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.

[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.