Black Gate

Hal Duncan’s The Book of All Hours is a dazzling, fascinating, frustrating work. A duology consisting of 2005’s Vellum and 2007’s Ink, it plays with structure and story in powerful ways, while also seeming to fall back too easily into black-and-white absolutes and traditional forms. The oddity of the book is that although in some ways it appears radically new, in other ways, as one reads further into it, it comes to feel more and more familiar.

The basic idea might have come from a Marvel comic book: hidden among mortal humans are individuals who, when they undergo certain traumas, develop great powers to shape the world — they become gods, angels, demons. Archetypes. Unkin. Their powers extend not only across time and space, but through the array of alternate worlds called the Vellum; and, as well, into worlds deeper and more profound than our own and its cognates.

A long time ago one of these Unkin created the Book of All Hours, which is, among other things, a map of the Vellum, and a text describing everything, defining everything, holding all stories and worlds within itself. Various Unkin factions want to get their hands on the Book, to rewrite it to suit themselves. The Covenant, a primal patriarchy ruled by archangels, represent one major faction. Another loose grouping is formed by seven individual Unkin, seven archetypes we trace through a range of alternate selves. These seven are (to use only one version of their various names, and a reductive description of their identities) Jack Flash, eternal rebel; Joey Pechorin, eternal traitor; Guy Fox, mastermind; Seamus Finnan, a tortured Prometheus; Don MacChuill, the old soldier; Phreedom Messenger, warrior queen; and her brother, Thomas Messenger, the eternal sacrifice.

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If you read a lot, you’ll soon find yourself drawn to writers who become personal favourites but who, unaccountably, go unrecognised by the wider world. A little while ago my girlfriend introduced me to a book by one of her own favourite writers, a woman named Joan North. I want to write about North here, because I was impressed by her work and I think she deserves to be better known.

North wrote three books, fantasies for children; what you’d now call stories aimed at the younger end of the YA category. North’s first book, The Cloud Forest, was published in the UK in 1965 and in the US the year after. Her second book, The Whirling Shapes, was published in 1967. Her last book, The Light Maze, was published in 1971 and shortlisted for the 1972 Mythopoeic Award.

I’ve looked for more information online about North, but can find nothing. What I know about her is what’s written on the dust jacket of The Light Maze:

Joan North was brought up in North China but now [1971] lives in North London, “in a household which comprises a mathematical husband, two daughters, and two Siamese cats.” She says that her chief interest is in “what might be called exploring Inner Space.” This preoccupation can be traced in her earlier books, The Cloud Forest and The Whirling Shapes, which, like The Light Maze, bring into an ordinary and often comical picture of everyday life an awareness of other worlds, other modes of being. She likes reading about Yoga, Zen, Christian mysticism and Eastern philosophy.

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Writing about Romanticism has gotten me started thinking about forms, and conventions, and how we read a story. To some extent I’ve come to feel that contemporary ways of reacting to narrative are more classical than romantic; they’re more to do with structure and form than with trusting the individual genius. It seems to me that many readers, and critics, have become used to looking for certain things in a story, and have come to think of stories that function in a different manner as necessarily defective rather than distinct. And I feel this is a pity, since if we can’t accept the strange works of genius that succeed in defiance of everything we think we know about storytelling, then our experience of story becomes diminished.

Take, for example, David Lindsay’s novel A Voyage to Arcturus.

Lindsay’s first book, published in 1920, the book begins with two men preparing for a séance, the medium and his host; neither man appears after the opening pages. Instead we follow two other men who come to the séance, Maskull and Nightspore, who afterward are invited by an acquaintance of Nightspore’s, Krag, on a journey to a planet in the system of Arcturus. Maskull, who now swiftly becomes the main character, is dubious; still, he agrees to the trip, seeking some kind of adventure he can’t quite seem to articulate. Maskull spends much of the trip asleep, finally awaking on his own on the Arcturan planet of Tormance. From there, we follow him as he heads northward, learning about the planet and the mysterious forces that seem to be struggling for mastery upon it.

To describe the book in such a way, though, is not to give any real sense of its contents. It challenges all traditional sense of character and indeed story. Maskull’s given no real history or coherent drives. He decides to do things on the spur of the moment, then changes those decisions on a whim. His body alters repeatedly on Tormance, sprouting a third arm and new sense organs; he takes it with aplomb. The people he meets on Tormance are equally difficult to understand, developing loves and hates almost at random. And yet there is a sense of a kind of logic at work; a dream-logic, where emotions rise and fade for no obvious reason.

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