Just read the Damn Book of All Hours- my (losing) entry for Scott Alexander's book review contest

Note: This review is of both “Vellum” and “Ink”, books one and two of the Book of All Hours respectively. However, I only had time to reread Vellum in preparation for the review, so the focus will be on Vellum. The title of the duology is “The Book of All Hours” and I feel that, spiritually, Vellum & Ink are a single novel, and were probably intended as such but split for commercial reasons. Thus I sometimes call it a book in the singular.

Spoiler warning: This review contains spoilers. I would be very surprised if, given the nature of the book, spoilers spoiled anyone’s fun. At the very least I am confident that these particular spoilers won’t.

“The annuna, the judges of the underworld, surrounded her- They passed judgment against her.

Then Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death- She spoke against her the word of wrath

She uttered against her the cry of guilt- She struck her.

Inanna was turned into a corpse- A piece of rotting meat

And was hung from a hook on the wall.”

-The Descent of Inanna

There are some house words at the top of Scott’s blog that say “in a mad world, all blogging is psychiatry blogging”. True, and in a narcissistic world, all reviewing is, at its heart, self-review. So we come to Vellum & Ink by Hal Duncan (2005, 2007) and my body and blood. We come to what it says about me that I consider this obscure fantasy duology the greatest fiction I have ever read, bar nothing. Perhaps such an idiosyncratic judgment is more of a haruspex of my innards than the book, but still, let me show it to you. I’ll be direct, I love it, I think it’s glorious and I’m going to try to convince you to read it. I’m probably going to get overexcited, definitely cringe. I apologize- I can only plead honesty. I hope I succeed in getting you to pick it because you guys would love it- mythology, erudition, word games, psychology- it’s like an inventory of all that this Substack enjoys.

How to give a flavor of it?

“A story saying that all but one solitary page were blank, and on that page, there was only a single simple sentence, an equation which captured the very essence of existence. This, he said, was why all those who’d ever looked upon the book had gone insane, unable to comprehend, unable to accept, the meaning of life laid out in a few words of mathematical purity. After what happened to Thomas, I remember thinking that I knew what that sentence was. Two words. People die.”

But whatever is written in the book “it is not in heaven”. There’s always hope. No judgment is so ineluctable that it cannot be run from, reinterpreted, resisted, revised, rejoined, reimagined, wrestled against or, worst-case scenario maliciously complied with. Thus, at least as long as there are still people, people have a chance. This is a story of hope militant and armed. The story of the clash between these powers- the certainty of death, the fire of hope- on the battlefield of eternity.

I- When I found the doors of perception out through the gates of heaven and hell

A quarter way through this, the journey of our mortal life, I received book vouchers valued at 25 dollars for a science fiction and fantasy bookstore from a friend. It was on the occasion of a birthday, I think my 21st. So I went into the central business district, planning to browse and then impulse buy. I can’t recall exactly, but knowing me I was probably looking for something science fiction or fantasy- with pretensions of being a wee bit literary- think The Use of Weapons or The Raven Tower.

I found Vellum, Book one of the Book of All Hours.

 On the back, in the sonorous language of blurbs:

The Book of All Hours: I

In the Vellum, – the vast realm of eternity on which our world is just a scratch – the unkin are gathering for war.

In the Vellum, – a falling angel and a renegade devil are about to come to blows.

In the Vellum, – blood magic made in hell is about come face to face with nanotechnology forged in heaven. Past, present and future will collide with other worlds and ancient myths.

And the Vellum will burn

An extraordinary, incendiary masterpiece from a rare new talent, this is multi-stranded, multi-charactered imaginative fiction that blows traditional literary concepts apart

The blurb is a bit cringe but what blurb isn’t cringe? All blurbs sound like they’re meant to be read by that guy who does all the movie trailer voiceovers. I started flicking through it and decided to buy it. I think I recall that I was so confident in my choice that I bought the second volume at the same time.

I got home and I started reading it. I became confused. Surprisingly, it did blow traditional literary concepts apart, at least for a certain value of traditional. It reads as if James Joyce got into Kabbalah or like Scott had written Unsong while high on LSD. I became very lost. So I went and grabbed a notepad and started from the beginning, drawing little diagrams and keeping little glossaries as I went. I started to grasp it, indeed, it seared me.

II- The lost days of summer and the lost deus of Sumer

Trying to summarize this book is a bit like trying to capture the essence of a complex three-dimensional object like a human body with a single two-dimensional slice:

Nonetheless, the simplest way to describe The Book of All Hours is that it tells a story not about characters in the normal sense, but about hyper-characters- archetypes. It does this by weaving a series of stories, with the same archetypes in them, together into sequences corresponding to a narrative of narratives.

The difficulty in reading it is peculiar, probably not quite what you are expecting. You know how Cthulhu is so maddening to look at because he is an N-dimensional being compressed, with loss, into a 3-dimensional space? It’s like that kind of difficulty, much more startling than it is laborious.. Or to look at it another way, It has been said that Kant is difficult to read not because he is vague, but precisely because he is so exact. Something like that is happening here. Given the architectonic character of the book, I was not surprised to learn the author is a former programmer. I can only imagine what the storyboard must have looked like.

The “center of gravity” of the stories is that the heroes- these archetypes moving through the space of all possible worlds-are Unkin. Once-humans who have stepped out of linear time, into a space of narrative time, they became demi-gods. Over the millennia they have been arranging themselves into two sides: The Covenant- an attempt to govern the Unkin, to bring them to heel and cease their pretensions to Godhood- they have championed Abrahamic monotheism. The Sovereigns stand against them- individual self-styled deities and their little fiefdoms. Angels and demons duel with swords of fire and words of thunder in the air. But a third side is coming, a Greek chorus that has chosen to enter the fight, a swarm of dead souls, moved by the richness of the world out from death and eternity, furious at the pretensions of both sides:

““NO MORE VILLAINS, NO MORE VICTIMS, NO MORE HEROES”

[…]

A commendable concept says Moloch bitterly. And who might you be?

And we tell him exactly what we are”

A searing flash of light is seen across the skyline of Damascus…

Every war has its deserters. Our lead characters are deserters from the war in heaven, trying to avoid being pressganged into either side. One of the characters, in various folds of reality, goes by the names Puck, Thomas, Dionysus, Tammuz, Dummuzi, Adonis, Pan, Thomson’s Gazelle (the species) Matthew Shepard (yes, that Matthew Shepard) and many others. He is killed, always by at least two killers, one of whom who admixtures disgust and longing- Jack. At the timeless, omnipresent moment of his death, a cry is heard across beingscape.

The Great God Pan is Dead

As was reputed to have been heard in our world, during the reign of Tiberius.

The characters, and the hyperspace of reality, are rent by grief. The multiverse starts circling the drain. Why does the death of Puck cause so much harm? No one is quite sure, and the characters themselves remark on the strangeness. However, within the dream logic of the book, I think a better question might be why doesn’t the death of anyone destroy the multiverse, for as it is written in the Talmud & Quran: Whoever destroys one life is as if he destroyed a whole world, and whoever preserves a life is as if he preserved the whole world.

Our heroes wage a desperate struggle -military, political, artistic, sexual, religious, social-against all the laws of narrative and reality, a war against the war in heaven, to restore him to existence.

III- The Ivory Tower weighs in

There might be only three academic works on this book. Two I have been able to find: Rewriting Myth and Genre Boundaries: Narrative Modalities in The Book of All Hours by Hal Duncan by Popov (2020) and the earlier piece Dead gods and rebel angels: Religion and power in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials and Hal Duncan's The Book of All Hours Macaskill (2009). I also found references to another work Euripides Bound: Hal Duncan's use of Greek Tragedy (2009) but couldn’t find a copy. The abstract of Popov’s article might give a flavor of the absurd but never quite ridiculous enterprise of the book:

This article explores the relations between fictional time, genre, myth, and narrative modalities in Hal Duncan’s novels Vellum (2005) and Ink (2007) – known collectively as The Book of All Hours.1 [….] The metanarrative mechanisms of the novels are then explained using this apparatus, which demonstrates the usefulness of SF in challenging fundamental assumptions about the grammar of thought. Finally, the same theoretical and methodological approaches are considered as tools for expanding narrative engagement with the world beyond strictly human domains, connecting the overarching argument to works from recent theoretical developments such as Object-Oriented Ontology and agential realism.

A pretty ambitious article for a book everyone has forgotten! I haven’t read the article cover to cover, but he’s right about one thing, it’s impossible to read the book and not think about possible worlds and long afternoons debating whether Twin Earth water is water.

IV- Of power and its false opposition

I once wrote to Hal Duncan and suggested that, what the book is about more than anything, is an attempt to escape both power and its false opposition. Hal Duncan agreed with that. And who amongst us has not looked at the webs we’ve wrapped ourselves in, look at the grandeur and potential of humanity, and not found ourselves saying “Christ, but do you have any more options for me?”. It might seem like only a child’s lament, a refusal to grapple with the Serious and Hard Choices. But consider all the dilemmas- technological, social, ethical, of the past. Think how often the right answer later turned out to be some “none of the above” a third option that hadn’t yet been imagined.

V- Yearning

Let us define yearning in contradistinction to desire. Desire is for something concrete. Yearning is for something you can’t capture in words or pictures. Desire is GPS coordinates, yearning is “Second star on the right and straight till morning”.

Why did this book sear itself onto me? The yearning. For so long I’ve yearned to be an abstraction, rising above a particular life, to become an idea-force operating on history. I’ve dreamed of writing the perfect book that summarizes exactly what I think and then just fading- leaving the book behind. Becoming an archetype, disincarnate agency. This book speaks to that.

However, I’ve also dreamed of becoming concreta, filling up each moment to overflowing. I’ve dreamed of being like Thomas sitting under the apple tree on a late summer afternoon, dappled in light, even while in his past and future both he is pursued and dying. Still, this moment is perfect for Thomas, so all moments are.

-You’ll always be getting captured, she says

-And I’ll always be escaping them

-They’ll kill you over and over again

-And all the time I’ll still be here, he says,, under a tree of golden apples and green leaves

The Book of All Hours speaks to both longings and so many more. I’ve yearned for things that don’t have a name. I’ve yearned for seemingly logically contradictory states of affairs. I have longed to be ordinary and longed to be extraordinary, longed to help the world and longed to escape from it. Haven’t we all? There is nothing special about me in this regard- everyone yearns. But this book gets yearning. Big deal- don’t a lot of books get yearning? Sure, but how many so successfully echo the infinite dimensions of yearning in their form and content?

It is a book that resonates in the hollow places of those who have loved beyond reason and shook their fists at death. In its careful balance, it neglects neither the sweetness of life, nor the longing for transcendence.

And as his cathartic inferno lights a slant of angular face, his obscenities, his profanities, his blasphemies turn into sobs and laughter, invocations of his lost love that break my heart as I sit here in the car, the engine idling, my hands shaking so much I know I cannot write those actual words of rogue desire without dissolving.

I think the book has turned me into a romantic in a lot of ways. For example, I am a utilitarian, in that I want to maximize welfare, but I could never agree with those who think welfare is simply the balance of pleasure minus pain. True welfare is, I think, a kind of wholeness of being and mastery of capacity. Pleasure or desire satisfaction might approximate it, but only approximate it. Intellectually my reason for thinking this is that, if we were pleasure maximizing utilitarians, we would think that a universe stuffed full of people reliving their greatest experience over and over again would be “good”. In terms of a philosophical autobiography though, I think it was probably this book that awakened me to this dimension of life.

So often, we describe all our values, especially, but not only our political values, in a stationary way, in terms of a possible utopia. Maddening! Our values are not places, they are directions. They are yearnings. In our limited minds these yearnings cannot be articulated ahead of time, our experience of trying to get someplace better, in life, in politics, in art, is much more like following a star than it is like following a map. Maybe this is only true because of human limitations but it is true.

VI- Verdant prose for the lost deus

The prose is intricate and luxuriant yet made according to his careful design. Ornamentation and function blend together. Each sentence picks up speed as it goes along, accelerating. Each sentence is a self-contained world, even when short. They are each laden with significance, but, at least in context, rarely pretentious. In parts, it is almost a verse novel. All this is all the more astonishing given it was Hal Duncan’s first.

Let me pick out a selection, almost at random, by opening Vellum up to different pages.

“There is a city, canopy, he says, last of a distant land and near the fountains of the sun, inhabited by a dark race”.

“The Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead Man, runs from Kern’s Gate, El Paso, north through a dry plain of natron, uranium, salt, sand and dust, up to Santa Fe, up to Los Alamos and Trinity where they shattered atoms, those destroyers of worlds”.

“The birdmen who sing the morning world into existence with their cant”. (Birdmen=angels, cant=language of magic).

““Everything is real” said Jack “Everything is true; nothing is permitted”.”

VII- Grit among the angels and light in Stygia

There’s a sensuality in the book, empiricism that prevents it from becoming a metaphysical treatise. Sometimes, repulsive, sometimes alluring, sometimes both:

“Rotting metal, petrol fumes, boiled blood, sulphur or ammonium. I swear it smelled like all of them and none of them. If that smell is natural than nature is no mother”

But the sensuality isn’t just in the words, it’s in the rhythms, the flow of speech which forces you to process the book audibly, and not just in terms of its semantics. Whole chunks are in rhyme, sometimes completely out of the blue. In the ideal case, this book would be read aloud, cover to cover, but a more select approach of reading the passages - the songs, the poems, the interludes by the Greek chorus- that vibrate in their sound will suffice.

IX- A world built of signification

The layers of apophenia and parallel go very deep, they are structure rather than ornamentation, and cannot be resolved into a single coherent symbol system. For example, which of the main characters represents Jesus? Is it Jack Carter (initials JC)- a redeemer born to overthrow tyrants? Is it Seamus/Prometheus- stretched out on a rock for the sins of humanity? Is it Thomas/Puck? The God who dies for our sins yet eternally lives again? More speculatively, is it the cold-blooded Joey? Joey=Yoey=Yoo-eee=Yod-He-Vav-He made flesh? A more advanced reader than me could probably make a case for any of the book’s seven characters being a stand-in for the messiah. Moreover, because the characters are archetypes rather than singular characters they constantly shift relations- is Anna Thomas’s sister? his Mother? his Lover?

The books reward rereading. At first you uncover the layers and hints left by the author. Every time you read it you will discover new hints, but gradually you will begin to build your own structure, stake out your own claims in the space of possibility.

I would very much not recommend this book to someone in imminent danger of psychosis. As someone who went pretty far down that path when I was a small child, it walks the road- makes a “steelman” of psychosis- all too well:

“You hear voices Jack?”

“Don’t we all? Voices of souls, of ancestors, family and friends, enemies and demons, ghosts inside the head, the ghosts in the machine. You telling me you don’t hear your own little internal narrative when you’re thinking to yourself? You’ve never had an argument with a friend that didn’t carry on in your head afterwards? You’ve never lain in bed and thought to yourself in someone’s voice, to get a different perspective, someone else’s attitude? We all hear voices, doctor. Most people just keep them turned down real low.”

“And these voices tell you to…”

“Listen. It’s like being asleep beside a river, a river of voices, babbling, buried in the rustle of leaves. Narcissus sleeps and dreams us all.”

X- En Passant

I should mention, at least in passing that the book has a rich and understated British humor that only becomes apparent once your eyes have adjusted to the other lights that dazzle you. Some of them are pretty obvious- e.g. Moloch talking about his “Philistine Liberation Organisation” but there are many more, often revealed upon rereading.

Also in passing, it’s a great book to beat people who sneer about genre fiction over the head with. It’s more erudite and urbane than just about all of the “sad-middle-class-people-having-affairs” set.

Now comparisons- what’s it like? It’s a little bit like A) The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot B) Ulysses by James Joyce C) Unsong by Scott Alexander D) Any book from a genre with “punk” at the end- steampunk, sailpunk, solarpunk E) The philosophical works of Soren Kirkegaard. F) Reading The Golden Bough by Frazer while high on LSD.

XI- Sodomy and violence

In understanding the book’s failure to take off, most of the blame must surely lie in its difficulty. However the choice of the author to make the story, in some sense, about a gay romance doubtless didn’t help. Just how many people are there who want to read a gay romance, written in the style of James Joyce, against the backdrop of the space of all possible worlds? Perhaps if it had been written today the thriving slash community would have carried it, I’m not sure.

But in other ways its publication today would be a little more fraught. Jack is sometimes Thomas’s killer, sometimes Thomas’s lover, and sometimes both. A deliberately disturbing choice. It’s a dynamic that would be difficult to explore with a heterosexual couple without provoking outrage. Perhaps it would be difficult to explore with any couple in a post-Metoo era- see the controversy over Lana Del Rey’s “Ultraviolence”. But it does make for an entrancing meditation on the erotics of violence.

These days it’s very unfashionable to suggest that homophobia might reflect latent homosexuality, and it’s very unfashionable to eroticise homophobia. Maybe because of its time, The Book of All Hours does both, and whether it is right on the psychological facts, is a richer and certainly more provocative novel for it.

“I started to remember it all at the funeral. I was thinking about how we first met. It was in this social studies class. We just clicked, like we’d known each other all our lives. At the funeral, I started to remember that we had. All our lives. We were like children playing in the illusion fields, he continues. Let’s pretend. One day we’d be soldiers in the First World War- Captain ‘Mad’ Jack Carter, Private Thomas Messenger. Another day I’d be a seraphim sent to hunt him down across this weird graey version of Amorica, only to wake up in a town called Endhaven, amongst black-suited refugees from a nanotech apocalypse. We’ve been shepherds in Arcadia and rent-boys on the streets of Sodom, Doc. I’ve crossed deserts wider than the world because he dared me. I’ve led armies to destruction because he was in danger. I remembered it all- Christ, it was like being born again- as I was standing there at his funeral, listening to the Minister spout his bullshit. We’ve lived a million lives and ended up together, whatever fold of the vellum we were in.”

“And in these other… folds, Puck didn’t die?”

“Oh, no, says Jack. He always dies. You should know Reynard. You should remember too.”

XII- Kill your gays?

On the topic of homosexuality, the TV tropes wiki has a useful comment on the books, which I have often found myself contemplating. The “Kill Your Gays” trope is a postulated tendency -and it accords with my observations although I haven’t seen a quantitative study- for gay characters to be particularly likely to die in fiction. In the bad old days, this was because gay characters were villains and needed to get their comeuppance. These days it’s often the opposite. The gay characters are portrayed as dying because they are too good for this sinful world. Nevertheless, they die.

TV Tropes suggests that the Book of All Hours is an attack on that trope. An attack on the idea that it is normal to expect gay characters to die gracefully and early in a nice little tear-jerker. But- how can that be? Isn’t the book an instantiation or even apotheosis of the trope? Isn’t Thomas always the wreathed sacrifice across all the worlds? In a way, but remember, this is a narrative about narratives. Thomas dies everywhere because that’s what happens in existing narratives. But the characters are in rebellion against the archetype, trying to find or create a new manifold of possibility where this isn’t true.

We could even- and I hope this doesn’t paint Hal as too self-indulgent- suggest that the activity of these characters in trying to make a new Eden where Puck can live is a metaphor for the work of the author. The author, or at least Hal, fights against the “tradition of all dead generations weigh[ing] like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. Hal invites us to imagine/demand other moral economies in literature where gay people don’t just elegantly die, thoughtfully providing a tasteful frisson of sad-spice to make the work Literary with a capital L.

XIII- An invitation to sit in the dappled light under the apple tree on this late summer day

It’s sad this book is all but forgotten. Maybe it would have done better today, with the internet and Wikipedia more ubiquitous, allowing the research-as-you-go detective puzzle box approach that this book benefits from. This is a book that really needs to be read by a community. It should be solved together like an alternate reality game on a Reddit forum- except less linear than an ARG, more like a continent to be explored in a series of joint expeditions.

At least until machine learning was invented, writing a book was the closest we could come to making a person artificially. Reading a book is always the interpenetration of two worlds, you and the book. I wish I could give you not just this book to read, but the interaction effect it had on me. But it’s for the best I can’t because you’ll build your own collided world. I hope it will be vast- full of ancient forests and singing deserts- but regardless, it will spin into fractal slices you can’t even imagine now. Or maybe you’ll hate it. No way to know without trying.

Pick it up and come sit with me under the apple tree.