " musical, NOWHERE TOWN, staged most awesomely and much to his delight by the University of Chicago Theater Group; SODOM! THE MUSICAL, a rock opera based on a 17th century farce, The Quintessence of Debauchery by Lord Rochester. For the Ballads of the Book album, he wrote the lyrics to Aereogramme's “If You Love Me, You'd Destroy Me,” and more recently, he collaborated with Skye band The Dead Man's Waltz, filmmaker Johnny Barrington and artists including Kate McMorrine and Cat Ingalls, on the Story's End project, a multimedia show that played the CCA in Glasgow before running at the 2013 Fringe as part of the Made In Scotland showcase. Other musical ventures include a stickman slideshow "animation" of his 43 verse sea shanty about the gay pirate gods of Love and Death, "The Ballad of Matelotage and Mutiny." If he was any more prone to throwing himself into left-field projects, he'd probably write a queer adaptation of As You Like It as a screenplay for a John Hughesian high school movie. Oh, wait. He did that too. Homophobic hatemail once dubbed him "THE. Sodomite Hal Duncan!!" (sic). He's getting a t-shirt made up. Agent email: howard AT morhaimliterary PERIOD com Direct email: hal AT halduncan PERIOD com. Follow him on Twitter: @Hal_Duncan Watch him on YouTube: TheSodomiteHalDuncan. Ink by Hal Duncan. This, finally, is the conclusion of the Book of All Hours, the sequel to Duncan's marvelous Vellum . Even more so than Vellum , it's complicated, difficult, non-linear reading, and is also the second half of a complete story. (The first section is called Part Three.) It's probably incomprehensible without reading Vellum first. We left our heroes in a scattered mess of echoing archetypes after a nanite plague has rewritten reality and history. (One may or may not realize, after Vellum , that we were left there, but it slowly becomes apparent over the course of Ink .) Just as Vellum started reasonably coherent and then exploded and shattered as the story continued, Ink begins almost entirely incoherently, flittering between multiple similar characters and endless settings, before slowly cohering into something approaching a conventional plot for the last hundred pages or so. This reversal of direction from Vellum makes sense given the structure of the overall work, but it makes for rough going for the reader. Vellum hooks you before it starts throwing out the really hard stuff; Ink starts out in the deep end, with a barrage of metaphor, non-linear plotting, and resonating images, and makes you tread water for some time before throwing you a line. It opens with characters and ideas scattered across multiple parallel worlds, multiple Havens of coherent rules in the wilderness of the Hinter, following multiple instances of Jack, Joey, and Puck. Sometimes those instances thread together into a story, but even then there are embedded flashbacks and layers of deception. Often they're mind- bogglingly confusing. Suffice it to say that this is not fast reading, and even taking one's time over each page and puzzling clues from the alignment of headings, it's easy to get a headache. As with Vellum , familiarity with classical material helps. Ink is full of literary allusion, not to mention a re-enactment of Euripedes' The Bacchae by the ensemble cast during the first half of the book. (I also found the epilogue mostly incoherent, since it's a reworking of material from Virgil with which I'm not familiar.) But beyond that, I got the most from the opening of Ink when I stopped looking for plot, stopped trying to line everything up and piece it back together, and instead tried to read for emotional effect. The first part of Ink is as much a character study of Jack and Joey as anything else. One may not come away with any clear idea of what's going on, but Jack's nature as the wild force of power, the rebel, the terrorist, the Nazi, the one-man force of chaos with a bipolar side of dark order does come across. By the second part of the book, the angels are back into the story, one slowly pieces together a picture of the world as a result of the fallout from the bitmites of Vellum , and the cast of seven characters is in place. The conclusion returns to mythological warfare, the Book of All Hours, open combat using Cant to attack and rewrite the universe, and slowly some sense of goal. While Vellum was concerned with scope, breadth, vision, and stage, Ink is about rules. Making rules, breaking rules, forcing people and places to adhere to them, rewriting them, and recording them. Changing history and failing to change history. Ink is about what's written on the pages, how the writing happens, and who controls it. The book metaphor, between Vellum and Ink , is wonderfully vivid. Unfortunately, digging the themes out of the text is even harder than it was with Vellum , hard enough to be discouraging for me. I caught the edges of grand ideas: the obvious struggle between chaos and order, of course, but also how seven different shards of archetypes combine into one force, the futility and necessity of rebellion, and some wonderfully nasty shots at the idea of God and the stifling catastrophe of a coherent scripture and a God who exists. The end of the book features a subversive retelling and questioning of key bits of the Old Testament that I liked quite a bit. But for all that I dug out of Ink , I felt like I was leaving even more behind, that whole sections of the book went straight over my head, and that it was often unnecessarily complex. Duncan gives the reader almost no help; he dumps all the scattered shards of story on a table in front of you and leaves it to you to puzzle out how they might go together and what they might mean. That gives the reader maximum freedom, but this is a 1500 piece jigsaw puzzle of a picture of chaos, and you don't have a box lid to work from. I left Ink rather unsatisfied. I think there was some closure to Reynard's grand trip through the Vellum that started Vellum , but I mostly missed it. The story of the angels is the central plot of the series and is resolved, the strongest part of closure in the book, but Finnan's story gets only an oblique conclusion, as does Phreedom's. Part of the trouble for me is that Ink focuses heavily on Jack, Puck, and Joey, and while I like Joey well enough, Jack and Puck I find annoying and incoherent more often than interesting. Jack wasn't really the character I wanted to read about, so large sections of Ink were a disappointment. I would have preferred to spend more time with Phreedom, but she goes deep into archetype territory, playing out practically every female role you can think of except for the ones Puck plays. As with Vellum , I think one's enjoyment of Ink will succeed or fail based on one's opinion of Duncan's language. He uses metaphor, alliteration, long runs of description, vivid images, eroticism (usually male homosexual), and outright pornography to create something that's often more poetry than prose. For example, when the characters are playing out their version of The Bacchae , the rhyme scheme becomes contagious: not only does the dialogue rhyme, but it starts infecting the surrounding narration. Duncan goes gloriously all-out, leaving nothing in reserve, and the result is either beautiful or horribly overdone depending on how it strikes you from moment to moment. This is the sort of work that you have to occasionally read for sound and image rather than meaning, and if that's not your thing, I expect it will be more frustration than it's worth. Even more than Vellum , this isn't a book for everyone. It's unforgivingly difficult, in a wild, non-linear, non-traditional way. Sometimes, I think this works at a level that you couldn't reach with a more traditional book, but it demands a lot of patience of the reader and is the sort of work one ideally needs to read multiple times in quick succession to wrap one's mind around. It's a hard book to read except when one can really concentrate. I have enough other things to read that I don't want to take the time, which means I leave a lot of meaning behind untapped. It is, unfortunately, nowhere near the book that Vellum was (at least in my opinion), but if you loved Vellum as I did, it does offer a bit more of the same. Only consider Ink if you read and loved (not just liked) Vellum , but if you did, cautiously recommended. in Disneyland. In Vellum, the first volume of Hal Duncan's hefty two-parter, a young man on the trail of a family legend finds a remarkable book of maps, and another young man dies - the victim, it may be, of homophobic hate-crime. Soon our narrator and friends are in the book, embroiled in a war between opposing factions of archangels. In fact, they were always in the book: they too are angels or "unkin", superior beings who can change the rules and shift from "fold" to "fold" of the vellum universe. They spend the next several hundred pages jump-cutting from one fictional world to another: re-enacting Sumerian myth, talking in Virgilian poetry, playing Prometheus Bound in the romantic trenches of the Somme, surviving the end of the world in a Stephen King-ish US, pursuing eldritch elder races of a ghastly Lovecraftian persuasion into the nethermost pit . The abrupt shifts can be hard to follow, but the real problem, should you find it a problem, is that after a vivid opening, all narrative drive collapses under the onslaught of Duncan's style: a rockfall, an avalanche of wonderfully wordsmithed picturesque vignettes, stuffed with every single urban fantasy, rebel youth or permanent warfare image (not to say cliché) known to modern man. Ink follows the same pattern: an electric, brooding first chapter, then the flood of vignettes showcasing other fictions: graphic novelist Bryan Talbot's Luther Arkwright, in his tantric phase; a Commedia dell'arte production of The Bacchae in a Shakespearian Disneyland; spycraft from John le Carré's Circus; bullet time from The Matrix; Nazi conjuring and Indiana Jones Bible archaeology from Edward Whittemore's cult classic The Sinai Tapestry . and this is not an exhaustive list. But it's an easier ride than Vellum. The tumult of ancient and modern voices is somewhat tamed. The jump-cuts are less jumpy; the core characters have re-invented themselves as a team, with at least a sporadic sense of purpose. Their mission is to restore order to the Vellum, a model of the universe which is, literally, the universe; and which has stopped making sense. They believe they can do this by undoing the death that haunts their story in all its parallels - a death closely identified, in book one, with the brutal murder of gay Wyoming student Matt Shepard in 1998. This real-world singularity at the heart of Vellum is, or has become, the key to Ink: the image that signifies all that's wrong with the world to a writer who himself grew up perilously different in a small town and whose gay characters pursue the eternal questions - death, judgment, heaven and hell - in terms of their own defiance, their own faith in salvation. Though Duncan's style has been called "Joycean", in its insouciant excess the wordplay has more of the flavour of Dylan Thomas: a shoot-'em-up Under Milk Wood, thick as the Bible, starring four young men who spend more time dressing up and admiring themselves, like an Adam and the Ants tribute band, than pursuing their apocalyptic fantasy. This is challenging genre fare, yet Vellum had its passionate supporters and the finished project deserves to win more - though Ink has some puzzling reversals of the Vellum agenda. Not the least of these is the relentless sexualisation of the "victim/princess" character, Tom Messenger; and a family-values coda in which the homosexual leads are reduced to winsome figments of Our Narrator's imagination. Readers content to be carried along by the tide will be rewarded with a rip-roaring supernatural adventure; I was left with the sense of a powerful new writer, still struggling to control the host of ghosts and shadows that people the creative mind. · Gwyneth Jones's most recent novel is Rainbow Bridge (Gollancz).