-
Monthly Archive
-
Departments
-
Site Admin
Site Search
Top 50 Tags
Networks
View UKSFBN's Authority
Mar
12
Hal Duncan on new Book of All Hours novel Ink
Posted in: UKSFBN Talks To on 12th March 2007 by Sandy Auden
When Hal Duncan's Vellum [Amazon] was released, its highly distinctive - and unusual - narrative structure, coupled with its mythological richness and symbolic power quietly stunned many of its readers. Now Duncan's tale of war and angels continues in the The Book of All Hours' concluding instalment, Ink…
"Ink kicks off twenty years after the bitmites were unleashed," says Duncan. "By now Evenfall has scoured the Vellum and pretty much torn reality apart, and humanity and the unkin are scattered across this cold wilderness known as the Hinter, holed up in enclaves called Havens. The Covenant is in ruins and you have tin-pot dictators everywhere.
"Phreedom and Finnan kind of take a back seat in this one; it's more about Reynard and Jack, Puck and Joey, the bit-players of Vellum taking centre-stage. Where Vellum was about things falling apart, Ink is about people trying to put things back together, struggling to rewrite history, to remake their world. It's about revolution, insurrection.
"I don't want to say too much about the plot, but the first half involves a retelling of Euripides's The Bacchae staged as a Harlequin play before an unkin Duke who rules one of these Havens, woven in with a Jack Flash thread which is basically the battle for Kentigern. And the final volume, the climax, takes us to an alternative Palestine in 1929, a modern-day city of Sodom. With Zeppelins."
The series is steeped in world-wide mythology, but Duncan plays down his wide inspiration base: "I don't really consider myself that well educated, to be honest," he says. "I've got a lot of books on religion and mythology - there's those great out-of-copyright works that you can pick up for three quid in discount bookstores, so I've built up a bit of a library of these - but I'm no scholar, really. I browse and skim.
"It's only if I'm actually looking to do a particular story that I'll really sink my teeth into the subject and do proper research. Mostly, I've just picked up a lot of details and theories from acting on casual curiosity. Because Jewish apocrypha or Sumerian religious texts are kind of interesting."
And it seems that The Bacchae has proved interesting for this volume too: "I used it as a source for the first half of Ink. It's based on a story about Dionysus being imprisoned by the tyrant Pentheus, who's not at all happy with this drunken drifter bringing his revels to town and driving the womenfolk insane.
"Needless to say, Pentheus hasn't been watching enough TV series like Kung Fu, or movies like High Plains Drifter, because if he had been he would know the cardinal rule: do not fuck with the drifter; fucking with the drifter leads to Bad Things.
"...a lot of the stories from Genesis ... deconstructed and reconstructed in accordance with my anarchist metaphysics."Also Biblical mythology plays a crucial part in the final volume, with a lot of the stories from Genesis being retold in a 'let me tell you what really happened' way, being deconstructed and reconstructed in accordance with my anarchist metaphysics."
As well as mythology, Vellum and Ink display complex structures: no linear continuity at all, but with diverse plotlines intersecting at strange angles instead. "I think I write in that way because it reflects my outlook. I see life as multi-threaded - work, play, drinking with friends, seeing family. It's like all the conventions I've been to tend to blur into one big party. I have a group of friends I drink with every Saturday night, and through the fifteen years of hanging with them, I'd be damned if I could tell you which conversation happened on what night. When you spend a glorious summer day in the park with mates, part of what's glorious about it is that you're in this space, this time, this zone, which is all summer days in the park.
"And I sort of look at identity as fragmented into these different archetypes - the id, the self, the shadow - which compete for control of the meat, to the extent of reconstructing the stories of your past, mythologising your own personal history as hero, victim or villain.
"People talk about having different personas with their friends or family. It may be a bit schizo but I sort of have names for those personas, for those modes of identity. Get a few drinks in me at a convention and you'll see where Jack Flash comes from. A few more, and a hot guy to hit on, and you might see a certain Puckishness.
"Maybe it's just that life seems more interesting if you accept the contradictions and the confusion, that I'm attracted to chaos and to the challenge of making sense of if; and that carries over into my writing."
Ink [Amazon] is available now for all good book stores and online retailers.
Source: Hal Duncan
Print this Item
Send this Item by Email
Tagged With: book news | Book-of-All-Hours | fantasy | Hal-Duncan | interview | science fiction
Related posts (auto-generated):
Comments
Do you have anything to add to this item?
[...] 1 - Hal Duncan interviewed “When you spend a glorious summer day in the park with mates, part of what’s glorious about it is that you’re in this space, this time, this zone, which is all summer days in the park.” (tags: reality architecture plot nonlinear novel Ink interview author fiction genre Duncan Hal) [...]
...But has anyone solved that inpenetrable riddle on the Ink website yet..? Are we the only ones befuddled by it..??
I must confess I haven't had a look myself. I'm useless at puzzles, especially fiendish ones...