Ink is the second volume in Hal Duncan's 'Book of All Hours' duology, and just like Vellum, the first volume, it's a wonderfully entertaining mess of a novel: Joyce channeling Zelazny telling five or six stories at once. Indeed, it's sufficiently similar to that book to make it pretty easy to work out who to recommend it to: if you liked Vellum, you'll like this, and if you didn't, you won't.

While it's not (quite) a direct sequel, I'd certainly advise against attempting this if you've yet picked up the first book. There's a quick reminder of the events of Book 1 worked rather neatly into the plot near the beginning, but the big concepts: the multiple realities that make up the Vellum, the angels/demons/gods/unkin and the Cant they speak to reshape themselves and the world around them and, of course, the mysterious Book itself are all introduced without much explanation (that is, with even less explanation than in the first volume).

I'd rather not spoil things too much for people thinking about picking this up: suffice to say that I liked it a lot, and really only had a couple of (fairly minor) complaints.

Least likely to worry anyone but me: there's a silly little bit of pseudo-mathematical gibberish near the middle of the book, that, while having pretty much no impact on the rest of the book, simply left a faintly sour taste in my mouth; here, at least, the author is simply not being as clever as he thinks he is. But that's really getting too far into nit-picking, I suspect.

More seriously, I had slight issues with both the focus of the novel and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the ending. Or, rather, the endings - there are actually several, at least of couple of which seem outright contradictory. But while this might be a problem for readers who were hoping for more of a definite resolution after the events of Vellum (it's fairly safe to say that there are no such definitive answers to be found here, though there are plenty of half-explained mysteries that can probably be puzzled out in a lot more detail than I did this time through), I felt that this was a decision on Duncan's part that almost had to be made, given the very nature of this series. My problem was rather more basic: the actual book proper ends about twenty-five pages before the text stops, leaving us with a self-indulgent epilogue that may well delight readers familiar with the works of Virgil but, I'll confess, left me pretty cold.

As to the focus: while Phreedom/Anna/Anastasia and Seamus Finnan were the central characters of Vellum, here they take much more of a back seat to Jack and Joey. Certainly both these characters (or archetypes, even) are entertaining and intriguing to read about, but I was left feeling that, in particular, Phree's arc from the earlier book was left almost unfinished, and she was reduced to almost a bit player in this book. I felt the first volume did, on balance, a better job of balancing all the different members of the cast.

But criticisms aside, this is a book I'm very happy to have read. Critics might complain that Duncan is more interested in showing off than in telling a coherent story, yet while there certainly is a great deal of showing off here, I'm not sure why that's something to criticise when it's simply so much fun to read. While there may be no destination to speak of, the ride is an exhilarating one; there are some wonderful set pieces, some incredible prose, and more neat ideas and feats of imagination than many authors would fit into ten times as many books.

If you hated Vellum, this book won't change your mind. But if you haven't tried the duology yet, you really owe it to yourself to do so.

Vellum was pretty amazing. Ink picks up the pieces where Vellum left, ready to blast the reader through a heavy mist of literary references, stylistic experimentation and archetypical characters playing their roles, repeated through the many-folded landscape of Vellum.

Ink is a clever book, so clever it hurts sometimes. I don't pretend I got most of it, but nevertheless, I enjoyed it a lot. The plot is interesting, though once again, probably not in the leading role after all. The parodies of literary genres, the play within a play structure, all the adventure, sex and violence - it's a delicious book, all in all.

This time the storylines wander through the mess of World War II, the Palestine in 1929, futuristic Kentigern, who knows where. Jack is Jack, Joey is Joey and so on, despite the setting and the characters they seem to play. I quite liked that. The ending is less stale than the last time, yet still not... perfect? Hard to say. I'm reasonably satisfied, and looking forward to reading these two again later.

(Original review at my review blog) ( )

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.a... ( )

http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2007/02... ( )