Cheryl over in the delightful environs of the Emerald City noted a rather interesting diatribe from another ‘dear, green place’ – Glasgow author Hal Duncan’s blog. Hal was taking issue with people who think some of us ’read too much into it’ when getting ourselves deeply into a good book.
Well, pardon us for actually expending mental effort in engaging with the books we choose to read and the even more unpardonable sin of relating what we read to other books and knowledge we’ve picked up. I could go on about how a good book is supposed to engage with both our emotions and our intellect, or how each person will always take meanings from any text according to their own cultural knowledge and quite often regardless of what preferred meaning the author may have intended.
But Hal has done a much better job of expressing this and if you are one of our wonderful band of freaks and geeks who like to read and think about books (and our SF Book Group meetings would be rather dull if we didn’t) I think you may enjoy a little peek. Actually the whole thing reminds me of the late, great Bill Hicks and his monologue on reading a book while eating in a diner in the Deep South (“Well, looks like we got ourselves a reader, “ says Bubba…).
And I will just use this space to also remind you that Hal’s debut novel, Vellum, is coming oh-so-soon now – August to be more precise. I’ve been utterly absorbed in it and will admit that perhaps I am reading too much into it. But considering Hal has layered his narrative with mythic archetypes constantly repeating from ancient Sumer and Babylon to the 20th century Red Clydesiders, themselves nested within a narrative which loops around in elegant folds upon itself into a literary montage, I don’t think I am.
Since it is peppered with allusions (and illusions) to so many other works of literature, from Michael Moorcock to Wilfred Owen and taking in writers like Eric Hobsbawm along the way, I don’t think I am. In fact I will go out on a limb here and say this is a book which demands you actively read into it, a two-way synergy between reader and writer. It’s clever, it’s beautifully written, it’s utterly absorbing and it will make you think.
Not least about the delicious irony of a book which makes you pause to think so much about the multiple possible meanings within its pages is primarily concerned with language and the ability of the written word to change the world. But then those of us who really read books kind of know that deep down already. The Hal Duncan express will be arriving at the nearest platform in a few weeks and I storngly advise you to board. You can read into that what you wish.
Fri, Jul 8, 2005
General