Having finally posted about Gaudeamus, I might as well get the other great "WTF" book in the stack out of the way. Hal Duncan's Vellum has been described as "cubist fantasy," and while I'm not quite sure what that means, it's probably as good a description as any.
Vellum takes place in 2017, and also during World War I, and also in the distant past, and also a few worlds outside of time. It follows Thomas Messenger, who is sometimes a modern teenager, sometimes a young aristocrat in the trenches of the Somme, sometimes an angel, and sometimes the Sumerian icon Tammuz. Thomas has gone missing, and is being sought by his sister Phreedom, who is usually a modern teenager, but sometimes the Sumerian goddess Inana, and he's occasionally protected by Seamus Finnan, who's a colorful old Irishman in both 1916 and 2017, but becomes something more, and he's hunted by some unpleasant characters in the service of the Metatron, who show up in a variety of different roles.
Are you confused yet? Because it's just started to get weird...
It's really difficult to say anything coherent about this book. The individual parts are all very well done, and the writing is terrific, but it just doesn't quite resolve into a clear picture of anything. Of course, I have that problem with cubist paintings, too, so maybe that's intentional. As with cubist art, if I tilt my head and squint, I think I can see more or less what's supposed to be there (a plot, in this case...), but I'm mostly just guessing.
The world we know is only a tiny piece of the larger universe, called the "Vellum," which contains pretty much any imaginable reality. There are certain archetypal stories that recur over and over, though, and people can become caught up in them through various eras. And there are some individuals who are born or become "unkin," who have the power to shape reality around themselves. Down through the years, the unkin have set themselves up as gods, or more recently angels in the service of a Covenant, and are hunting new and unaligned unkin, such as Thomas and his sister.
There are also plot threads involving a couple of mysterious archeological expeditions in the Caucasus in 1921 and 1945, and a nameless person who has come into possession of the Book of All Hours, which appears to be a map of the Vellum, and is making his way toward some mysterious goal, through a host of increasingly bizarre realities. I'm not quite sure how these fit with the rest.
This is the first half of a longer work (this split was not the work of David Hartwell), and the sequel, Ink, should be coming out soon. Maybe that will clear things up. I suspect, though, that even when the work is complete, it will remain puzzling to look at.
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