hal duncan
Poetry and Politics
It’s hard to believe that this is for real: a poem about Trump written by an American, riffing on the orange one’s Scottish heritage (which, I’m sure it’s fair to say, embarrasses our entire nation).
Indeed, something in the headline gives me pause: why would The Scotsman describe it as “created” rather then “written”? I wonder whether it has been generated algorithmically by a program.
It must be a fawning, sycophantic, arse-kissing algorithm of the worst sort, if so. And if not — and if it’s not some particularly subtle satire — then the guy behind it is… unbelievable, assuming he’s writing from the heart. And has one.
But if you’ve gone and read that, then you should wash your mind out with Hal Duncan’s response, which is not only better poetry, it’s written in modern Scots, and contains lines like this:
Ah’ll spit a rhyme for ye: Ye cannae write.
…
Best of McLeod? Don’t make me fuckin laugh.
Yer tangerine nazi rapeclown’s fuckin loathed
by Scots who mind when rebels wurnae naff
gold-shittered gobshite Emperors unclothed.
But don’t wait here. Go and read the whole thing.
Ink, by Hal Duncan (Books 2007, 3)
So, The Book of All Hours is finished. And fine, fine stuff it is, too. This volume seems somehow more polished than the first , but perhaps not as exciting, as startling.
The story is brought to a conclusion of sorts, but as you might expect, it’s ambiguous, open to interpretation. This is, of course, not a bad thing: in fact, I thoroughly approve.
I’m not, though, going to try to give any details of it, or to explain what it ls about; just read it: it’s great.
Book Notes 17: Vellum, by Hal Duncan
I finally get to read Vellum, then. I'd been waiting for the paperback for a while, as I said back in Book Notes 7. I've pre-ordered the sequel, Ink, in hardback, though, which should be recommendation enough.
We are, once again, in the territory of myths walking the Earth. This time they are angels and demons, gods and devils, and their powers extend far beyond Earth, and into the Vellum. This is a kind of multiverse, a visual metaphor for the many-worlds theory, you might say (though the book walks the fantasy line, more than science fiction, the use of nanotech notwithstanding).
It starts really well, and I loved the whole first half, but the second half loses focus somewhat. The pace slows, and it seems a tad repetitive. Though I may have picked up this last criticism from John Clute’s review of it, which I glanced at while I was reading the book.
Reading the whole of Clute’s review now, I agree with much of it, though I’m left feeling considerably more positive about the book as a whole than Clute obviously was.
In a way it feels unfinished: not just that it leaves you wanting more, which is a good thing, but I found myself thinking, on more than one occasion after it ended, that I hadn’t actually finished reading it. However, Hal himself points us at a review which captures the meaning of the ending perfectly, and makes me think I need to read things more closely and think about them more carefully. Though sometimes you just need to have something pointed out to you, to make you realise that you understood it all along.
It is a great, sparkling debut (though whether it is possible for work to be simultaneously a debut and a ‘masterpiece’, as the blurb has it, is something that caused some discussion in my house), and highly recommended.