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

[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.