One Good Snark Deserves Another

[coalescent]

Matt Cheney on Vellum:

... each time I was ready to give up on the whole book as gassy claptrap, something snared me again, a detail or a phrase or an image, and before I knew it, I'd read another fifty pages in a kind of hyperattentive dream.

Some reviewers have, of course, disliked the book, and that hasn't surprised me at all -- this is the sort of book that causes strong reactions in readers, and it is a book that requires some real effort to read, given its length and complexity. I've not been much annoyed by reviewers who said, "I don't get it, and I don't want to bother getting it," because that's anybody's right, but I have been angered by a couple of reviewers who, strangled by the leashes of their pet taxonomies, have willfully and lazily missed the riches within the novel.

TM Wagner's review:

In fact, Vellum is empty, pretentious twaddle. It's another naked emperor for the cheering throng that mistakes obscurantism for brilliance. I cannot even call Duncan's novel an exercise in style over substance, because that term implies a substance beneath the style. Duncan, having exhaustively researched ancient myths, is just playing around with them here without shining the light of understanding upon them — either as stories in and of themselves, or upon the role of myth as a necessary defining ingredient of civilization.

[...]

I was surprised to find many of the book's fans describing it much the way Matthew Cheney does on The Mumpsimus: "It's a mess. But as messes go, it's one I had a lot of pleasure wading through." I suppose this demarcates the line between Vellum's defenders and detractors. Either you roll with its author's penchant for masturbatory self-indulgence (an attitude I have some sympathy for, as I apply it to a handful of writers myself), or you don't. In Hal Duncan's case, I didn't. Cheney writes, "...each time I was ready to give up on the whole book as gassy claptrap, something snared me again..." Those snares missed me. Thanks for taking one for the team, Matthew.

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

My stance on this book is one I feel for many first novels--why aren't the editors giving some guidance here? There is a good book in Vellum, but someone needed to make Hal sit down and write a book outline *after* he'd finished and then rework the book so that the thread actually went through the entire cloth. Vellum is written the way Hal thinks: fireworks at Dawn. In fact, there are some string resemblances to Charlie Stross's more manc productions.

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

Pretty much my feeling; I actually read this during Eastercon, as we were going to be on a panel together, and it seemed only polite to do so. Intensely frustrating ... the book, I mean. Lots of interesting ideas, some genuinely good and exciting writing, but it shot off all over the place. In the end, I felt like someone had given me a sack in which were shut two or three different novels, which were fighting for supremacy, and I was being obliged to read bits being thrust out of the sack at me, from whichever novel happened to be in the ascendant at that moment. My heart sank somewhat when I discovered this was only part 1.

Editorial discipline may be an old-fashioned concept,but it is to be encouraged, if only to provide a solid framework against which to kick later.

[frogworth.livejournal.com]

Which particular strings, and which of Charlie's productions are manc anyway? Edinburghian maybe...

[fjm.livejournal.com]

too much sugar yesterday. bad for the co-ordination.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

I dunno - if there were novels and short stories to which other works could have string resemblances, I think they would have to be Charlie's ...

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

I am now feeling stupid because I liked it.

Perhaps it's just a suspension of snark: I expect the threads to be pulled together in the second part (though have a nasty suspicion that not all of them will be). And I don't mind things being left unexplained. Vellum is a passionate novel and there were certainly moments where the passion alienated me, where I sat back and Didn't Get It. But then there were sections that drew me in, fascinated by the sheer invention and by the prose.

If I were editing it, it'd be about half the length, but it'd contain all the bits that really grabbed me and very little of the rest. That wouldn't necessarily make it a better book -- it would make it my take on it, my remix.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely - and this seems to be similar to people's take on The Baroque Cycle as well. Most readers seem to feel that the book would have been better if Stephenson had more of _this_ stuff in it and less of _that_ stuff, and couldn't his editor have made him cut it down. There's just been a lack of agreement over which bits were the worthwhile bits and which weren't...

I must add Vellum to my wishlist, so that I can get up to speed. Certainly the panels that Hal was on at EasterCon made me want to read it.