Ink

The Book of All Hours #2

by Hal Duncan

It's twenty years since the Evenfall swept across the Vellum and the bitmites took reality apart, twenty years since Phreedom Messenger disappeared into the wilderness and Seamus Finnan was imprisoned in his own past. Twenty years of chaos but the Dukes, the remnants of the Covenant, still cling to power in their enclaves of order in the bitmite-devastated wilderness . . . in their Havens in the Hinter.

Across the folds of time and space, though, rogues and rebels are rising up against the Empire. From a mediaeval fortress where wandering mummers stage a Harlequin play based on Euripides's The Bacchae and performed in the Cant ... to Kentigern where another Harlequin, Jack Flash, wreaks havoc on a fascist state that thought him dead. From a 1939 Paris where Jack Carter and Seamus Finnan, heroes of the International Brigades, seek to rewrite history -- to a 1929 Berlin where a very different Jack seeks to save the world from a history he has helped make real. Locked in an eternal battle of chaos and order, it seems everyone must play their part now, as rebel or tyrant, hero or villain.

'It is, quite simply, stunning and the most powerful debut novel I've read since Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Norrell and Mr Strange' " Forbidden Planet" magazine

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction, New Weird, Urban Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Dark Fantasy

530 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Hal Duncan is the author of Vellum, which was a finalist for both the William H. Crawford Award and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. He is a member of the Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle. He lives in the West End of Glasgow.

Reviews

[Craig Couden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This book is really good.

To try to sum up the plot of Ink and its precursor Vellum would take up much more space and time than I care to expend. But in a nutshell: The world has ended, reality has shattered, and seven people try to put together pieces of themselves that are shattered and scattered across reality while they try to find the mythical/ real Book that is the map/key to the universe. In a nutshell.

Ink is one of the more difficult simply to read. narration jumps back and forth between characters and plot lines, all of which revolve around similar characters with same names. Keeping the Jacks, Guys, and Joeys, etc. straight was difficult always and impossible a number of times. However, confusion has a purpose. What emerges from the jumble of narrative strings is not the story of many characters, but of the same characters in the same roles, Jack the hero, Joey the traitor/ enemy, Anna the warrior. Duncan creates archetypes out of these characters and after a while the reader can see these defined roles in whichever narration is being told.

There is so much more to be taken from this book that I'm not going to write about here. It's a challengeing book, no question, but one of the best I've read in years.

[Kelley · Rating 2 out of 5]

VELLUM, the first book in this series, was my favorite book of the year and I was dying for INK to come out. But while there were many wonderful moments in this book, it just couldn't keep me engaged. I cannot live by meta-character alone, I guess. I'm sorry to say, it's one of the few books that after months of slogging through it, I gave up. That's right. Didn't finish it. Sorry. So many seeds of brilliance, so much potential, but far too indulgent.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a dense, twisty, wonderful conclusion of Duncan's The Book of all Hours. The group of friends from Vellum deals with the aftermath, just trying to get back what they had, or get something new or both or.. well, yeah Twisty, like I said. These books are worth the brain power necessary.

[SyringaVulgariska · Rating 5 out of 5]

"[...] jeśli Księga wszystkich godzin jest prawdziwą historią, o którą nam chodziła - zapisaną krwią na skórze aniołów - jak to, na Boga, świadczy o naszym człowieczeństwie?"

Rzadko zdarza mi się wstawić tu coś poza zwykłą oceną danej książki. Bo jestem leniwa.
Z Atramentem, którego pierwszej części Welinu nie czytałam, postanowiłam jednak uczynić wyjątek.
Książce zarzuca się, że jest trudna i męczy czytelnika i faktem jest, że nie jest to lekka i przyjemna lektura. Szczególnie jeśli (tak jak ja) zignoruje się uwagę autora zawartą w pierwszych rozdziałach, która zdradza czytelnikowi jak powinien postępować z książką.

Pętle czasowe, rozbicia rzeczywistości, ci sami bohaterowie występujący pod różnymi imionami. Pozorny chaos, który ostatecznie tworzy palimpsest, a jednocześnie historię, którą jeśli czytelnik zechce można ułożyć w chronologiczną opowieść.
Duncanowi nie zależy na prowadzeniu swojego czytelnika za rękę, pozwala mu się zgubić, podrzuca wskazówki, które niekiedy naprowadzają na fałszywy trop. (Czy to jeszcze ten sam bohater? Czy już całkiem nowa postać? Domyśl się, sam zdecyduj.) Bawi się z odbiorcą, zadając przy tym niewygodne pytania. Czy okrucieństwo, rządza władzy i terror nie są wpisane w nasz gatunek? Dlaczego nie umiemy odmienić historii? Czemu Kain zawsze zabija Abla? Czemu wiedza sprawia ból?

W Atramencie szybkie i intensywne sceny walk, pełne wybuchów, pościgów i przemocy, która dla głównego(?) bohatera stanowi siłę napędową, przerywane są kronikarskimi opisami rzeczywistych wydarzeń z pierwszej połowy XX wieku. Duncan na 3 stronach streszcza nam największe okrucieństwa jakich dopuściła się ludzkość na przestrzeni pięćdziesięciu lat. To właśnie te zestawienia, a nie achronologia wydarzeń, czy zmiany imion bohaterów, czynią tę książkę trudną i niewygodną. Bo chociaż, na końcu pojawia się nadzieja, zjawia się też pytanie, czy nie będzie ona kolejną zmarnowaną szansą.

[Robert Day · Rating 1 out of 5]

Here are all the reasons I loved this book numbered zero to zero (in no particular order):

0 -

Oh, wait - there are none.

Ah well, this is going to be a quick, one-star review then.

Read the first paragraph from Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible:

"Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their own precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever"

Then read the first paragraph from this book:

""

Yeah, you're right - I just couldn't be bothered.

What I want to say though is that Barbara's first paragraph and all of Hal's prose are, on the surface, quite similar in style but that's where the resemblance ends ... (cover your ears for the next part if you have a sensitive disposition) ... because Babs writes writing that makes love and produces beautiful babies whereas Hal's stuff is pure masturbation. He writes to no purpose that I can discern: his novel is storyless, his characters are formless, his prose is devoid of any colour but purple and his sense of when to stop repeating the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over again is completely absent.

So, yeah - pretty please don't read this book that I just spent the last 16 days of my life wading through (26 days if you include the time I spent reading the first book in the series). It won't make you happy.

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd like to say that if you arrived here without reading the first book in the series, "Vellum" then you should go back and read that to avoid being confused. But I'm . . . not sure it really matters. In fact, I'm not even sure if reading them out of order would give you a markedly different effect than the right way round.

For those who made it through the first book, you probably understand about as much as I do. The unkin (read: "angels") use the Cant to rewrite reality, which is overall termed the Vellum and contains much more than our world. Most of the unkin are derived from ancient myths and would like things to stay the way they are. There's about to be a war and a group of fresh unkin would rather stay out of it. Those people for the most part happen to be our main characters, who appear over and over again in different incarnations across reality, generally suffering variations of the same fates and straining to achieve a goal that . . . might be freedom? Or "Phreedom", which is literally the name of one of the characters.

The first book was an unholy hodgepodge of pretty much every myth that Duncan could let his local academic library get him access to, all filtered through the story's sensibilities. Unfortunately for all of us, that sensibility more often than not bordered on outright incoherence. The story kept jumping from reality to reality, giving the characters slightly different names but not giving us much to hang onto either plot-wise or emotionally. Like a KISS concert set inside a Baz Luhrmann film, it was just too much of everything at once. The craft and the passion were there but after a while it felt more blugeoning than anything else.

Things improve slightly here. Not by much, but slightly. The characters are a little more established, although if you've forgotten anyone's motivations you're out of luck because not much gets reexplained. The idea of the war seemed to have been pushed to the backburner, or at least Duncan isn't interested in openly describing it. Strangely, it winds up paring things down slightly and instead of forcing us to frantically chase after myth drenched scenarios like a Whack-a-Mole game set to the wrong speed we're only really focusing on a couple scenarios at a time.

Unfortunately its not clear what those scenarios have to do with the main plot, or anything at all. You can't even be sure there is a main plot anymore. The opening scenes alternate with a play given to a Duke and a princess that appears to mirror the action in the other scenes but beyond that its not certain what you're supposed to draw from it. There's a plot that seems to be set in a "V for Vendetta" type future where the "Futurists" won and England is fascist. There's a long interrogation scene that seems to repeat itself with subtle variations every time. There's a kind of "Indiana Jones" type adventure going on somewhere else. There's Cold Men. There's . . . not a dance number but that's probably an oversight. What you do have are a lot of questions and a lot of answers but you can't be sure that you're getting the right answers to the right questions.

So having to only follow like three or four plots simplifies matters, especially as he lets the plots string out longer so you can settle into them for a bit. But instead of feeling like smaller portions of a larger war, it comes across as a series of pastiches for all the stuff Duncan wants to write about. Just about all of them are well done, although the one that seems the nearest to his heart is the strange cross between a Michael Moorcock Jerry Cornelius story and that Alan Moore "Lustbusters" backup from "American Flagg" . . . with the strange Wolfman Jack type commentary happening throughout, it has the most moving parts but like all the others its opaque as to how much of it is just mirroring the overarcing plot.

The downside to the pastiches is that after a while it makes you miss the more hyperactive approach of the first volume . . . without any sense that we're going somewhere definite with these the scenarios go on and on and on. Having made their point as an alternate versions of the reality we know they just keep on chugging along gradually taking over the book. We keep waiting for a war to start but then keep asking ourselves if this is the war itself or merely its aftermath.

If the characters were stronger than maybe it would help but, again, we aren't given much to grasp with them. Some of the characters get stronger scenes than others and an extended sequence in the epilogue gives us a better idea of what a more focused book might have looked like with everyone on the same page (and even the epilogue overstays its welcome, acting instead as a remix of some works by Virgil) but with variations of the characters scattered here and there working toward goals that aren't easy to infer you may find yourself wishing after hundreds of pages that some satisfying culmination may come of this.

It doesn't. If anything there's even less of a sense here that the characters are struggling toward a goal or working through a conflict as much as Duncan is writing all the stuff he ever wanted to write and cramming it into one book. Like "Vellum", its all interesting and erudite and to his credit never comes across as smugly "clever-clever" the way that early Neal Stephenson can make me feel . . . but either I'm getting ossified in my old age with navigating complex plots (in his defense I did have a couple rough weeks at work) or he's so far over my head that astronauts are calling him in as a potential UFO. Normally I'm a sucker for weirdness or tapping into the primal sources of myths but boy, whatever frequency this one is broadcasting on isn't one that I'm able to receive.

[Vít · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vítejte ve světě (či světech) rozbitých válkou andělů na cucky, kde prostor nedrží pohromadě a čas plyne všemi směry současně. Podobně na střípky je rozbitý i celý Atrament. Hal Duncan nemá se čtenáři moc slitování, jeho hrdinové existují v bezpočtu verzích v různých světech i příbězích, je to opět docela na budku:)
Ale je to fascinující.

[Ian Cann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trying to stay on top of the plot of Ink as it fractures reality, space and different versions of these characters across the vellum is like trying to teach bees to juggle ham whilst also eating cake - Crazy, possibly quite dangerous and delicious.

The language, ideas and characters carry everything with the plots being dragged kicking and screaming along for the ride. Allusions and references abound like giant literary abounding things and time is split asunder amidst the chaos.

This and Vellum, (the prior novel in this duology) could possibly do with a spot more focus and some editing - the ending does feel like it fizzles out like a slightly disappointing firework, otherwise enormous mythical fun is to be had here.

[Tani · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave the first book in this series 4 stars. On its own, I would have rated it about 3.5, but I rounded up because I really admired the vision of the book, and I had high hopes that this second book would bring together the scattered ideas and shape them into a more cohesive whole. I guess that happened, but it ended up being a whole that I really didn't enjoy.

I think a big part of my problem was pacing. This book felt tremendously slow to me. I think part of that was just the style its written in. It's a very jumpy style. Like the first book, each chapter is divided into a large number of much smaller sections, averaging from one page to maybe five. Maybe I was just less tolerant of it in this book, but it drove me nuts. There would be a section of story from one timeline, a snippet of the same story being told in a different style, and then a snapshot of another timeline, and then it would cycle back through. This completely kept me from building up any momentum. I felt like I just slogged from section to section.

This book was also really focused on Jack. Jack is my least favorite character in this duology, to be honest, so that wasn't a thrill. The characters that I liked a bit better, like Phreedom and Finnan, had a much lesser role. Phreedom was the target of a lot of disapproval from the other characters, as well, which. It's not like anyone else makes good decisions. Why should she get all the criticism from the others for her bad decisions? And Finnan's story was pretty much completely disconnected from the rest of the book, so although I liked it a bit more than the rest, it felt like a waste of time when all I wanted to do was be done with the book.

Repetition was another big problem here for me. I understand that repetition is very much a key ingredient of the premise of the book, but there was just too much of it. I felt like I was reading the same storylines over and over again, which got very old. Plus, this is a pretty bleak story, so that made it even harder to read, and I certainly didn't really enjoy doing so.

Other minor quibbles: All the sex. All the drugs. So casually, so mindlessly. Bleh. It was a bit much for me. I don't dislike either of those things, but when it feels gratuitous, I hate it. There's just something in my basic character that takes sex and drugs pretty seriously, so it really bothers me when they're overused like this. Also, that everything builds on different pieces of ancient literature that I've never read and have no interest in reading. My lack of knowledge probably did not help my enjoyment of the book at all. I hate when I can feel points whooshing over my head.

These things aside, I still admire the vision of the books. It's a bold idea. I just think that the execution was lacking.

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in November 2009.

Book two of The Book of All Hours continues in the same vein as book one, Vellum. Like that, and you'll like this. Find that incomprehensible (which is quite possible), and this will be the same. (Note that it is a while since I read Vellum, so my description of how the two books relate together might not be entirely accurate.)

The Book of All Hours (the book within the book) describes, controls, or perhaps is, the multitude of universes. In the aftermath of the catastrophic Evenfall, chaos rules; now, everything is fragmented, yet some things remain constant between the different versions of reality. Jack Carter is a revolutionary, everywhere, connected to the metaphysics of the Book. But what is he trying to achieve? Is he even dead or alive?

The story is extremely fragmented, told in an exceptionally allusive style: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius meets Finnegans Wake. References run from pop culture (The Prisoner, the Sex Pistols, etc.) to ancient literature (a performance of the Bacchae as political satire by a commedia dell'arte troupe forms the structure of a long section of the novel, and one of Virgil's Eclogues is used in a similar fashion in the epilogue) to folklore (Puck, Reynard the fox). Theological discussion rubs shoulders with a thriller set in the thirties Middle East. Overall, it is a scintillating cascade of ideas, images, and styles.

Like other books of this kind, however, the narrative is hard to follow, particularly if you are a reader who wants to have a linear plot. It is also true that parts of the novel work better than others. (At least, it appeared to be the case to me, both here and in Vellum, but is could just mean that my concentration levels fluctuated.) It is likely to make more sense a second time around, and a repeat read is definitely something I will do.

In summary, The Book of All Hours will not be everyone's cup of tea, but I liked it.

[Belle Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know that thing, when you love a book so much, and you're afraid to read the sequel just in case you don't like it as much? I was kind of like that with Ink. I loved Vellum to a degree that I didn't think it was possible to love a book--with the kind of fierce, ecstatic love that one usually reserves for rock stars. I read it and stopped my own writing for a while, quite sure that I would never manage to approach the sheer brilliance and complexity of it. Every book got compared to Vellum; every book came up lacking (and, to a small degree, still does, although I've re-learned to accept each book on its own merit, away from the Vellum-sway.) And I was afraid to read Ink unless it came up short for being 1.) not Vellum and 2.) a sequel, which usually aren't as good.
I am thrilled to report that it is excellent. Different excellent, but excellent nonetheless. You still have the formal frame of ancient works: a Harlequin play enacting the Bacchae in the first half, and the destruction of Sodom in the second. It is an ensemble piece, ultimately, and the old gang are all back together, although Thomas appears only shortly before he morphs into his Puck-self, the self he retains for the rest of the book.
But if Vellum found its center in Phreedom's sorrow at the loss of her brother, Ink finds its core in Jack's mad, wild joy of rebellion, and his love for the softer, stiller Puck. This is a love that plays out through the Vellum, sometimes with happy results, sometimes with sad. In Ink, Jack's character is underpinned by the Peacock Angel of the Yezidi, the fallen entity that finds forgiveness and redemption, and his wild blue and green orgone trails can only recall a peacock's tail.
In short, (and I find myself surprised in saying this) I love Ink as much as I love Vellum. Differently, of course: there is no Sumer in Ink, and Sumer was one of the things that made me love Vellum sooooo much. But Ink stands on its own merits, and there are facets of it that I love even more than Vellum. I know this doesn't tell you much about it, but with both books, the only thing you can do is strap yourself in and ride through both of them. You really won't be sorry.

[Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well.

Let me preface this by saying that I read Ink first; I've just now started Vellum, and think, perhaps, that some of the dream-logic landscapes of Ink might be sketched out for the reader there, as a sort of primer for the second volume. But that's not how it happened, and I need to write about Ink now, though I may change my review later, once I've read Vellum.

Ink is the kind of book that bleeds and breathes hard, that wails with anguish while the world relentlessly falls apart. To some extent, it's difficult not to read this book as an assemblage of shards of trauma narratives-- and indeed, what worse trauma than the apocalypse? In this, it succeeds. In spite of the epilogue (which is obviously a miserable "please don't worry" tacked on at the behest of the editor, or perhaps merely a last-minute sense of duty to the reader on the part of Duncan himself), and in spite of the fact that the character(s) seem to be battling against futurists and nihilists and theists alike, this narrative is, itself, deeply and satisfyingly nihilistic. Of this I will not say much more.

Other reviewers have probably covered this book better than I can (having read it in many short spurts- it evoked too much for me to handle large chunks); in sum, it's a work of subversive translation and prose-poetry as much as it is a compilation of distorted mythologies, tropes woven together into something much more than mere allegories, mere orientalism, mere science fiction, mere horror, mere history. What can be resolved of all these disparate parts, of time that clumps and cracks like freshly setting islands making themselves and being unmade at arbitrary rates? I'm really not sure. It's something that I wondered the whole time... where is he going with this? The answer, of course, is nowhere, everywhere, and it doesn't matter.

This will not be a good read for people who seek anything resembling closure, but DAMN, who cares about those people?

[Pavlo Tverdokhlib · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Ink" is supposed to be a sequel and conclusion to "Vellum". Towards the end of "Vellum", the angel Metatron combines the magic of the Cant- the secret first language that's been used to write the titular Book of All Hours with the semi-sentient nanotech bitmites in a bid to ensure the dominance of the Covenant- a group of angels set on making sure the magic of the Cant is controlled and its use is restricted. Once the bitmites are loose, though, they tear reality apart in an attempt to grant humanity its unconscious wishes.

"Ink" has little direct continuity with the events in the Vellum. The familiar characters emerge eventually, and the beginning is an an allegorical re-telling of a classic Roman play, combined with the Harlequinade. Eventually, a meta-narrative emerges that sees a group of unkin struggle across the various dimensions of what's left of the Vellum in an attempt to.... do something that may put the multiverse together again. Maybe.

The neo-futuristic plots from "Vellum" get a lot more coverage in "Ink", and trying to somehow piece those together in a semi-coherent narrative is arguably the best part of the experience. That being said, overall I found the book to be a difficult, poorly-paced read. It's an exercise moreso than a pure "enjoyment read".

Things to pick up towards the end of the second part, and the epilogue is a type of thing that lets everyone draw their own conclusions as to what they've just read. It very much feels like Duncan tried to do a meta-narrative similar to the Cornelius Quartet and I'm not sure if he really pulled it off.

[Clarice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite excellent, although it took me a while to get through. This also was not for the faint of heart, but has a lot of storyline references and in some ways I think was easier to follow than Vellum. References to classic Commedia Dell'Arte - Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot, and Pantalone - alternate realities, slipping through timelines, and a rescue of the main characters from Vellum from the aftermath of the events in that book. It definitely brings everything together and gives a sense of finality to the story as a whole.

At one point I wondered if perhaps the two books should have been bound together, but after reading, I realize that as two separate books they work much in the way parentheses work. Two arching mirroring themes that hold a complete idea between them.

In summation, this is an excellent conclusion to an incredibly ambitious story. Not for everyone as the narrative is dissected and spread out in a fashion that is actually more linear than it initially seems, but not in a historical timeline sense.

[Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is definitely the best pair of books I've read in a long time. It was a lot of fun learning to read the parallel stories throughout the first book until you began to understand the idea of time as a 3D construct. And then in Ink, you have to start thinking of it as a fractured structure which still holds a formidable sort of order. I loved the characters, and how their plot lines come together in the end. It constantly read like a different book than the 50 pages right before it, and I loved it for that.

The only downside for me was that they didn't start using my favorite character as a focus until the second book. The book had a consistent six characters in Vellum, but it felt like he needed to expand to seven for Ink. So an earlier minor character was given a serious revamp, which felt very strange. The book is, at it's core, about four people with three sidekicks... sort of. I just happened to like two of the sidekicks a lot more.

Overall, these were two amazing books.

[Jade Lopert · Rating 5 out of 5]

So this is the "sequel" to Vellum. I put it in parenthesis because in all honesty both books read like their one. There is no coherent end to Vellum & Ink doesn't really have a story start. Which makes me glad that I realized that this was a sequel when I got it from the library BEFORE I started reading it.

The story seems a little convoluted while your reading it, but by the time you get to the end it makes perfect sense. Every story seems entirely different, but really it's all the same just told slightly differently through the lens of different religions and mythologies.

This was one of the best in depth books I've read in a long time. I've been reading many fluffy books which is unlike me and this book reminded me why it's unlike me.

[Kate O'Hanlon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no words for how utterly delighted I am with this book.

This is the best thing that can happen when you trust an author and keep reading even though your confused about what's going on, concerned that it might all just be pretentious pomo wank, and tempted to read something that's not so friggen heavy (in every sense of the word). Duncan pays dividends as The Book of All Hours resolves itself into a story that's not just about playing with mythology and intertextuality, but also a poignant meditation on love and grief.

[Kori Klinzing · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

Once again, I was left elated, delighted and very slightly confused. A really wonderful read.

[Eric Arvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

At times, very confusing, but quite brilliant at others. The ending left me a bit disappointed, but not enough to detract from FIVE stars. I love his challenging and poetic writing style.

[Saturnina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too long blahblah + see Vellum review.

[Megan Cutler · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I enjoyed this book more than the first in the series, but only because I skipped, or skimmed, entire chunks of it.

The book opened strong, with an explanation of the previous book (though I really feel like the previous book should have ended with this epilogue instead of forcing readers to wait for the next installment to figure out what was going on), but quickly deteriorated from there. This book seems far more linear than the last book, following a narrow selection of narratives in roughly chronological order, and it's at least readily apparent how these narratives weave together.

Unfortunately, all the threads I was interested in from the first novel were either dropped or resolved with a one sentence summary early in the book. The rest of the plot meanders in slow circles. Once again, it feels like sections have been smooshed into the middle of the book as filler to make the mystery more obscure and the resolution take longer. But despite skipping entire pages of text, I never felt like I missed anything because the main themes are repeated so frequently.

The final nail in the coffin was the pointless and arbitrarily cruel epilogue that doesn't even seem to match the rest of the narrative. In the end, this series felt like a lot of wasted potential.

[Amélie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's hard to tell when exactly "ambitious" turned to "possibly pretentious", when I went from "this is Complicated but Complicated is Nice" to "mmmmmh yeah maybe that could have been shortened a bit because I'm not even really enjoying myself at that point".

There's still a lot of brilliance in this book, some amazing ideas, and the convoluted writing is nice... until it gets too convoluted. I really wanted to love it, to devour it from beginning to end... but even said end didn't fully satisfy me, and I nearly wish I hadn't gone through my big re-read of the first one to get to this one, so that I'd stayed on my first impressions.

I don't know. I guess it just lost its magic for me.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a long time since I've read this but it's still vivid in my mind. There's something about a traveling theatrical troupe that can warp reality with sorcery through their performances that is extremely appealing to me. It's got a "gnostic punk" vibe to it, erudite and transgressive at the same time. Practitioners of Chaos Magick will love this book, though admittedly some of the lore is more Book-of-Enoch/Annunaki and less Nag Hammadi, which I disagree with, but it's still not too committed to any one mythology, there's a lot of hybridizing of myths. The gay stuff in here is really hot too, if you're into that.

[Macha · Rating 4 out of 5]

this one's better than Vellum: more coherent and thought-through, less indulgent. Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius is an obvious influence. but it's still, although ambitious, not as engaging as it ought to be: maybe the weight of its conceits strip out the meaning it tries to insert? well, something like that. worth the read, though; it's a book that aims high and often hits its marks.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

More of a second half than a sequel. Expands on everything that was good about the first book, and gives the story a sense of progression and closure. Still, don't expect anything to be tied up neatly

[Kéké · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong book, sometimes hard to keep with, but very interesting and intriguing.
Do not consider it as a night reading, for you need all your attention :-).

[Ron Me]

Slightly more coherent than the first. Needed an editor. Don't bother.

[Giulia · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you think you understood everything after reading it once, then read it again. And again and again. If possible, it's even better that the first book.

[Liam Ostermann]

Review and ratings to follow

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent sequel that goes in a profoundly different direction. Feels sometimes like it might not come together but his prose style is such that you don't care.