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The Vorrh Trilogy #1
The Vorrh
Prepare to lose yourself in the heady, mythical expanse of The Vorrh, a daring debut that Alan Moore has called “a phosphorescent masterpiece” and “the current century's first landmark work of fantasy.”
Next to the colonial town of Essenwald sits the Vorrh, a vast—perhaps endless—forest. It is a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests. Sentient and magical, the Vorrh bends time and wipes memory. Legend has it that the Garden of Eden still exists at its heart. Now, a renegade English soldier aims to be the first human to traverse its expanse. Armed with only a strange bow, he begins his journey, but some fear the consequences of his mission, and a native marksman has been chosen to stop him. Around them swirl a remarkable cast of characters, including a Cyclops raised by robots and a young girl with tragic curiosity, as well as historical figures, such as writer Raymond Roussel and photographer and Edward Muybridge. While fact and fictional blend, and the hunter will become the hunted, and everyone’s fate hangs in the balance, under the will of the Vorrh.
Next to the colonial town of Essenwald sits the Vorrh, a vast—perhaps endless—forest. It is a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests. Sentient and magical, the Vorrh bends time and wipes memory. Legend has it that the Garden of Eden still exists at its heart. Now, a renegade English soldier aims to be the first human to traverse its expanse. Armed with only a strange bow, he begins his journey, but some fear the consequences of his mission, and a native marksman has been chosen to stop him. Around them swirl a remarkable cast of characters, including a Cyclops raised by robots and a young girl with tragic curiosity, as well as historical figures, such as writer Raymond Roussel and photographer and Edward Muybridge. While fact and fictional blend, and the hunter will become the hunted, and everyone’s fate hangs in the balance, under the will of the Vorrh.
514 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 12, 2012
About the author
B. Catling
9 books19 followersAlso publishes as Brian Catling.
Brian Catling was born in London in 1948. He is a poet, sculptor and performance artist, who makes installations and paints egg tempera portraits of imagined Cyclops. He has been commissioned to make solo installations and performances in many countries including Spain, Japan, Iceland, Israel, Denmark, Holland, Norway, Germany, Greenland and Australia. He is currently writing novels.
He is Professor of Fine Art at The Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, University of Oxford, and a fellow of Linacre College.
Brian Catling was born in London in 1948. He is a poet, sculptor and performance artist, who makes installations and paints egg tempera portraits of imagined Cyclops. He has been commissioned to make solo installations and performances in many countries including Spain, Japan, Iceland, Israel, Denmark, Holland, Norway, Germany, Greenland and Australia. He is currently writing novels.
He is Professor of Fine Art at The Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, University of Oxford, and a fellow of Linacre College.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,272 reviews
June 24, 2015
Reads like an old white dude's psychoanalytic sessions.
February 10, 2017
I think I was really prepping myself up for this one just a little too much. I wanted to expect lyrical language, and I did get a lot of lyrical language, and I wanted to expect some rather interesting ideas and concepts put together in a poetic way, all the while getting immersed in fantasy and science fiction and a truly heaping helping of the dark stuff, enough to consider the novel as a true horror.
What I did get was quite a few truly beautiful and evocative scenes of robots in a time and memory bending endless forest, an adventure with a bow made of a violently killed woman, lots of exploration in the real world during the early days of photography, socialites, mind-doctors, and a truly enormous amount of graphic and violent sex, sex, sex, and strangely enough, it's mostly the women being violent.
So why not give it a higher rating just for all the interesting ideas and the near-juxtaposition and crossovers between the magical cyborg forest and a modern european town?
Because the story was only able to grab me fitfully. Sometimes, I was fully engaged, and other times, I was just catching myself wondering why I was sitting through these odd photography sex-bondage scenes or watching a truly horrific torture, and while I then reminded myself that this is considered a horror, I then wondered what all the other story bits were doing to improve or engage me in the horror sense.
And then I realized that it's all my fault with cultural expectations that equate love without amazing torture. That true love doesn't necessarily require slow vivisections. Silly me, the yokel.
Like I said, it was hard to connect. It really was beautiful on many levels, to be sure, but it was more like a passing ship in the night followed by the screams of tortured men and the twang of a magical bow. Alas.
What I did get was quite a few truly beautiful and evocative scenes of robots in a time and memory bending endless forest, an adventure with a bow made of a violently killed woman, lots of exploration in the real world during the early days of photography, socialites, mind-doctors, and a truly enormous amount of graphic and violent sex, sex, sex, and strangely enough, it's mostly the women being violent.
So why not give it a higher rating just for all the interesting ideas and the near-juxtaposition and crossovers between the magical cyborg forest and a modern european town?
Because the story was only able to grab me fitfully. Sometimes, I was fully engaged, and other times, I was just catching myself wondering why I was sitting through these odd photography sex-bondage scenes or watching a truly horrific torture, and while I then reminded myself that this is considered a horror, I then wondered what all the other story bits were doing to improve or engage me in the horror sense.
And then I realized that it's all my fault with cultural expectations that equate love without amazing torture. That true love doesn't necessarily require slow vivisections. Silly me, the yokel.
Like I said, it was hard to connect. It really was beautiful on many levels, to be sure, but it was more like a passing ship in the night followed by the screams of tortured men and the twang of a magical bow. Alas.
March 28, 2017
The Heart of Darkness meets Borges meets something that might have crawled out of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth.
Brian Catling’s The Vorrh—or as editor Tim O’Connell likes to put it, “VVVOOORRRRRHHH”—is an intoxicating novel that defies easy summary. A slippery, twisty book, it always seemed to be squirming out of reach. The blurb that accompanies it is woefully inadequate, though of no fault to the blurber, because how can a book like this be summed up in a few lines? (I’d love to hear about how Catling pitched this to his publishers…) I don’t think I’ve read a book like this in a while. Words like ‘genius’ and ‘sheer madness’ and ‘Jungian’ get jumbled like marbles in my mouth when I try to describe this book for friends.
The easiest way to start talking about The Vorrh is to ask, ‘What is the Vorrh?’ The Vorrh is an ancient, dense forest set in the heart of the African continent, most likely the Congo, and rumored to enclose the Garden of Eden. Catling took the name from Raymond Roussel’s tract, Impressions of Africa, which, from what I can tell, was mostly a madcap travelogue of sorts that helped foster the boilerplate Western notion of Africa as an alien place filled with exotic horrors and savagery. (Now, does Catling, an English white man, perpetuate that? I don’t think so, but I’ll get to that…) Catling freights the Vorrh with its own mythos: It is eternal and endless. It bends time; it cannibalizes the memories of anyone who encroaches too long. The forest is regarded with reverence and fear by both locals and colonials. Nestled next to the Vorrh is Essenwald, a colonial cut-out built to resemble a typical European city, down to the last stone. As the city expands, there are logging trips into parts of the Vorrh to gather lumber and local materials for the building projects, an ironic and very operant metaphor for the idea of colonial incursion. In and around the Vorrh and the city of Essenwald, we meet several characters, Europeans and Africans alike, all transformed or effaced by violence and the clash of cultures in some way, and all drawn to make ill-advised treks into the Vorrh.
Structurally, the novel is essentially a series of image-laden set pieces and disparate storylines. Some stories converge, a few quite violently in the mysterious forest; others circle around the perimeter and lurk. This disjointedness can be maddening. Those readers who like their narratives neat and tidy might be put off, but be patient; eventually things start to coalesce, and what you’ll be rewarded with is a wickedly labyrinthine masterpiece.
Populating this surreal-tinged universe are people from real life and history: Edward Muybridge, Sarah Winchester, Sir William Withey Gull, even Raymond Roussel himself (though not exactly by that name) all make their uncanny appearances. There are also fantastical characters: a melancholy cyclops named Ishmael, sentient bakelite robots, and various monstrous (e.g., the anthropophagi) and ethereal beings (the Erstwhile). There are warriors, medicine men, assassins, and hunters. There are charmed weapons of incredible heft and symbolism: one is a bow carved from the remains of a mystic woman, the Bowman’s lover; another is a Lee-Enfield rifle protected by charms.
Waves of the macabre and grotesque come up frequently here, but Catling uses them in ways that are far from repellant. Two examples. In the opening scene, an act of vivisection and mutilation becomes transmuted into a solemn, tender tribute of love. It’s a depiction of love so deep and profound that it boggles the senses and challenges our modern, sanitized notions of love. To my own perplexity, the scene brought to mind that Neruda sonnet that everyone is so fond of quoting about loving something as dark things should be loved—but with more blood and viscera. It also evokes the reverent butchery in Tibetan sky burials.
In a scene later in the book, an eye, still alive but separated from its body, is consumed by insects:
For me, the most difficult parts were the depictions of sexual frenzy, often nightmarish, and often streaked with violence or mute suffering. (Kristen Roupenian discusses this more in her review.) These parts will probably be the most unsettling for readers. For what it’s worth, Catling has gone on record to say that the trodden-upon female characters in the book are part of a larger set piece that eventually sees them exceeding their male counterparts in the next two books (yes, The Vorrh is part of a planned trilogy). If this is a chronicle of oppression being inverted or displaced, then it makes sense that a baseline needs to be first established.
More cynical readings of The Vorrh may dismiss the surreal tropes as another kind of broad cultural brushstroke pilloried by Binyavanga Wainaina in Granta. But I personally think Catling is operating on a completely different level here. It’s a critique of colonialism and the violence and distortion of identity/self in both the oppressor and oppressed, but it’s also a kind of alternate history where all bets are off. But critical theory aside, what takes center stage is how Catling maneuvers through the fantasy tropes. The fantastical so deeply permeates the narrative reality of the book that you are constantly wondering, ‘Am I awake? Am I dreaming this?’ In the words of Alan Moore, it “leaves the reader filthy with its seeds and spores, encouraging new growth and threatening a great reforesting of the imagination.”
Catling is a published poet and that sensibility very much informs the prose style of the novel, where pedestrian, ordinary things constantly get illuminated and flushed with new life. Consider this line, a description of dusk, which another reviewer here also flagged as Catling-prose exemplar:
Overall, this is a spectacular book, like a flicker of light that makes other books seem bland and monochromatic. I give it the highest possible rating because it dares to explore; it’s primal and potent. I’d recommend this if you’ve been secretly yearning for something to jolt you out of your reading doldrums, something that will crack open your subconscious and blur the borders between prose and poetry...and dreams.
“VVVOOORRRRRHHH,” people.
[Disclaimer: I received an ARC copy of this book from the publisher through the Goodreads First Reads Program in exchange for an honest review.]
Brian Catling’s The Vorrh—or as editor Tim O’Connell likes to put it, “VVVOOORRRRRHHH”—is an intoxicating novel that defies easy summary. A slippery, twisty book, it always seemed to be squirming out of reach. The blurb that accompanies it is woefully inadequate, though of no fault to the blurber, because how can a book like this be summed up in a few lines? (I’d love to hear about how Catling pitched this to his publishers…) I don’t think I’ve read a book like this in a while. Words like ‘genius’ and ‘sheer madness’ and ‘Jungian’ get jumbled like marbles in my mouth when I try to describe this book for friends.
The easiest way to start talking about The Vorrh is to ask, ‘What is the Vorrh?’ The Vorrh is an ancient, dense forest set in the heart of the African continent, most likely the Congo, and rumored to enclose the Garden of Eden. Catling took the name from Raymond Roussel’s tract, Impressions of Africa, which, from what I can tell, was mostly a madcap travelogue of sorts that helped foster the boilerplate Western notion of Africa as an alien place filled with exotic horrors and savagery. (Now, does Catling, an English white man, perpetuate that? I don’t think so, but I’ll get to that…) Catling freights the Vorrh with its own mythos: It is eternal and endless. It bends time; it cannibalizes the memories of anyone who encroaches too long. The forest is regarded with reverence and fear by both locals and colonials. Nestled next to the Vorrh is Essenwald, a colonial cut-out built to resemble a typical European city, down to the last stone. As the city expands, there are logging trips into parts of the Vorrh to gather lumber and local materials for the building projects, an ironic and very operant metaphor for the idea of colonial incursion. In and around the Vorrh and the city of Essenwald, we meet several characters, Europeans and Africans alike, all transformed or effaced by violence and the clash of cultures in some way, and all drawn to make ill-advised treks into the Vorrh.
Structurally, the novel is essentially a series of image-laden set pieces and disparate storylines. Some stories converge, a few quite violently in the mysterious forest; others circle around the perimeter and lurk. This disjointedness can be maddening. Those readers who like their narratives neat and tidy might be put off, but be patient; eventually things start to coalesce, and what you’ll be rewarded with is a wickedly labyrinthine masterpiece.
Populating this surreal-tinged universe are people from real life and history: Edward Muybridge, Sarah Winchester, Sir William Withey Gull, even Raymond Roussel himself (though not exactly by that name) all make their uncanny appearances. There are also fantastical characters: a melancholy cyclops named Ishmael, sentient bakelite robots, and various monstrous (e.g., the anthropophagi) and ethereal beings (the Erstwhile). There are warriors, medicine men, assassins, and hunters. There are charmed weapons of incredible heft and symbolism: one is a bow carved from the remains of a mystic woman, the Bowman’s lover; another is a Lee-Enfield rifle protected by charms.
Waves of the macabre and grotesque come up frequently here, but Catling uses them in ways that are far from repellant. Two examples. In the opening scene, an act of vivisection and mutilation becomes transmuted into a solemn, tender tribute of love. It’s a depiction of love so deep and profound that it boggles the senses and challenges our modern, sanitized notions of love. To my own perplexity, the scene brought to mind that Neruda sonnet that everyone is so fond of quoting about loving something as dark things should be loved—but with more blood and viscera. It also evokes the reverent butchery in Tibetan sky burials.
In a scene later in the book, an eye, still alive but separated from its body, is consumed by insects:
"The fluid and movement attracted the attentions of other watchers, bringing the hungry curiosity of a stream of black ants to the rock. Without hesitation they continued the dissection that Tsungali had started. He watched the eye being nibbled and ferried away, its muscles still alive and contracting as the insects held it aloft like a great prize, dragging it backwards along the glistening black chain of their frantic bodies. A few minutes later, there was nothing left—even the stain was fought over and diminished by the porous stone and the cooking sun."I got goosebumps when I read that. (I’ve lived in the tropics and know how the forest can eat you alive!) Taken alone, without context, the passage may seem overly graphic, though you can’t deny its effect! And in any case, Catling doesn’t use imagery like this gratuitously; images like this fit with the various leitmotifs centered around vision and sight throughout the book (think the Cyclops, Muybridge and his brand of photography, references to inner eyes and occult visions, blindness, and so on). In this strange world, it makes narrative sense that clarity and sight would be consumed.
For me, the most difficult parts were the depictions of sexual frenzy, often nightmarish, and often streaked with violence or mute suffering. (Kristen Roupenian discusses this more in her review.) These parts will probably be the most unsettling for readers. For what it’s worth, Catling has gone on record to say that the trodden-upon female characters in the book are part of a larger set piece that eventually sees them exceeding their male counterparts in the next two books (yes, The Vorrh is part of a planned trilogy). If this is a chronicle of oppression being inverted or displaced, then it makes sense that a baseline needs to be first established.
More cynical readings of The Vorrh may dismiss the surreal tropes as another kind of broad cultural brushstroke pilloried by Binyavanga Wainaina in Granta. But I personally think Catling is operating on a completely different level here. It’s a critique of colonialism and the violence and distortion of identity/self in both the oppressor and oppressed, but it’s also a kind of alternate history where all bets are off. But critical theory aside, what takes center stage is how Catling maneuvers through the fantasy tropes. The fantastical so deeply permeates the narrative reality of the book that you are constantly wondering, ‘Am I awake? Am I dreaming this?’ In the words of Alan Moore, it “leaves the reader filthy with its seeds and spores, encouraging new growth and threatening a great reforesting of the imagination.”
Catling is a published poet and that sensibility very much informs the prose style of the novel, where pedestrian, ordinary things constantly get illuminated and flushed with new life. Consider this line, a description of dusk, which another reviewer here also flagged as Catling-prose exemplar:
“Outside, the swallows were changing to bats, to measure the space of the sky with sound instead of sight.”So expect a lot of lovely, lush language in The Vorrh. Catling is so good at evoking the uncanny with imagery, taking something that’s ordinary or familiar and making it strange.
Overall, this is a spectacular book, like a flicker of light that makes other books seem bland and monochromatic. I give it the highest possible rating because it dares to explore; it’s primal and potent. I’d recommend this if you’ve been secretly yearning for something to jolt you out of your reading doldrums, something that will crack open your subconscious and blur the borders between prose and poetry...and dreams.
“VVVOOORRRRRHHH,” people.
[Disclaimer: I received an ARC copy of this book from the publisher through the Goodreads First Reads Program in exchange for an honest review.]
July 13, 2015
"B. Catling is a poet, sculptor, painter and performance artist." Hmm. Henceforth I may stick to books by authors.
Terry Gilliam and Tom Waits liked this book. Jeff Vandermeer says it "reads like a long-lost classic of Decadent or Symbolist literature." No doubt someone else says Catling's sensibilities are informed by a contempt for post-something, deconstructionalism and a desire to bring a new structure to fantasy unencumbered by such things as a coherent plot.
There are large chunks here that appear to be part of a real book in which someone is telling you a story. Then I guess the acid kicks in and Castaneda goes with J. G. Ballard and Sam Delany to the Heart of Darkness.
Eadweard Muybridge is here for no reason I can see except that perverts are always useful when you need a kinky sex scene because the plot has derailed. And why waste the research? Maybe he was meant to be in another book that fell through.
This book may have ended well. I'll never know, because I bailed after 300-some pages.
If you took four 300-level classes in philosophy, and speak of "lit'racher" and "the dance" (terpsichore, not pro sports), you might enjoy this. If you didn't, you might call it some of the rude words I'm thinking.
But I've read better far-out fantasy than this.
Terry Gilliam and Tom Waits liked this book. Jeff Vandermeer says it "reads like a long-lost classic of Decadent or Symbolist literature." No doubt someone else says Catling's sensibilities are informed by a contempt for post-something, deconstructionalism and a desire to bring a new structure to fantasy unencumbered by such things as a coherent plot.
There are large chunks here that appear to be part of a real book in which someone is telling you a story. Then I guess the acid kicks in and Castaneda goes with J. G. Ballard and Sam Delany to the Heart of Darkness.
Eadweard Muybridge is here for no reason I can see except that perverts are always useful when you need a kinky sex scene because the plot has derailed. And why waste the research? Maybe he was meant to be in another book that fell through.
This book may have ended well. I'll never know, because I bailed after 300-some pages.
If you took four 300-level classes in philosophy, and speak of "lit'racher" and "the dance" (terpsichore, not pro sports), you might enjoy this. If you didn't, you might call it some of the rude words I'm thinking.
But I've read better far-out fantasy than this.
March 29, 2018
In my teens a novel I loved was Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. I've never reread it for fear of spoiling my memory of the magic it weaved into my imagination. It was like the perfect transition from the otherworldly bewitchments of children's books to the more sober worlds of adult literature. The Vorrh is an imaginatively bizarre romp of a novel in the spirit of Gormenghast with a generous dose of the glorious controlled insanity of Thomas Pynchon thrown in.
The characters in the Vorrh include a one-eyed cyclops with three Bakelite robot guardians, a male wanderer armed with a sentient bow and arrow made of the body parts of a beloved female mentor, a blind woman miraculously healed by a sexual union, a pioneer photographer who is commissioned to photograph the ghost of a beloved husband. The Vorrh itself is a sentient forest on the outskirts of a generic European city in an unspecified time of history - it's often in Victorian in atmosphere. Somewhere at its heart is the Garden of Eden. It's rumoured Adam and angels still wander there.
A frequent problem whenever a writer lets his imagination run wild is architecture tends to play second fiddle and this is true here. Structure is its weakest feature, seeming rather prosaic and half-baked in relation to the imaginative blitzkrieg of the imagery. Perhaps this is why I can't pretend I understood what it all added up to. But on the whole I had a lot of wild fun reading it.
The characters in the Vorrh include a one-eyed cyclops with three Bakelite robot guardians, a male wanderer armed with a sentient bow and arrow made of the body parts of a beloved female mentor, a blind woman miraculously healed by a sexual union, a pioneer photographer who is commissioned to photograph the ghost of a beloved husband. The Vorrh itself is a sentient forest on the outskirts of a generic European city in an unspecified time of history - it's often in Victorian in atmosphere. Somewhere at its heart is the Garden of Eden. It's rumoured Adam and angels still wander there.
A frequent problem whenever a writer lets his imagination run wild is architecture tends to play second fiddle and this is true here. Structure is its weakest feature, seeming rather prosaic and half-baked in relation to the imaginative blitzkrieg of the imagery. Perhaps this is why I can't pretend I understood what it all added up to. But on the whole I had a lot of wild fun reading it.
April 18, 2013
I started a bare-bones blog to force myself to write better/longer reviews: http://scryingorb.wordpress.com/
Alan Moore loves this book. His praise is all over the front and back covers and it begins with a few page introduction where he raves about how fantastic the Vorrh is — how it is the best fantasy novel of this century thus far, how it enlivens a stale genre full of wizards and dragons, how superbly written it is, etc etc. These sort of introductions are always problematic, especially for unproven novels, as they heighten expectations and when they don’t live up to them, you feel let down rather than surprised a book you never heard of was actually pretty good. The Vorrh isn’t bad, but it’s not nearly as excellent or groundbreaking as Moore claims and fantasy hasn’t been merely about wizards and dragons in a very long time though it is frustratingly limited at times.
The Vorrh is a massive, primal forest in Africa (unfortunately described as a single monolithic entity and not a large multi-culture continent here) that apparently originates in Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa and may or may not contain the Garden of Eden amongst other things. The novel itself follows several disparate threads / characters that slowly begin to converge within the titular forest during the middle and last thirds of the novel, though they do not come fully together and some threads barely meet at all all.
I don’t mind this sort of structure, a great plot is not essential, and some of my favorite novels follow it. It does require two things however:
1. An author who is a skilled craftsperson at the prose-level. They can write.
2. Compelling and interesting characters that the reader enjoys following even if the overarching plot is sparse.
For the first requirement, Catling largely succeeds. His writing isn’t quite the caliber Alan Moore describes, but it is still better-than-genre-average and he does creeping horror very well. The best parts of the book include a side-story involving stillborn babies and the doctor who first diagnosed anorexia. The descriptions of The Vorrh itself are also stellar. Additionally, the book has that difficult to analyze page-turner quality. I read it pretty quick for a big, bulky 500 page novel.
The problem comes with number 2. None of the characters are particularly likeable. Some of this is by design. The real life photographer Edweard Muybridge is the best character, and also a total prick. But for the most part, none of them are very compelling. The cyclops, Ishmael, is the worst. He is bland as all hell, and his storyline is boring for a significant chunk of the book. The rest are largely forgettable and some of the fates they meet are sort of bewildering (not in the good way) or shrug-worthy.
On top of that, the women are all miserable characters and all the noteworthy ones have sex with the main male characters. And having sex with them is why they are important to the plot. In fact, the only real point-of-view women in the novel have sex with same male character. And the only black woman (remember this takes place in Africa…) who gets any characterization at all is both mute and like, savagely sexual.
So ultimately, it has its moments and isn’t terribly written but I’d only recommend it with major reservations. It’s part of a trilogy and I am not sure if I would read future installments.
Thanks to Green Apple Books in San Francisco for stocking this. Even if I did not love it, it was interesting and somewhat unique and it’s good to support independent presses.
Alan Moore loves this book. His praise is all over the front and back covers and it begins with a few page introduction where he raves about how fantastic the Vorrh is — how it is the best fantasy novel of this century thus far, how it enlivens a stale genre full of wizards and dragons, how superbly written it is, etc etc. These sort of introductions are always problematic, especially for unproven novels, as they heighten expectations and when they don’t live up to them, you feel let down rather than surprised a book you never heard of was actually pretty good. The Vorrh isn’t bad, but it’s not nearly as excellent or groundbreaking as Moore claims and fantasy hasn’t been merely about wizards and dragons in a very long time though it is frustratingly limited at times.
The Vorrh is a massive, primal forest in Africa (unfortunately described as a single monolithic entity and not a large multi-culture continent here) that apparently originates in Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa and may or may not contain the Garden of Eden amongst other things. The novel itself follows several disparate threads / characters that slowly begin to converge within the titular forest during the middle and last thirds of the novel, though they do not come fully together and some threads barely meet at all all.
I don’t mind this sort of structure, a great plot is not essential, and some of my favorite novels follow it. It does require two things however:
1. An author who is a skilled craftsperson at the prose-level. They can write.
2. Compelling and interesting characters that the reader enjoys following even if the overarching plot is sparse.
For the first requirement, Catling largely succeeds. His writing isn’t quite the caliber Alan Moore describes, but it is still better-than-genre-average and he does creeping horror very well. The best parts of the book include a side-story involving stillborn babies and the doctor who first diagnosed anorexia. The descriptions of The Vorrh itself are also stellar. Additionally, the book has that difficult to analyze page-turner quality. I read it pretty quick for a big, bulky 500 page novel.
The problem comes with number 2. None of the characters are particularly likeable. Some of this is by design. The real life photographer Edweard Muybridge is the best character, and also a total prick. But for the most part, none of them are very compelling. The cyclops, Ishmael, is the worst. He is bland as all hell, and his storyline is boring for a significant chunk of the book. The rest are largely forgettable and some of the fates they meet are sort of bewildering (not in the good way) or shrug-worthy.
On top of that, the women are all miserable characters and all the noteworthy ones have sex with the main male characters. And having sex with them is why they are important to the plot. In fact, the only real point-of-view women in the novel have sex with same male character. And the only black woman (remember this takes place in Africa…) who gets any characterization at all is both mute and like, savagely sexual.
So ultimately, it has its moments and isn’t terribly written but I’d only recommend it with major reservations. It’s part of a trilogy and I am not sure if I would read future installments.
Thanks to Green Apple Books in San Francisco for stocking this. Even if I did not love it, it was interesting and somewhat unique and it’s good to support independent presses.
November 14, 2017
My conclusion about this book: literary gaslighting. The blurb is enticing, and the book is endorsed by several big-name authors, but it never lives up to either.
I've read a lot of critiques in favor and against this book and in the end it comes down to:
-In favor: the prose can be nice.
-Against: the prose is too self-conscious and/or heavy-handed, at times what seems at first sight to be some wildly poetic passage turns out to show that Catling doesn't actually know what he's writing or what the words he's using means, or even makes any grammatical or logical sense.
-In favor: the book hints at some kind of intriguing steampunk/alternative history.
-Against: the book never really fleshes anything out. What the blurb entices us with (a strange and possibly malicious sentient jungle) almost never takes center stage, and instead we pass through seemingly unconnected lives of different characters. On top of that, the characters seem like ghosts in their own story, since there is no real character development, they are mostly unrelatable, and their actions rarely make sense.
-In favor: There are several scenes which are beautifully haunting.
-Against: A lot of the more grotesque scenes in the book seem to be there just because, not because they drive the plot. Which is fine in itself, but in combination of many other factors it just adds on to the negative aspects of the book.
Some other thoughts: using colonialism (for example) as a literary backdrop is fine in of itself. However, when a British author more or less fetishizes colonialism instead of using the novel to challenge the status quo, it gets tiring to read from a moral standpoint (didn't the British have hundreds of years to bask in their colonialism glory?). The same goes for some other themes in the novel: although Catling seems aware of the negative themes in his book, he never actually condemns them and actually fetishizes them.
A lot of the problems in the novel seem to come from the fact that Catling is an Old, White British Man. He doesn't seem to know or care how women's physiology actually works (periods are geysers of blood), nor what would actually motivate a woman or any human for that matter. At one point one of the female characters in the book has sex with a scrawny, ugly cyclops for no other reason other than he seems to have a big penis, and there is more physical description of the cyclops' penis than any of the characters in the novel. And just in case you were wondering, it is (I kid you not) a counter-clockwise corkscrew. If the "women will have sex with a big penis no matter what is attached to it" weren't such a tired and pervasive trope, and if Catling seemed to have any sort of grasp on real human psychology, then I might have been able to accept it as another part of the surrealism of the novel. There are violent rape scenes (again, no challenging of the status quo, more fetishes, more insinuating "women will let you rape them if you have a big penis because it will feel good" tropes), made more disturbing by the fact that Catling seems to identify most with the cyclops character. If you doubt that, if you do a google image search of "Brian Catling The Vorrh", you'll see that he has made a personalized rubber mask to make himself into a cyclops. Just saying.
PS- If you use the word "spunk" for semen in a novel, there's a special place in hell for you, and the only way to pay pennance is to donate all of your earnings from the novel to a charitable foundation. Your move, Catling.
I've read a lot of critiques in favor and against this book and in the end it comes down to:
-In favor: the prose can be nice.
-Against: the prose is too self-conscious and/or heavy-handed, at times what seems at first sight to be some wildly poetic passage turns out to show that Catling doesn't actually know what he's writing or what the words he's using means, or even makes any grammatical or logical sense.
-In favor: the book hints at some kind of intriguing steampunk/alternative history.
-Against: the book never really fleshes anything out. What the blurb entices us with (a strange and possibly malicious sentient jungle) almost never takes center stage, and instead we pass through seemingly unconnected lives of different characters. On top of that, the characters seem like ghosts in their own story, since there is no real character development, they are mostly unrelatable, and their actions rarely make sense.
-In favor: There are several scenes which are beautifully haunting.
-Against: A lot of the more grotesque scenes in the book seem to be there just because, not because they drive the plot. Which is fine in itself, but in combination of many other factors it just adds on to the negative aspects of the book.
Some other thoughts: using colonialism (for example) as a literary backdrop is fine in of itself. However, when a British author more or less fetishizes colonialism instead of using the novel to challenge the status quo, it gets tiring to read from a moral standpoint (didn't the British have hundreds of years to bask in their colonialism glory?). The same goes for some other themes in the novel: although Catling seems aware of the negative themes in his book, he never actually condemns them and actually fetishizes them.
A lot of the problems in the novel seem to come from the fact that Catling is an Old, White British Man. He doesn't seem to know or care how women's physiology actually works (periods are geysers of blood), nor what would actually motivate a woman or any human for that matter. At one point one of the female characters in the book has sex with a scrawny, ugly cyclops for no other reason other than he seems to have a big penis, and there is more physical description of the cyclops' penis than any of the characters in the novel. And just in case you were wondering, it is (I kid you not) a counter-clockwise corkscrew. If the "women will have sex with a big penis no matter what is attached to it" weren't such a tired and pervasive trope, and if Catling seemed to have any sort of grasp on real human psychology, then I might have been able to accept it as another part of the surrealism of the novel. There are violent rape scenes (again, no challenging of the status quo, more fetishes, more insinuating "women will let you rape them if you have a big penis because it will feel good" tropes), made more disturbing by the fact that Catling seems to identify most with the cyclops character. If you doubt that, if you do a google image search of "Brian Catling The Vorrh", you'll see that he has made a personalized rubber mask to make himself into a cyclops. Just saying.
PS- If you use the word "spunk" for semen in a novel, there's a special place in hell for you, and the only way to pay pennance is to donate all of your earnings from the novel to a charitable foundation. Your move, Catling.
January 25, 2019
A complete pile of flaming arse gravy.
December 24, 2022
Il Vorrh è una foresta inesplorabile, situata nel cuore di quello che sembra essere il continente africano - molto probabilmente il Congo - e si mormora essere così antica da racchiudere il Giardino dell'Eden. Chi si addentra troppo a fondo o troppo a lungo in questa voragine perde la ragione (o l’anima) o viene divorato dalle creature mostruose che la popolano.
Nemmeno il terrore, però, può scoraggiare la brama di conoscenza e potere dell’Uomo bianco che metterà radici ai margini della foresta per sfruttarne il legname e il mistero. A questo scopo, a cavallo tra XIX e XX secolo, viene eretta al confine con il Vorrh una città, Exxx, ricostruzione fedele di una città europea, avamposto commerciale dei colonizzatori.
Vorrh si presenta come un romanzo storico post coloniale, sullo sfondo critico dell’imperialismo tardo vittoriano, mescolato con tocchi di steampunk e di fantascienza weird, se non addirittura letteratura dell’orrore e dell’incubo. Un classico “Cuore di tenebra” rivisitato in salsa borgesiana o gormenghastiana. Nonostante il debito immenso nei confronti di molti classici di genere e non, è un romanzo riccamente immaginifico e ipnotico (Catling è un pittore e un artista e mette al centro della sua prosa la visione), influenzato ugualmente dal Decadentismo e dal Surrealismo quanto dal body horror. È un romanzo insolito e straordinario, difficile da riassumere o definire, soprattutto perché l’autore stesso schiva qualsiasi cliché. La stessa trama non solo non è lineare ma sembra addirittura non esserci, puntando, esattamente come il Vorrh, a una dispersione e a uno smarrimento esistenziali. Più che un susseguirsi di eventi, ci troviamo di fronte a un cerchio di storie concentriche che pone al centro il Mistero, la Foresta è il magnete che attira a sé tutti i personaggi. Le loro storie, labilmente connesse, hanno in comune un elemento: la direzione. Sono tutte rivolte verso il Vorrh, una discesa nella follia e nell’inspiegabile ma anche il tentativo di trovare una via d’uscita da un labirinto.
Seguiamo le vicende di: un ricco depravato francese, una donna cieca miracolosamente guarita, commercianti e medici di discendenza europea che vivono in città e cercano di indagare sui misteri del Vorrh, un ragazzo con un solo occhio che viene educato da un gruppo di robot fatti di bachelite e ancora sciamani, assassini, soldati ribelli, schiavi ma anche personaggi storici realmente esistiti come il celebre fotografo scozzese Muybridge, una strega leggendaria trasformata in un arco, addirittura esseri soprannaturali chiamati Ancestrali. Le identità dei personaggi sono mutevoli, vanno incontro a metamorfosi (simboliche e letterali), si disincarnano e reincarnano in nuovi corpi, si deformano, si corrompono e si riproducono.
Com’è ovvio dalla schiera di storyline e personaggi trattati, il romanzo non appartiene a un solo genere, ed è volutamente strano, a tratti in maniera eccessiva. La prosa lussureggiante e visivamente portentosa, convive spesso con svolte narrative a tratti demenziali (giuro che in questo libro ho letto di membri genitali maschili che si muovono come girandole). L’eccesso comunque è cifra stilistica, lo dimostra la ricchezza del mondo creato che mescola folklore, tecnologia, mitologia e simbolismo (vedi l’immagine ricorrente del cerchio, del labirinto e del ciclope), magia ancestrale ma anche complotti politici e misteri che si rifanno alla Storia imperialista.
La concezione del mistero non è mai chiarita attraverso spiegazioni ma rivelata attraverso visioni, quasi in un senso spirituale (l’elemento religioso infatti è molto presente all’interno del libro). La Verità sul Vorrh non è comprensibile attraverso la Ragione ma è riservata a pochi eletti, prescelti che accedono a prospettive sul reale precluse a chi è “normale”. Non è un caso che chi sembra custodire le chiavi dell’Enigma possiede corpi danneggiati (il Ciclope) o ha subito lesioni cerebrali (il Fotografo) o ha a disposizione tecnologie che lo aiutano ad accedere a diversi livelli di percezione (la fotografia stessa, ai suoi albori, produceva terrore perché era una diversa percezione del Reale). Questo è un romanzo di immagini, di premonizioni, di fantasmi che non tutti riescono a vedere. Come una sorta di ipnosi che crea alterazioni nella visione.
Nonostante queste atmosfere totalmente impreviste e il rifiuto di narrazioni disciplinate ed edulcorate, purtroppo Catling non riesce a trovare un’alternativa alla prospettiva maschile, prometeica ed eroica, impegnata a dominare la Natura, il Fato e gli Dei. I personaggi femminili sfruttati e dominati sono fastidiosamente docili e non compresi. Persino la critica al colonialismo appare debole visto che la maggior parte delle voci narranti sono uomini bianchi. Non c’è quindi una totale rivoluzione narrativa, benché il libro riesca a magnetizzare ugualmente il Lettore in questo universo disturbante, cupo e magico.
Nemmeno il terrore, però, può scoraggiare la brama di conoscenza e potere dell’Uomo bianco che metterà radici ai margini della foresta per sfruttarne il legname e il mistero. A questo scopo, a cavallo tra XIX e XX secolo, viene eretta al confine con il Vorrh una città, Exxx, ricostruzione fedele di una città europea, avamposto commerciale dei colonizzatori.
Vorrh si presenta come un romanzo storico post coloniale, sullo sfondo critico dell’imperialismo tardo vittoriano, mescolato con tocchi di steampunk e di fantascienza weird, se non addirittura letteratura dell’orrore e dell’incubo. Un classico “Cuore di tenebra” rivisitato in salsa borgesiana o gormenghastiana. Nonostante il debito immenso nei confronti di molti classici di genere e non, è un romanzo riccamente immaginifico e ipnotico (Catling è un pittore e un artista e mette al centro della sua prosa la visione), influenzato ugualmente dal Decadentismo e dal Surrealismo quanto dal body horror. È un romanzo insolito e straordinario, difficile da riassumere o definire, soprattutto perché l’autore stesso schiva qualsiasi cliché. La stessa trama non solo non è lineare ma sembra addirittura non esserci, puntando, esattamente come il Vorrh, a una dispersione e a uno smarrimento esistenziali. Più che un susseguirsi di eventi, ci troviamo di fronte a un cerchio di storie concentriche che pone al centro il Mistero, la Foresta è il magnete che attira a sé tutti i personaggi. Le loro storie, labilmente connesse, hanno in comune un elemento: la direzione. Sono tutte rivolte verso il Vorrh, una discesa nella follia e nell’inspiegabile ma anche il tentativo di trovare una via d’uscita da un labirinto.
Seguiamo le vicende di: un ricco depravato francese, una donna cieca miracolosamente guarita, commercianti e medici di discendenza europea che vivono in città e cercano di indagare sui misteri del Vorrh, un ragazzo con un solo occhio che viene educato da un gruppo di robot fatti di bachelite e ancora sciamani, assassini, soldati ribelli, schiavi ma anche personaggi storici realmente esistiti come il celebre fotografo scozzese Muybridge, una strega leggendaria trasformata in un arco, addirittura esseri soprannaturali chiamati Ancestrali. Le identità dei personaggi sono mutevoli, vanno incontro a metamorfosi (simboliche e letterali), si disincarnano e reincarnano in nuovi corpi, si deformano, si corrompono e si riproducono.
Com’è ovvio dalla schiera di storyline e personaggi trattati, il romanzo non appartiene a un solo genere, ed è volutamente strano, a tratti in maniera eccessiva. La prosa lussureggiante e visivamente portentosa, convive spesso con svolte narrative a tratti demenziali (giuro che in questo libro ho letto di membri genitali maschili che si muovono come girandole). L’eccesso comunque è cifra stilistica, lo dimostra la ricchezza del mondo creato che mescola folklore, tecnologia, mitologia e simbolismo (vedi l’immagine ricorrente del cerchio, del labirinto e del ciclope), magia ancestrale ma anche complotti politici e misteri che si rifanno alla Storia imperialista.
La concezione del mistero non è mai chiarita attraverso spiegazioni ma rivelata attraverso visioni, quasi in un senso spirituale (l’elemento religioso infatti è molto presente all’interno del libro). La Verità sul Vorrh non è comprensibile attraverso la Ragione ma è riservata a pochi eletti, prescelti che accedono a prospettive sul reale precluse a chi è “normale”. Non è un caso che chi sembra custodire le chiavi dell’Enigma possiede corpi danneggiati (il Ciclope) o ha subito lesioni cerebrali (il Fotografo) o ha a disposizione tecnologie che lo aiutano ad accedere a diversi livelli di percezione (la fotografia stessa, ai suoi albori, produceva terrore perché era una diversa percezione del Reale). Questo è un romanzo di immagini, di premonizioni, di fantasmi che non tutti riescono a vedere. Come una sorta di ipnosi che crea alterazioni nella visione.
Nonostante queste atmosfere totalmente impreviste e il rifiuto di narrazioni disciplinate ed edulcorate, purtroppo Catling non riesce a trovare un’alternativa alla prospettiva maschile, prometeica ed eroica, impegnata a dominare la Natura, il Fato e gli Dei. I personaggi femminili sfruttati e dominati sono fastidiosamente docili e non compresi. Persino la critica al colonialismo appare debole visto che la maggior parte delle voci narranti sono uomini bianchi. Non c’è quindi una totale rivoluzione narrativa, benché il libro riesca a magnetizzare ugualmente il Lettore in questo universo disturbante, cupo e magico.
July 5, 2015
Closer to a 2.5.
I finished reading this close to two weeks ago and I'm only writing a review now. This is emblematic of my frustration with The Vorrh, a book that came with a lot of buzz in some circles and, in the first 80 or so pages, really established something I thought I was falling in love with.
This is, at its heart, a sort of Weird fantasy tale. There's a small town bordering a forest that is believed to be magical or haunted or dangerous or some combination of all of those things. One man seeks to explore the Vorrh, others are trying to stop him, and just the strange character of the town in general ends up dominating everything.
It's a book that suffers from the same thing we see a lot of the New Weird doing (even if this is not explicitly categorized as such), in that the setting and mood of the book overwhelmingly take precedence over the plot, and what ends up happening is that the construction of the story takes a back seat over the worldbuilding aspects. What was constructed deserved a better tale to go with it, and it became repeatedly difficult to care about anything that was going on.
Just a definite disappointment. Some readers might find some interesting stuff here, and if you're into significant worldbuilding this might be one to look up, but otherwise...
I finished reading this close to two weeks ago and I'm only writing a review now. This is emblematic of my frustration with The Vorrh, a book that came with a lot of buzz in some circles and, in the first 80 or so pages, really established something I thought I was falling in love with.
This is, at its heart, a sort of Weird fantasy tale. There's a small town bordering a forest that is believed to be magical or haunted or dangerous or some combination of all of those things. One man seeks to explore the Vorrh, others are trying to stop him, and just the strange character of the town in general ends up dominating everything.
It's a book that suffers from the same thing we see a lot of the New Weird doing (even if this is not explicitly categorized as such), in that the setting and mood of the book overwhelmingly take precedence over the plot, and what ends up happening is that the construction of the story takes a back seat over the worldbuilding aspects. What was constructed deserved a better tale to go with it, and it became repeatedly difficult to care about anything that was going on.
Just a definite disappointment. Some readers might find some interesting stuff here, and if you're into significant worldbuilding this might be one to look up, but otherwise...
May 12, 2015
There is a dark place in the world.
Essentially this place has been captured by Brian Catling in his novel The Vorrh, an alternative history of a soul sucking forest in the midst of Africa in the early 20th century. I finished this somewhat plotless book that reads more as a descent into madness than a traditional novel while questioning myself the whole time, “Why are you going on?” In the end, I probably shouldn’t have, and you probably shouldn’t either.
There seems to be a lot to explain as to why I would not recommend you reading a book that for most purposes was well written and, at least if you believe the reviews, well received. I’ll try my hand a some key points.
Have you ever had a friend that thinks that he is so clever when he turns a phrase? Maybe like a non-sequitur or a simple play on words that gives his sentence an unintended, but to him, serendipitous meaning. Now imagine having to read a book full of these crafted sentences. Sure maybe one in five come off with some power, but honestly, it becomes a slog rather than the occasional moments of delight like they can be. The author is trying too hard to get a little nod of the hat with each phrase. Some may see this as lyrical, but hundreds of pages worth makes you long for the spartan description of Hemingway.
Now let’s talk about description or world-building or character development or anything else besides, say, a plot. This is what Mr. Catling offers to you in this tome – which is supposedly the first of a trilogy. I couldn’t tell you what the next volume could be about because I’m not sure I could tell you what the story of this one is. There are a bunch of fleshed-out characters and the world of The Vorrh is elaborately assembled with such dark intention that makes the reader ready to escape. A story, such as it is, more or less develops just because the characters kind of bump into each other – not because there is any direction to the tale. Several long “side” stories have virtually no relation to the main characters or the Vorrh at all. It’s almost as if separate stories were just cobbled into this novel because they exhibited the same mood as the others and it would thicken the book. I love world-building and character development, but there seems to be a sad tendency – especially in the fantasy genre – to substitute worlds with stories. I’m sorry, but give me an O. Henry short story every day that has a plot than 500 pages of an immaculate world with no point. It is like many modern authors are trying to be Tolkein but missing the point.
Finally I need to mention the evil. The Vorrh is a dark place. It turns everyone that goes into it a hollow shell of a person. Make no mistake: this is the intention of this book to those who read it. Every single character is a dark, twisted caricature of a person. There are no heroes, no good guys, no noble purposes. The one character who should be a bright spot is a woman who receives back her sight after being born blind. In such a gloomy, oppressive world, surely this one would find joy in her sight. Almost purposefully as soon as the reader thinks this, the author spends the time to show the ugliness of the sight of flowers in this character’s mind. The gift of sight is actually a curse – for really to all the people that inhabit this world, life is a curse. I rarely psychoanalyze authors, but Mr. Catling has presented a worldview that sees corruption and evil in all things. I don’t know if I know anyone who I think would like this book, and if I did, I would be scared to give it to them because it might sink them beyond hope.
I usually don’t bring up the Bible in non-Christian works, but the author has taken perverse pleasure at bringing up many illustrations of it and making them horrible. In Phillipians, Paul says “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.” I cannot think of a better antithesis to that statement than this book. It is a mire of thought. Avoid it.
2 stars out of 10
Red Eagle's Legacy
Essentially this place has been captured by Brian Catling in his novel The Vorrh, an alternative history of a soul sucking forest in the midst of Africa in the early 20th century. I finished this somewhat plotless book that reads more as a descent into madness than a traditional novel while questioning myself the whole time, “Why are you going on?” In the end, I probably shouldn’t have, and you probably shouldn’t either.
There seems to be a lot to explain as to why I would not recommend you reading a book that for most purposes was well written and, at least if you believe the reviews, well received. I’ll try my hand a some key points.
Have you ever had a friend that thinks that he is so clever when he turns a phrase? Maybe like a non-sequitur or a simple play on words that gives his sentence an unintended, but to him, serendipitous meaning. Now imagine having to read a book full of these crafted sentences. Sure maybe one in five come off with some power, but honestly, it becomes a slog rather than the occasional moments of delight like they can be. The author is trying too hard to get a little nod of the hat with each phrase. Some may see this as lyrical, but hundreds of pages worth makes you long for the spartan description of Hemingway.
Now let’s talk about description or world-building or character development or anything else besides, say, a plot. This is what Mr. Catling offers to you in this tome – which is supposedly the first of a trilogy. I couldn’t tell you what the next volume could be about because I’m not sure I could tell you what the story of this one is. There are a bunch of fleshed-out characters and the world of The Vorrh is elaborately assembled with such dark intention that makes the reader ready to escape. A story, such as it is, more or less develops just because the characters kind of bump into each other – not because there is any direction to the tale. Several long “side” stories have virtually no relation to the main characters or the Vorrh at all. It’s almost as if separate stories were just cobbled into this novel because they exhibited the same mood as the others and it would thicken the book. I love world-building and character development, but there seems to be a sad tendency – especially in the fantasy genre – to substitute worlds with stories. I’m sorry, but give me an O. Henry short story every day that has a plot than 500 pages of an immaculate world with no point. It is like many modern authors are trying to be Tolkein but missing the point.
Finally I need to mention the evil. The Vorrh is a dark place. It turns everyone that goes into it a hollow shell of a person. Make no mistake: this is the intention of this book to those who read it. Every single character is a dark, twisted caricature of a person. There are no heroes, no good guys, no noble purposes. The one character who should be a bright spot is a woman who receives back her sight after being born blind. In such a gloomy, oppressive world, surely this one would find joy in her sight. Almost purposefully as soon as the reader thinks this, the author spends the time to show the ugliness of the sight of flowers in this character’s mind. The gift of sight is actually a curse – for really to all the people that inhabit this world, life is a curse. I rarely psychoanalyze authors, but Mr. Catling has presented a worldview that sees corruption and evil in all things. I don’t know if I know anyone who I think would like this book, and if I did, I would be scared to give it to them because it might sink them beyond hope.
I usually don’t bring up the Bible in non-Christian works, but the author has taken perverse pleasure at bringing up many illustrations of it and making them horrible. In Phillipians, Paul says “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.” I cannot think of a better antithesis to that statement than this book. It is a mire of thought. Avoid it.
2 stars out of 10
Red Eagle's Legacy
July 5, 2015
Reading The Vorrh ...
Reading The Vorrh reminds me of the first time I read Gene Wolfe. Catling offers a very similar combination of mystery, allusion, tricky plots, some beautiful sentences, unpredictability, touches of horror, and a powerful sense of meaning just beneath the surface. The Vorrh is like Shadow of the Torturer in that it's a standalone book which is also, apparently, the start of a series. This is also my way of offering very high praise.
If the Hugo awards matter ever again, this is now my second nomination for the year's best novel.
It's the kind of book you reread parts of while reading, and which you begin again immediately upon finishing.
It's not a comfortable, friendly book. The narrative(s) isn't (aren't) built that way. The Vorrh doesn't offer much in the way of characters you empathize with. Instead it's a challenge, a lunge in unexpected directions, energetically doing work on multiple levels not all of which the reader can grasp right away.
I've been reading parts of this novel out loud, partly from pleasure, and also so dig more deeply into passages. It's that kind of book.
Alan Moore compares it to Voyage to Arcturus, and that makes sense to me.
...before I go further with impressions and comparisons, I'll introduce what the book is actually about. Then I'll head into spoilers.
The Vorrh doesn't have a single plot, but multiple storylines that intersect around a fantastic African forest of great antiquity, the titular Vorrh, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We follow a French writer who visits the forest, several Europeans living in a colonial city at the forest's edge, a local ex-soldier, the great Scots photographer Muybridge, and several local shamans and/or medical doctors, not to mention mysterious slaves, William Gull, a cyclops, monsters, robotic teaching puppets, a growing population of ghosts, a disembodied assassin, and, most importantly, a woman turned into a bow. Their stories dodge back and forth in time, especially as identities change or disappear.
A note on genre: as you might gather from the preceding, The Vorrh is a fantasy, or a work of magic realism. We see realistic details alongside objects and forces drawn from myth and imagination. The forest seems to exist somewhere all across North Africa, stretching down along the eastern coast, yet also near the Mediterranean. As with, say, the works of Tim Powers, this novel works fantastic elements into the nitty gritty of daily life. It also reads like surrealist art and fiction, with genuinely strange scenes and ideas: a cyclops going to a carnival, after being taught from mysterious crates by helpful puppets.
The Vorrh is also an adventure novel, with several characters engaged on epic quests, and including gunfire, ambushes, betrayals, curses, sex scenes, torture, and rebellion. *And* it's alternate history, positing a colonial enterprise that didn't exist, and including historical personages, such as Roussel, Gull and Muybridge. Additionally, steampunk fans may find some fun machines.
A note on style: Catling has a flair for surprising word choice and lovely phrases, with touches of sardonic wit.
A note on references: The Vorrh opens with a flourish of entertaining allusions. Frobenius is there to make us think of German colonialism in Africa. Conrad brings up the European enterprise more generally. Zen and the Art of Archery teases us about the bow.
Once the book gets going, Catling quietly builds up a larger referential world. The Bible is a touchstone throughout, sometimes literally. Flann O'Brien is namechecked once (2525) , to my delight.
A note on politics: The Vorrh soaks in Europe's colonialist past, and runs all kinds of risks in doing so. European characters exploit and literally enslave the locals. Catling, not from Africa, narrates from local points of view. The entire enterprise risks something like Orientalism by creating a fantasty world in a far-off, exploitable land for colonial people to explore.
But Catling pulls it off, I think. The Europeans don't fare that well, overall, resembling less Stanley and more Mungo Park. For example, And the Vorrh isn't really feminized. Kij Johnson goes further, arguing that "what this book is not, is about Africa".
Do I recommend The Vorrh? Do I ever. But with cautions. It's challenging, not often giving readers comfortable ways in. The plots sprawl and their actions often suspend themselves. Reading enough of this novel brings about a kind of trance effect, not onlike watching a Tarkovsky film. This ain't Dragonlance.
So read it. This may be the greatest fantasy of the decade.
Here's one good review.
Reading The Vorrh reminds me of the first time I read Gene Wolfe. Catling offers a very similar combination of mystery, allusion, tricky plots, some beautiful sentences, unpredictability, touches of horror, and a powerful sense of meaning just beneath the surface. The Vorrh is like Shadow of the Torturer in that it's a standalone book which is also, apparently, the start of a series. This is also my way of offering very high praise.
If the Hugo awards matter ever again, this is now my second nomination for the year's best novel.
It's the kind of book you reread parts of while reading, and which you begin again immediately upon finishing.
It's not a comfortable, friendly book. The narrative(s) isn't (aren't) built that way. The Vorrh doesn't offer much in the way of characters you empathize with. Instead it's a challenge, a lunge in unexpected directions, energetically doing work on multiple levels not all of which the reader can grasp right away.
I've been reading parts of this novel out loud, partly from pleasure, and also so dig more deeply into passages. It's that kind of book.
Alan Moore compares it to Voyage to Arcturus, and that makes sense to me.
...before I go further with impressions and comparisons, I'll introduce what the book is actually about. Then I'll head into spoilers.
The Vorrh doesn't have a single plot, but multiple storylines that intersect around a fantastic African forest of great antiquity, the titular Vorrh, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We follow a French writer who visits the forest, several Europeans living in a colonial city at the forest's edge, a local ex-soldier, the great Scots photographer Muybridge, and several local shamans and/or medical doctors, not to mention mysterious slaves, William Gull, a cyclops, monsters, robotic teaching puppets, a growing population of ghosts, a disembodied assassin, and, most importantly, a woman turned into a bow. Their stories dodge back and forth in time, especially as identities change or disappear.
A note on genre: as you might gather from the preceding, The Vorrh is a fantasy, or a work of magic realism. We see realistic details alongside objects and forces drawn from myth and imagination. The forest seems to exist somewhere all across North Africa, stretching down along the eastern coast, yet also near the Mediterranean. As with, say, the works of Tim Powers, this novel works fantastic elements into the nitty gritty of daily life. It also reads like surrealist art and fiction, with genuinely strange scenes and ideas: a cyclops going to a carnival, after being taught from mysterious crates by helpful puppets.
The Vorrh is also an adventure novel, with several characters engaged on epic quests, and including gunfire, ambushes, betrayals, curses, sex scenes, torture, and rebellion. *And* it's alternate history, positing a colonial enterprise that didn't exist, and including historical personages, such as Roussel, Gull and Muybridge. Additionally, steampunk fans may find some fun machines.
A note on style: Catling has a flair for surprising word choice and lovely phrases, with touches of sardonic wit.
Este had foreseen her death while working in our garden, an uncapping of momentum in the afternoon sun. (Kindle location 131)
He stepped over a gurgling drain and emptied the bullets out of the gun; they fell like brass comets into the speeding firmament below. (4291)
Cyrena Lohr combed the city and caught three names, which now wriggled in her teeth. (2589)
"I want to be forgotten for who I am, not judged for how I have been made." (5934)
For so it is among those who shed lives every few years: They keep their deflated interior causeways, hold them running parallel with their current usable ones; ghost arteries, sleeping shrunken next to those that pump life. Hushed lymphatics, like quiet ivy alongside the speeding juice of now. Nerve trees like bone coral, hugging the whisper of bellowing communications.(338)
...a great stench of hope rose... (3686)
The camera was a collector not of light, but of time, and the time it cherished most was in the anticipation of death. (1609)
She had found [a book] confused and obscure. No doubt it was art, for she knew him to be a man of dangerous appetites and total selfishness.(2001)
She had a smouldering attractiveness that hid beneath a face that melted uncontrollably between the ages of eight and eighty-one. (5507)
A note on references: The Vorrh opens with a flourish of entertaining allusions. Frobenius is there to make us think of German colonialism in Africa. Conrad brings up the European enterprise more generally. Zen and the Art of Archery teases us about the bow.
Once the book gets going, Catling quietly builds up a larger referential world. The Bible is a touchstone throughout, sometimes literally. Flann O'Brien is namechecked once (2525) , to my delight.
A note on politics: The Vorrh soaks in Europe's colonialist past, and runs all kinds of risks in doing so. European characters exploit and literally enslave the locals. Catling, not from Africa, narrates from local points of view. The entire enterprise risks something like Orientalism by creating a fantasty world in a far-off, exploitable land for colonial people to explore.
But Catling pulls it off, I think. The Europeans don't fare that well, overall, resembling less Stanley and more Mungo Park. For example, And the Vorrh isn't really feminized. Kij Johnson goes further, arguing that "what this book is not, is about Africa".
Do I recommend The Vorrh? Do I ever. But with cautions. It's challenging, not often giving readers comfortable ways in. The plots sprawl and their actions often suspend themselves. Reading enough of this novel brings about a kind of trance effect, not onlike watching a Tarkovsky film. This ain't Dragonlance.
So read it. This may be the greatest fantasy of the decade.
Here's one good review.
September 14, 2021
Un luogo imprecisato di un’Africa immaginaria e immaginata, una foresta senziente alla Vandermeer, alla cui ombra è stata ricostruita la città di Essenwald, passaggio obbligato per chi sogna di raggiungere il Vorrh, misteriosa dimora di un Popolo Antico, ma anche sede dell’Eden, dei suoi Guardiani ormai dimenticati e dove Dio passeggiava quando voleva pensare mettendosi nei panni degli uomini.
Il Vorrh “non è un posto da vedere per curiosità. Non è un luogo da osservare e dimenticare. È un luogo sacro e onnisciente; gli uomini devono cedere qualcosa qui, sacrificare tutto o una parte di sé. Non si può entrare e uscire a piacimento; non è un parco o un giardino di città”.
È sede dell’oscurità più profonda, di un nero quasi liquido, popolato di ombre e circondato da leggende.
Nella contrapposizione tra buio e luce, non sempre è la seconda a trionfare. Forse più rassicurante per alcuni, per altri è infida e maligna, perché mette in risalto contorni, spazi e distanze.
Dalla vita scandita dal tempo di Essenwald, con i suoi numerosi abitanti, i quartieri eleganti e i palazzi antichi, si passa alla sospensione di tempo e spazio del Vorrh, che risucchia l’umanità di chi lo attraversa, annullandone la memoria e l’identità. Ma l’attrazione esercitata dalla foresta è irresistibile:
“ Dormì sapendo che tutto nella sua vita era un mistero e che il suo unico scopo sembrava essere attraversare il Vorrh”.
“D’istinto sapeva che memoria e immaginazione condividono lo stesso alloggio nel cervello, e che sono come impronte nella sabbia fine o nella neve. La memoria di solito pesava di più, ma non qui, dove veniva spazzata via dalla foresta, che appianava ogni contorno del suo significato vitale.
Qui, avrebbe fatto ricorso all’immaginazione per sradicare le ultime fondamenta che rifiutavano l’insidiosa erosione che divorava ogni cosa intorno a lui. Avrebbe ritrovato la sua strada verso la vita sognando fatti impossibili”.
Il sonno e il sogno, la forza dell’immaginazione, l’impallidire dei ricordi, sempre più vaghi e frammentati, lo sfinimento di una ricerca per cui si deve necessariamente sacrificare una parte di sé, accomunano alcuni dei personaggi che si inoltrano nel mistero e ne escono cambiati. Alla fine ad attenderli sarà la follia, una nuova consapevolezza o la morte.
Entriamo anche noi, quasi trascinati, nel Vorrh, in un tempo sospeso di cui ricorderemo solo i primi istanti:
“ L’alba, come fosse la prima. Le nubi grigio piombo sembrano mani corazzate che stringono il pallido sole menomato nella loro morsa. La notte aleggia ancora sopra i rami più alti, enorme e poderosa […] È l’ora in cui svanisce il ricordo della notte, quando si percepisce la gloria del buio che viene risucchiato e infine spogliato della sua purezza”.
Per certi versi mi ha fatto pensare a Gormenghast, pur essendo altra storia e altra ambientazione. Scrittura barocca con una scelta accurata di parole, a volte taglienti, a volte crude. Immagini e descrizioni di grande bellezza, anche quando si soffermano sulla violenza più feroce. Ipnotico e seducente.
Il Vorrh “non è un posto da vedere per curiosità. Non è un luogo da osservare e dimenticare. È un luogo sacro e onnisciente; gli uomini devono cedere qualcosa qui, sacrificare tutto o una parte di sé. Non si può entrare e uscire a piacimento; non è un parco o un giardino di città”.
È sede dell’oscurità più profonda, di un nero quasi liquido, popolato di ombre e circondato da leggende.
Nella contrapposizione tra buio e luce, non sempre è la seconda a trionfare. Forse più rassicurante per alcuni, per altri è infida e maligna, perché mette in risalto contorni, spazi e distanze.
Dalla vita scandita dal tempo di Essenwald, con i suoi numerosi abitanti, i quartieri eleganti e i palazzi antichi, si passa alla sospensione di tempo e spazio del Vorrh, che risucchia l’umanità di chi lo attraversa, annullandone la memoria e l’identità. Ma l’attrazione esercitata dalla foresta è irresistibile:
“ Dormì sapendo che tutto nella sua vita era un mistero e che il suo unico scopo sembrava essere attraversare il Vorrh”.
“D’istinto sapeva che memoria e immaginazione condividono lo stesso alloggio nel cervello, e che sono come impronte nella sabbia fine o nella neve. La memoria di solito pesava di più, ma non qui, dove veniva spazzata via dalla foresta, che appianava ogni contorno del suo significato vitale.
Qui, avrebbe fatto ricorso all’immaginazione per sradicare le ultime fondamenta che rifiutavano l’insidiosa erosione che divorava ogni cosa intorno a lui. Avrebbe ritrovato la sua strada verso la vita sognando fatti impossibili”.
Il sonno e il sogno, la forza dell’immaginazione, l’impallidire dei ricordi, sempre più vaghi e frammentati, lo sfinimento di una ricerca per cui si deve necessariamente sacrificare una parte di sé, accomunano alcuni dei personaggi che si inoltrano nel mistero e ne escono cambiati. Alla fine ad attenderli sarà la follia, una nuova consapevolezza o la morte.
Entriamo anche noi, quasi trascinati, nel Vorrh, in un tempo sospeso di cui ricorderemo solo i primi istanti:
“ L’alba, come fosse la prima. Le nubi grigio piombo sembrano mani corazzate che stringono il pallido sole menomato nella loro morsa. La notte aleggia ancora sopra i rami più alti, enorme e poderosa […] È l’ora in cui svanisce il ricordo della notte, quando si percepisce la gloria del buio che viene risucchiato e infine spogliato della sua purezza”.
Per certi versi mi ha fatto pensare a Gormenghast, pur essendo altra storia e altra ambientazione. Scrittura barocca con una scelta accurata di parole, a volte taglienti, a volte crude. Immagini e descrizioni di grande bellezza, anche quando si soffermano sulla violenza più feroce. Ipnotico e seducente.
January 9, 2024
Very much like ‘nails on a chalkboard’ some authors' prose just clashes with my ears: Ray Bradbury, Patrick Rothfuss and the fictional author, James S A Corey, to name a few. I now add Brian Catling to that list. I'm not saying it is the fault of these authors, or that there is any failing on their part. It may just be a ‘me’ thing. Who knows. I'm sure there's a large philosophical debate there about aesthetics, but I'm not interested in getting into that, presently.
So then, I will now discuss Catling’s, The Vorrh. I got excited about this because Alan Moore was excited about this, as well as, other such luminaries. From this moment forward I will only be reading books recommended by GR friends, my wife, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville.
This book has all the elements of good fiction: a mystery, mythology, several character viewpoints, androids, and a cyclops for crying out. But it never really materialized into anything of value.
Where VanderMeer, Mieville, and Ford are weird in a good way; Catling writes weird in a bad way. Where Peake and McCarthy are pleasingly wordy; Catling is displeasingly wordy. Gaiman and Wolfe are able to meander in there novels without convoluting; Catling cannot.
This novel is supposedly part of a trilogy. I'm ok with a story being somewhat incomplete, leading into the next installment, but the novel has to be able to stand alone in some way. Examples of successful attempts (IMHO): Annihilation (of the Southern Reach Trilogy), ASOIAF: A Game of Thrones, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion (hotly debated). The Vorrh fails very hard in this regard.
What is The Vorrh? Apart from being a mythical forest, beats me. And as it was barely addressed in the novel, I no longer care.
Moore's praise comes as an afterword in the edition I read. He tries to make sense of what you just read, and, frankly, it's all just a bunch of bullshit. He makes false claims that Catling breathed new life into the fantasy genre. I agree that fantasy was stale for a time with the endless Tolkien pastiches, but all that definitely ended, if not before, with the arrival of the New-Weird authors. Read "Perdido Street Station" or "The Physiognomy" and tell me if they are stale. Moore even compares this writing to Peake (blasphemy). Yes, I learned that it's possible to write "Watchmen", "V for Vendetta" and "The Killing Joke", and still be a fallible human being. But, please, don't listen to me or Moore; form your own opinion.
I wouldn't be continuing in the series, but like a fool, in the early stages of my courtship with this book, I signed up for an early reading of The Erstwhile, and Net Galley gave it to me. I will follow through with my commitments. Hopefully the series gets better. The second half of the book was an improvement on the first.
Author's favorite words repeated ad naseum:
1) Camera obscura
2) Erection
3) Fetish
(there were more but I kept bad notes)
So then, I will now discuss Catling’s, The Vorrh. I got excited about this because Alan Moore was excited about this, as well as, other such luminaries. From this moment forward I will only be reading books recommended by GR friends, my wife, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville.
This book has all the elements of good fiction: a mystery, mythology, several character viewpoints, androids, and a cyclops for crying out. But it never really materialized into anything of value.
Where VanderMeer, Mieville, and Ford are weird in a good way; Catling writes weird in a bad way. Where Peake and McCarthy are pleasingly wordy; Catling is displeasingly wordy. Gaiman and Wolfe are able to meander in there novels without convoluting; Catling cannot.
This novel is supposedly part of a trilogy. I'm ok with a story being somewhat incomplete, leading into the next installment, but the novel has to be able to stand alone in some way. Examples of successful attempts (IMHO): Annihilation (of the Southern Reach Trilogy), ASOIAF: A Game of Thrones, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion (hotly debated). The Vorrh fails very hard in this regard.
What is The Vorrh? Apart from being a mythical forest, beats me. And as it was barely addressed in the novel, I no longer care.
Moore's praise comes as an afterword in the edition I read. He tries to make sense of what you just read, and, frankly, it's all just a bunch of bullshit. He makes false claims that Catling breathed new life into the fantasy genre. I agree that fantasy was stale for a time with the endless Tolkien pastiches, but all that definitely ended, if not before, with the arrival of the New-Weird authors. Read "Perdido Street Station" or "The Physiognomy" and tell me if they are stale. Moore even compares this writing to Peake (blasphemy). Yes, I learned that it's possible to write "Watchmen", "V for Vendetta" and "The Killing Joke", and still be a fallible human being. But, please, don't listen to me or Moore; form your own opinion.
I wouldn't be continuing in the series, but like a fool, in the early stages of my courtship with this book, I signed up for an early reading of The Erstwhile, and Net Galley gave it to me. I will follow through with my commitments. Hopefully the series gets better. The second half of the book was an improvement on the first.
Author's favorite words repeated ad naseum:
1) Camera obscura
2) Erection
3) Fetish
(there were more but I kept bad notes)
June 12, 2015
Man... I could probably write a 5-page essay on this one. Given how narratively dense the book is, though, I imagine I wouldn't be the only one. I fluttered back and forth between wanting to give this 4 stars or 5. Ultimately I chose 5. Here's why:
This is by far one of the most imaginatively wild novels I've read. Ever. There is so much going on in "The Vorrh" that it's kind of impossible to describe. It's set in post-WWI colonial Africa, but it's also set in mid-to-late 1800s England and America. It's an adventure novel, but it's also a strange, Victorian romance. It's a mystery. It's historical fiction, but it's definitely fantasy. It's allegorical... maybe? It's certainly unlike any fantasy I've ever read. There aren't any dragons, and there aren't wizards in any form you'd recognize, but the supernatural forces of the Vorrh are present throughout the book, even if you don't really grasp what they are or how they're propelling this wide cast of strange, fascinating characters. This book is jam-packed with imagination, and if you don't kind of let yourself go with the flow, it'll probably be a jarring read for some. Let yourself go with the flow. I don't know how it will make you feel, but the story will be worth it. This story fires the imagination, even as it leaves you bug-eyed with jealousy at some of the stuff Catling's created here.
It reminded me a lot of some of Gene Wolfe's stories, or maybe Samuel Delany's. I mean that as a compliment, because those are two great, great writers. But the book is dense. It is not a quick read.
The reason I almost gave this 4 stars was that because in spite of how marvelous the story is, the prose can sometimes be very, very convoluted. For the first 100 pages or so, every sentence seems loaded with so much metaphor and simile and personification and flowery adjectives that it really made me want to sit down with Mr. Catling and be like, Hey, this is great, but let's edit this just a WEE BIT, ok? The writing is not bad, by any far stretch. But as I read the book I could kind of tell that this was a first novel, mainly in how the story evolved over time, and how the pacing picks up. Like I said, the first 100 pages were a bit of a slog, even as he introduced these crazy, fascinating characters set in this familiar yet totally fantastical world. But after those 100 pages, the prose eased up a bit on the ostentation, and the story really took off. And it's a hell of a ride, even when you're not sure what's going on or why things are happening.
I can't imagine everyone will love this book. And I imagine I'll need to read it again, or sit down with others who've read it and discuss before I really have a full grasp of what happened. Heaven and Hell, angels and demons and Adam and Eve... I imagine I might have missed some of the stuff happening "behind the scenes". But Catling's imagination really is a marvel to behold. His writing is wonderful (once you get past the grandiloquence), and there are so many scenes and chapters that will leave you with goosebumps. There are scenes that will make you laugh, scenes that will terrify you. It's a bit of a trek, for sure, but the journey is well worth it.
This is by far one of the most imaginatively wild novels I've read. Ever. There is so much going on in "The Vorrh" that it's kind of impossible to describe. It's set in post-WWI colonial Africa, but it's also set in mid-to-late 1800s England and America. It's an adventure novel, but it's also a strange, Victorian romance. It's a mystery. It's historical fiction, but it's definitely fantasy. It's allegorical... maybe? It's certainly unlike any fantasy I've ever read. There aren't any dragons, and there aren't wizards in any form you'd recognize, but the supernatural forces of the Vorrh are present throughout the book, even if you don't really grasp what they are or how they're propelling this wide cast of strange, fascinating characters. This book is jam-packed with imagination, and if you don't kind of let yourself go with the flow, it'll probably be a jarring read for some. Let yourself go with the flow. I don't know how it will make you feel, but the story will be worth it. This story fires the imagination, even as it leaves you bug-eyed with jealousy at some of the stuff Catling's created here.
It reminded me a lot of some of Gene Wolfe's stories, or maybe Samuel Delany's. I mean that as a compliment, because those are two great, great writers. But the book is dense. It is not a quick read.
The reason I almost gave this 4 stars was that because in spite of how marvelous the story is, the prose can sometimes be very, very convoluted. For the first 100 pages or so, every sentence seems loaded with so much metaphor and simile and personification and flowery adjectives that it really made me want to sit down with Mr. Catling and be like, Hey, this is great, but let's edit this just a WEE BIT, ok? The writing is not bad, by any far stretch. But as I read the book I could kind of tell that this was a first novel, mainly in how the story evolved over time, and how the pacing picks up. Like I said, the first 100 pages were a bit of a slog, even as he introduced these crazy, fascinating characters set in this familiar yet totally fantastical world. But after those 100 pages, the prose eased up a bit on the ostentation, and the story really took off. And it's a hell of a ride, even when you're not sure what's going on or why things are happening.
I can't imagine everyone will love this book. And I imagine I'll need to read it again, or sit down with others who've read it and discuss before I really have a full grasp of what happened. Heaven and Hell, angels and demons and Adam and Eve... I imagine I might have missed some of the stuff happening "behind the scenes". But Catling's imagination really is a marvel to behold. His writing is wonderful (once you get past the grandiloquence), and there are so many scenes and chapters that will leave you with goosebumps. There are scenes that will make you laugh, scenes that will terrify you. It's a bit of a trek, for sure, but the journey is well worth it.
March 10, 2020
Could not continue reading it after about 1/4 of the way in. The "lyrical" way in which the author wrote seemed less like descriptive beauty and closer to how a college student flagellates an essay with nonsense fill-in words to get their word count up when it is too low.
A bunch of sex, violence, flowery wording, and a bow made from a human body. Nah. Not for me.
A bunch of sex, violence, flowery wording, and a bow made from a human body. Nah. Not for me.
June 7, 2019
Boring and painfully transparent, Catlings jerk off material is occasionally interrupted by either his nasty opinions on women, his ideal of savage masculinity, or his appallingly racist sentiments. If this is a landmark in the science fiction genre, then I think that readers need to take a very long hard look at themselves and feel ashamed.
June 18, 2016
Ummm. That was a trip. Maybe not a good trip, but not a boring one.
December 29, 2014
Feb 2014
The Vorrh is an unusual and remarkable historical fantasy though perhaps it’s coming to it after reading a lot of classics that makes it not quite as mindblowing as some reviews say. The vast cast of characters with interlocking stories, some of whom don't meet in person, tallies with current trends in literary fiction. The glorious surfeit of adjectives and adverbs recalls the too-richness of decadent literature but (and I speak as someone who’s too fond of those myself) the clause rhythms occasionally become samey and Catling could perhaps have varied this a bit more with metaphors and other means of description. Still, there are gems of that ilk: Outside, the swallows were changing to bats, to measure the space of the sky with sound instead of sight. Damned interesting way to say “night was falling”.
Decadence, Surrealism (the title, the name of a vast African forest, comes from Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa and Roussel is himself a character) and late-Victorian / early twentieth century imperialism in its sinister authority and boys’ own colonial adventures form the background. There is a kind of steampunk/dieselpunk here, but it’s unusual, skewed, not the stuff of cliche: animate, liquid-filled Bakelite androids for instance. There is sex and gore and body-horror. The romance of intrepid adventure and transgressive love. And the profundity of people’s struggles with damaged bodies and brains. (Including the notorious photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge who wrestles and succeeds with some aspects of self-control following brain injury but can no longer be entirely master of himself and his now–angry temperament.) Fantasy motifs are here including a legendary bow and magical healing, but tropes are rarely created and progressed in the expected ways. This is not only a weird alternative history but an alternative and novel way of doing fantasy, both beautiful and nightmarish.
Sometimes episodes in the fictitious African colony of Essenwald feel too European; they are set among colonial settlers, but more mentions of climate and of animals we know of as sub-Saharan African, besides the strange mythical beings, would create a stronger sense of geographic place. It's a play on colonials' determination to remain European, but I wonder if the presentation makes it too easy for the reader to lose sight of the location and therefore the author's point. It's also possible that not having read Roussel, I'm not appreciating the tribute aspect in the writing.
Character roles are fairly true to those of class, gender and race for the time and those who have strong views on the subject should note that The Vorrh is often – though not exclusively - a story of the colonisers more than of the colonised. (Coming from the literary fiction perspective, this is so unusual in an ambitious newly published book as to have come round to being a novelty. I can't comment on serious contemporary fantasy as I usually stick to the humourous stuff which tends to have a lot of time for the underdog.) The close-third person narrative is taken on by many characters in turn but some readers will find it notably unfortunate that the inner thoughts of a black woman only take up one and a half pages in the whole novel - whilst a black man and two upper-class white women have voices as strong in the narrative as various white men. There is certainly critique of colonialism here, though plotted in the form of stylised, surrealist repetition and occasional subversion, rather than the currently-usual realist rewriting from the perspective of the colonised. (I can see both sides on this sort of thing and would like to be able to write in such a way that's giving the right information to those who care, and also acknowledges those who are tired of hearing about it and don't think art should have to follow narrowly prescriptive rules - but that's probably impossible.)
The Vorrh is only the first in a projected trilogy; there were times, especially around pp.3-400, when I wasn’t sure I would want to do this again but towards the end there was obviously so much still to happen that I became eager to know what would happen next and how some characters and the author's approach to the subject would develop.
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August 2013, was up to c. p.200
Beautiful language and description. Sometimes I parse reflexively and note that there are too many adjectives - but they work regardless. So rich and luscious and decadent. (I overuse adjectives too.) Its fin de siecle decadence is gorgeous though sometimes I forget the story is in Africa because the style is one that automatically makes me imagine a European setting. (Not least because I first started The Vorrh after reading a modern African novel...And the European style itself could arguably indicate something about the colonial era it's all set in.)
Eventually I realised why I'd got so irked by a few criticisms of the book. There's the usual thing where I simply read plenty of interesting characters as people first and genders some way down the list. (It annoys me when people who may see that as the ideal to reach, try and impose petty representation politics which actually impedes a relatively ungendered view.)
And I see a negative judgement of the idea that a character had sex with another character, when they do have a life other than as a blow-up doll, to be essentially puritanical rather than right-on.
(These politics of representation I see a lot of on Goodreads, usually from Americans, take things too much the other way and impose their own hegemony, arguing for a type of politically approved cliche in which certain categories of characters must behave in prescribed ways.)
And most of all in The Vorrh, about the Bowman and Este. The second scene of the book was electric and one of the most moving things I've read in a long long time. (And that thought I can see alientaing a few people already.) The scene provided an illustration of love of such depth and viscerality that it's almost useless in modern sensible existence, something I only ever found it possible to put vague form to, always unspoken, using metaphors from ancient world religions or ideas of Frida Kahlo-esque pictures I had not the skill to make. But these did not contain anything like the connection and reciprocity found here. The mutual wanting-to is almost everything that matters in that scene... they are each other's religion and neither is dictating. As I read it they were simply people who were connected that way and I imagined either being either sex, or some other again, race etc irrelevant, for it went way beyond anything of that sort.
Back down to earth as it were, this is a book which I have put off finishing a few times because I think it would seem a waste for me to read it when I'm not feeling somewhere near-ish to my best. Yet it's also (especially after reading Heart of Darkness as background) enthralling.
I find myself concerned on the book's behalf that it doesn't take the political stuff seriously enough to rank alongside classics, but perhaps that's because it's a long time since I've read much fantasy. (It doesn't toe the convnetional party line on a few of matters, and that's my theory as to why it didn't make the Booker longlist. Presuming it was submitted that is - being with a small publisher it would have been their best candidate, not having dozens of rivals as would, say, a novel published by Jonathan Cape. From what I've read of it so far, this year;s Booker list is really rather PC, perhaps forgetting that real diversity also includes something that doesn't follow all the rules to the letter. Though I too would have balked at pushing forward a book - Christopher Priest's The Adjacent, a more frequently mentioned SFF candidate - which contains a futuristic totalitarian Islamic Republic of Great Britain.) I do nitpick at a lot of books but The Vorrh is one which I'd love to see more people appreciating without nitpicking because it is (so far) incredible enough to transcend that. (Incidentally, as Raymond Roussel was no more than a name to me, I had needed a recommendation to see beyond the title. Vogon poetry and vore were the ideas it brought to mind, neither exactly appetising.)
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January 2014, after reading various blogs and papers about critical race theory
Whilst I've now read quite a lot more relevant material, I still find that discussions don't have room for people who disagree including when they are from its own group or from a mixed background. There is a lot of discussion of negative stereotypes which are simply unfamiliar to me in the first place, some because they are more characteristic of American media. (Which I would rather not have known of at all in case they affect how I see anyone.) Also I think I've missed out on the stereotyping of Africa in adult literature because, having always had an attraction to stories about colder places, I have read very little about it in fiction since children's classics. My ideas about African countries come largely from news, documentaries, politics courses and so on, mentioning individual country names and characteristics and is largely factually-based, possibly with an overemphasis on poverty and people wearing second-hand western clothes, rather than the sort of thing some people complain of regarding this book, which for me is very different and unfamiliar.
At the same time I can't deny The Vorrh contains elements of this. I guess that what I argue for is less monolithic criticism from and of either side in these nebulous contemporary representation issues as regards single art works, whilst being decent to the people I meet in real life, and against institutionalised racism. (I just don't think fictional people should be taken as particularly relevant to the people you meet in real life - I was a kid who grew up thinking they were and fiction gave me no bloody idea of how to be or how anyone else would be once I left home. The types of people you find in books are often unlike those you meet at work and so forth, even when they are not specifically SFF.)
Yet here, the opening scene could be interpreted as a metaphor critical of colonialism. It's not that simple.
The Vorrh is an unusual and remarkable historical fantasy though perhaps it’s coming to it after reading a lot of classics that makes it not quite as mindblowing as some reviews say. The vast cast of characters with interlocking stories, some of whom don't meet in person, tallies with current trends in literary fiction. The glorious surfeit of adjectives and adverbs recalls the too-richness of decadent literature but (and I speak as someone who’s too fond of those myself) the clause rhythms occasionally become samey and Catling could perhaps have varied this a bit more with metaphors and other means of description. Still, there are gems of that ilk: Outside, the swallows were changing to bats, to measure the space of the sky with sound instead of sight. Damned interesting way to say “night was falling”.
Decadence, Surrealism (the title, the name of a vast African forest, comes from Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa and Roussel is himself a character) and late-Victorian / early twentieth century imperialism in its sinister authority and boys’ own colonial adventures form the background. There is a kind of steampunk/dieselpunk here, but it’s unusual, skewed, not the stuff of cliche: animate, liquid-filled Bakelite androids for instance. There is sex and gore and body-horror. The romance of intrepid adventure and transgressive love. And the profundity of people’s struggles with damaged bodies and brains. (Including the notorious photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge who wrestles and succeeds with some aspects of self-control following brain injury but can no longer be entirely master of himself and his now–angry temperament.) Fantasy motifs are here including a legendary bow and magical healing, but tropes are rarely created and progressed in the expected ways. This is not only a weird alternative history but an alternative and novel way of doing fantasy, both beautiful and nightmarish.
Sometimes episodes in the fictitious African colony of Essenwald feel too European; they are set among colonial settlers, but more mentions of climate and of animals we know of as sub-Saharan African, besides the strange mythical beings, would create a stronger sense of geographic place. It's a play on colonials' determination to remain European, but I wonder if the presentation makes it too easy for the reader to lose sight of the location and therefore the author's point. It's also possible that not having read Roussel, I'm not appreciating the tribute aspect in the writing.
Character roles are fairly true to those of class, gender and race for the time and those who have strong views on the subject should note that The Vorrh is often – though not exclusively - a story of the colonisers more than of the colonised. (Coming from the literary fiction perspective, this is so unusual in an ambitious newly published book as to have come round to being a novelty. I can't comment on serious contemporary fantasy as I usually stick to the humourous stuff which tends to have a lot of time for the underdog.) The close-third person narrative is taken on by many characters in turn but some readers will find it notably unfortunate that the inner thoughts of a black woman only take up one and a half pages in the whole novel - whilst a black man and two upper-class white women have voices as strong in the narrative as various white men. There is certainly critique of colonialism here, though plotted in the form of stylised, surrealist repetition and occasional subversion, rather than the currently-usual realist rewriting from the perspective of the colonised. (I can see both sides on this sort of thing and would like to be able to write in such a way that's giving the right information to those who care, and also acknowledges those who are tired of hearing about it and don't think art should have to follow narrowly prescriptive rules - but that's probably impossible.)
The Vorrh is only the first in a projected trilogy; there were times, especially around pp.3-400, when I wasn’t sure I would want to do this again but towards the end there was obviously so much still to happen that I became eager to know what would happen next and how some characters and the author's approach to the subject would develop.
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August 2013, was up to c. p.200
Beautiful language and description. Sometimes I parse reflexively and note that there are too many adjectives - but they work regardless. So rich and luscious and decadent. (I overuse adjectives too.) Its fin de siecle decadence is gorgeous though sometimes I forget the story is in Africa because the style is one that automatically makes me imagine a European setting. (Not least because I first started The Vorrh after reading a modern African novel...And the European style itself could arguably indicate something about the colonial era it's all set in.)
Eventually I realised why I'd got so irked by a few criticisms of the book. There's the usual thing where I simply read plenty of interesting characters as people first and genders some way down the list. (It annoys me when people who may see that as the ideal to reach, try and impose petty representation politics which actually impedes a relatively ungendered view.)
And I see a negative judgement of the idea that a character had sex with another character, when they do have a life other than as a blow-up doll, to be essentially puritanical rather than right-on.
(These politics of representation I see a lot of on Goodreads, usually from Americans, take things too much the other way and impose their own hegemony, arguing for a type of politically approved cliche in which certain categories of characters must behave in prescribed ways.)
And most of all in The Vorrh, about the Bowman and Este. The second scene of the book was electric and one of the most moving things I've read in a long long time. (And that thought I can see alientaing a few people already.) The scene provided an illustration of love of such depth and viscerality that it's almost useless in modern sensible existence, something I only ever found it possible to put vague form to, always unspoken, using metaphors from ancient world religions or ideas of Frida Kahlo-esque pictures I had not the skill to make. But these did not contain anything like the connection and reciprocity found here. The mutual wanting-to is almost everything that matters in that scene... they are each other's religion and neither is dictating. As I read it they were simply people who were connected that way and I imagined either being either sex, or some other again, race etc irrelevant, for it went way beyond anything of that sort.
Back down to earth as it were, this is a book which I have put off finishing a few times because I think it would seem a waste for me to read it when I'm not feeling somewhere near-ish to my best. Yet it's also (especially after reading Heart of Darkness as background) enthralling.
I find myself concerned on the book's behalf that it doesn't take the political stuff seriously enough to rank alongside classics, but perhaps that's because it's a long time since I've read much fantasy. (It doesn't toe the convnetional party line on a few of matters, and that's my theory as to why it didn't make the Booker longlist. Presuming it was submitted that is - being with a small publisher it would have been their best candidate, not having dozens of rivals as would, say, a novel published by Jonathan Cape. From what I've read of it so far, this year;s Booker list is really rather PC, perhaps forgetting that real diversity also includes something that doesn't follow all the rules to the letter. Though I too would have balked at pushing forward a book - Christopher Priest's The Adjacent, a more frequently mentioned SFF candidate - which contains a futuristic totalitarian Islamic Republic of Great Britain.) I do nitpick at a lot of books but The Vorrh is one which I'd love to see more people appreciating without nitpicking because it is (so far) incredible enough to transcend that. (Incidentally, as Raymond Roussel was no more than a name to me, I had needed a recommendation to see beyond the title. Vogon poetry and vore were the ideas it brought to mind, neither exactly appetising.)
------
January 2014, after reading various blogs and papers about critical race theory
Whilst I've now read quite a lot more relevant material, I still find that discussions don't have room for people who disagree including when they are from its own group or from a mixed background. There is a lot of discussion of negative stereotypes which are simply unfamiliar to me in the first place, some because they are more characteristic of American media. (Which I would rather not have known of at all in case they affect how I see anyone.) Also I think I've missed out on the stereotyping of Africa in adult literature because, having always had an attraction to stories about colder places, I have read very little about it in fiction since children's classics. My ideas about African countries come largely from news, documentaries, politics courses and so on, mentioning individual country names and characteristics and is largely factually-based, possibly with an overemphasis on poverty and people wearing second-hand western clothes, rather than the sort of thing some people complain of regarding this book, which for me is very different and unfamiliar.
At the same time I can't deny The Vorrh contains elements of this. I guess that what I argue for is less monolithic criticism from and of either side in these nebulous contemporary representation issues as regards single art works, whilst being decent to the people I meet in real life, and against institutionalised racism. (I just don't think fictional people should be taken as particularly relevant to the people you meet in real life - I was a kid who grew up thinking they were and fiction gave me no bloody idea of how to be or how anyone else would be once I left home. The types of people you find in books are often unlike those you meet at work and so forth, even when they are not specifically SFF.)
Yet here, the opening scene could be interpreted as a metaphor critical of colonialism. It's not that simple.
March 22, 2021
This was a truly horrendous book! It's been a long time since I've read something this bad. I know this is supposed to be fantasy but I prefer a story to make sense. And the problem is that most of the plot really didn't make sense to me. At all. I tried to understand it and follow with the various characters (and there are many too, each involved in different things) but it just didn't add up! I sort of feel maybe it's supposed to be some kind of ... Experimental story or something that has a different kind of plot? Sort of like you are in a dream or something?? I don't know. I just don't like it! I know what each character was doing (but I always didn't understand why or about the big picture) but it didn't make sense. Like one person was hunting another, but why...yes I know they were told to, but why?? And why was the first person doing what they were told to do by a dying person? I just feel these things weren't really explained so I could understand it. And I like things to make sense.
Another thing I really hated is how the story moves. This is S-L-O-W. The back says it's about going into a weird, mysterious forest! I read that and thought "Cool! An adventure story!" ... But that's not what this is at all. There's no adventure in here. The characters don't even reach the forest until page 186! The majority of the pages before that is about all sorts of other random stuff. And some of it is very, very bizarre. Way out there.
And so I thought...ok, now they're in the woods so something will happen. Nope! I was wrong! I kept waiting for the adventure to start but nothing ever really materialized. So it was a huge disappointment..and a big waste of time too. The book just hints that something is going to happen but it never really develops. No suspense, no actual danger, no thrills. You get the idea. Unless you think a character getting turned around in the forest for a few pages is exciting?? I don't.
And trust me, there is some very disturbing stuff in this book! You have been warned.
And the end only left me even more confused. Nothing adds up at all. I really don't understand the point of this. Or what the image on the cover is supposed to be? I think it looks like phases of the moon?
I'll be glad to dump this one back off at the library!
Another thing I really hated is how the story moves. This is S-L-O-W. The back says it's about going into a weird, mysterious forest! I read that and thought "Cool! An adventure story!" ... But that's not what this is at all. There's no adventure in here. The characters don't even reach the forest until page 186! The majority of the pages before that is about all sorts of other random stuff. And some of it is very, very bizarre. Way out there.
And so I thought...ok, now they're in the woods so something will happen. Nope! I was wrong! I kept waiting for the adventure to start but nothing ever really materialized. So it was a huge disappointment..and a big waste of time too. The book just hints that something is going to happen but it never really develops. No suspense, no actual danger, no thrills. You get the idea. Unless you think a character getting turned around in the forest for a few pages is exciting?? I don't.
And trust me, there is some very disturbing stuff in this book! You have been warned.
And the end only left me even more confused. Nothing adds up at all. I really don't understand the point of this. Or what the image on the cover is supposed to be? I think it looks like phases of the moon?
I'll be glad to dump this one back off at the library!
Read
January 28, 2013A weird and astonishing fantasy of Africa. The strange and sprawling cast of protagonists includes a native policeman drawn back into the service of the colonial authorities against whom he once led a bloody revolt, a bowman whose bow's name we know before we know his, a cyclops raised by bakelite robots - and those are just the fictional figures. Mixing with them on equal terms are the historically verified, such as proto-surrealist Raymond Roussel (from whose Impressions of Africa the Vorrh's name comes), and photographer and prick Eadweard Muybridge. The links between their stories are initially unclear, and sometimes remain so, but all revolve around the vast forest of the Vorrh, a presence which can bleach men's (or even angels') minds, and distort not only weather patterns, but time. And on the edge, for reasons briefly explained but which ultimately share the necessity of dream-logic, stands one middle-European city, with its burghers and carnivals.
Alan Moore's introduction sites The Vorrh combatively against the fantasy mainstream and yes, it's a long way from the generic pseudo-mediaeval post-Tolkien sagas. But it's not quite as anomalous as all that. The use of a lush metropolis as the focus for a fantasy addressing colonialism reminded me of KJ Bishop's Etched City, and the overwhelming power of the forest recalled Robert Holdstock's early Mythago books, before he fell into formula. And Moore must be aware of the latter at least, because he referenced them alongside this (at the time unpublished) in the conclusion of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century. Conversely, I didn't think the comparison to David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus which Moore makes really holds water - both books are outlandish, brutal, oddly dreamlike, but Catling comes across throughout as a visionary artist, whereas at times Lindsay reads more like a nutter typing out his magnum opus in the library and reading it aloud as he does so.
Regardless of its peers and antecedents, though, I agree with Moore on this much: The Vorrh is a truly remarkable book, and one which shows that it is still possible after all this time to write a truly original novel. We need more like it, by which I of course mean, totally unlike it.
Alan Moore's introduction sites The Vorrh combatively against the fantasy mainstream and yes, it's a long way from the generic pseudo-mediaeval post-Tolkien sagas. But it's not quite as anomalous as all that. The use of a lush metropolis as the focus for a fantasy addressing colonialism reminded me of KJ Bishop's Etched City, and the overwhelming power of the forest recalled Robert Holdstock's early Mythago books, before he fell into formula. And Moore must be aware of the latter at least, because he referenced them alongside this (at the time unpublished) in the conclusion of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century. Conversely, I didn't think the comparison to David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus which Moore makes really holds water - both books are outlandish, brutal, oddly dreamlike, but Catling comes across throughout as a visionary artist, whereas at times Lindsay reads more like a nutter typing out his magnum opus in the library and reading it aloud as he does so.
Regardless of its peers and antecedents, though, I agree with Moore on this much: The Vorrh is a truly remarkable book, and one which shows that it is still possible after all this time to write a truly original novel. We need more like it, by which I of course mean, totally unlike it.
February 3, 2013
Every so often, a book comes along that defies genre. 'No Country for Old Men' is more than a thriller or a western. 'The Big Sleep' is more than a crime novel. And what exactly is 'The Catcher in the Rye'? Brian Catling's masterful 'The Vorrh' is another such book. This is not just another Fantasy. There are remnants of the Western in there, Adventure, Crime, Romance. And still, it transcends these genres as well. It is simply 'The Vorrh' and is a much better book because of that.
Of course, due to the supernatural themes and the slight eccentricities of some of the characters, it will inevitably go down as a Fantasy novel. This isn't entirely wrong, nor is it a black mark against the book, indeed, it's a genre that hold some weight. 'The Vorrh' is, however, a new breed of Fantasy. Catling creates a world of wonder and imbues it with Cormac McCarthy-esque violence and a tension that is entirely it's own. Again, it is simply 'The Vorrh'.
I enjoyed the book greatly, from the richness of the language to the idiosyncrasies of the alternate world that had been created. There were times I feared that there were a few too many characters, but, as I read on, I realised just how necessary they all were. There were a few characters I would have liked to have seen slightly more of, but, again I soon realised, that that would have ruined the mystery surrounding them.
Put simply, 'The Vorrh' is a book that is hard to define owing mainly to its stark originality. If you're looking for a book where the language is rich and the storytelling is masterful, look no further. And, in this world where there are a few too many shades of grey, who isn't looking for that?
Of course, due to the supernatural themes and the slight eccentricities of some of the characters, it will inevitably go down as a Fantasy novel. This isn't entirely wrong, nor is it a black mark against the book, indeed, it's a genre that hold some weight. 'The Vorrh' is, however, a new breed of Fantasy. Catling creates a world of wonder and imbues it with Cormac McCarthy-esque violence and a tension that is entirely it's own. Again, it is simply 'The Vorrh'.
I enjoyed the book greatly, from the richness of the language to the idiosyncrasies of the alternate world that had been created. There were times I feared that there were a few too many characters, but, as I read on, I realised just how necessary they all were. There were a few characters I would have liked to have seen slightly more of, but, again I soon realised, that that would have ruined the mystery surrounding them.
Put simply, 'The Vorrh' is a book that is hard to define owing mainly to its stark originality. If you're looking for a book where the language is rich and the storytelling is masterful, look no further. And, in this world where there are a few too many shades of grey, who isn't looking for that?
September 18, 2019
Bewildering, bizarre, byzantine in language, like someone reciting a Norse legend with gods and monsters in it but then blended with some belle epoque colonialism.
“Complexity has cripled me before, and the healing from it took too many years.” - The Bowman
“His voice stopped mosquitoes and caused the room to listen.” - Tsungali
“He was the most ridicilous of travellers, brilliantly prepared for all events, so long as they never happened.” - The Frenchman
The Vorrh reminds me of The Dark Tower by Stephen King, the epicness mixed with something you’d not expect (with King this is Western meets SciFi dystopia, here its a kind of The Lord of the Rings in colonial era). Also a fascination with guns in all sorts and gore is shared between the two fantasy saga’s. The graphic depictions and scenes, with a few pages narrating what dogs dreams of when fucking, were sometimes a bit much in my view, but effective in worldbuilding and setting the scene. Some other fantasy golden oldies also crossed my mind when reading: Ishmael traveling through the Vorrh made me think of the The Hobbit or There and Back Again and Mirkwood while Tsungali acted as a kind of Gollum to his master at two thirds of the book and Nebsuel was a kind of Elrond with his offering of a place to stay.
The Vorrh feels sometimes a bit bombastic with lots of adjectives and rather one dimensional characters, blessed with either occupational names like the Bowman and the Frenchman or names as Ghertrude when German and Charlotte when French. Some were better crafted than others, the Muybridge storyline for instance didn’t really hold my attention, I couldn’t retell his story well, even after just having read about him. Regardless, Catling his writing is rich, precise and packed with words I never read before, even when his characterisation is sometimes not so strong.
The atmosphere and world of the Vorrh are mesmerising, with women clawing out their uterus with their hands, a wood protecting itself by deleting memories of those who cross to far into it, a cyclops raised by bakelite robots, asylums with experiments, miracelous healings of the blind, aborted children turning to live, seances in creepy, sprawling mansions; its a Lovecraftian mix of short scenes which have only a very loose connection with each other at first glance, but the world sucked me in. Also the Erstwhile, a kind of angels, being out of sync with reality, their images appearing an hour later than their presence to the other senses, was fascinating as a concept, making me eager to read the next book in the trilogy.
“Complexity has cripled me before, and the healing from it took too many years.” - The Bowman
“His voice stopped mosquitoes and caused the room to listen.” - Tsungali
“He was the most ridicilous of travellers, brilliantly prepared for all events, so long as they never happened.” - The Frenchman
The Vorrh reminds me of The Dark Tower by Stephen King, the epicness mixed with something you’d not expect (with King this is Western meets SciFi dystopia, here its a kind of The Lord of the Rings in colonial era). Also a fascination with guns in all sorts and gore is shared between the two fantasy saga’s. The graphic depictions and scenes, with a few pages narrating what dogs dreams of when fucking, were sometimes a bit much in my view, but effective in worldbuilding and setting the scene. Some other fantasy golden oldies also crossed my mind when reading: Ishmael traveling through the Vorrh made me think of the The Hobbit or There and Back Again and Mirkwood while Tsungali acted as a kind of Gollum to his master at two thirds of the book and Nebsuel was a kind of Elrond with his offering of a place to stay.
The Vorrh feels sometimes a bit bombastic with lots of adjectives and rather one dimensional characters, blessed with either occupational names like the Bowman and the Frenchman or names as Ghertrude when German and Charlotte when French. Some were better crafted than others, the Muybridge storyline for instance didn’t really hold my attention, I couldn’t retell his story well, even after just having read about him. Regardless, Catling his writing is rich, precise and packed with words I never read before, even when his characterisation is sometimes not so strong.
The atmosphere and world of the Vorrh are mesmerising, with women clawing out their uterus with their hands, a wood protecting itself by deleting memories of those who cross to far into it, a cyclops raised by bakelite robots, asylums with experiments, miracelous healings of the blind, aborted children turning to live, seances in creepy, sprawling mansions; its a Lovecraftian mix of short scenes which have only a very loose connection with each other at first glance, but the world sucked me in. Also the Erstwhile, a kind of angels, being out of sync with reality, their images appearing an hour later than their presence to the other senses, was fascinating as a concept, making me eager to read the next book in the trilogy.
July 13, 2015
I received this book through Goodreads First Reads.
I'm not totally sure how to review this book. Brian Catling is an extremely talented author; his words in this novel are completely poetic. And that's the main problem here, unfortunately. At 500 pages, this wholly original Fantasy book is very dense. The style of the prose combined with the subject matter just did not lend itself to grasping my full attention. It doesn't help that the ending could've been 40 pages shorter, and that the inclusion of Edward Muybridge as a character was only ever tangentially related to the story--and that only by a loose, loose thread.
The story is in fact a fresh take on the fantasy genre. I can certainly say that. But it's Lord of The Rings as seen through Heart of Darkness if James Joyce had decided that Conrad's classic needed to be harder to read. The idea of how different characters are all affected by The Vorrh, a strange, huge forest (known to be the home of Adam of Garden of Eden Fame) which feeds off of memories---well, it's a cool idea. But that's really as far as the plot goes. The rest is sort of convoluted, as the characters are difficult to relate to, and they don't have much reason for their actions.
It's possible that the book just isn't for me, not the style that I enjoy, not something that I was willing to focus on, not something that held my interest. Either way, I did finish it, so at least there's that.
I'm not totally sure how to review this book. Brian Catling is an extremely talented author; his words in this novel are completely poetic. And that's the main problem here, unfortunately. At 500 pages, this wholly original Fantasy book is very dense. The style of the prose combined with the subject matter just did not lend itself to grasping my full attention. It doesn't help that the ending could've been 40 pages shorter, and that the inclusion of Edward Muybridge as a character was only ever tangentially related to the story--and that only by a loose, loose thread.
The story is in fact a fresh take on the fantasy genre. I can certainly say that. But it's Lord of The Rings as seen through Heart of Darkness if James Joyce had decided that Conrad's classic needed to be harder to read. The idea of how different characters are all affected by The Vorrh, a strange, huge forest (known to be the home of Adam of Garden of Eden Fame) which feeds off of memories---well, it's a cool idea. But that's really as far as the plot goes. The rest is sort of convoluted, as the characters are difficult to relate to, and they don't have much reason for their actions.
It's possible that the book just isn't for me, not the style that I enjoy, not something that I was willing to focus on, not something that held my interest. Either way, I did finish it, so at least there's that.
July 5, 2015
Nope, Done with THAT. Graphic description of prepubescent boy fucking a robot with a specially designed vagina to teach him about sex on page 46.
Nuff Said
Nuff Said
January 22, 2018
Really, really cool.
The setting here is “the great brooding forest […] older than humankind” (9), an expanse somewhere in Africa, near the site of where the “Possession Wars began when the True People […] rebelled against the British occupiers” (14). Setting mythology is that “nobody had ever reached the centre of the Vorrh,” “the mother of forests; ancient beyond language, older than every known species” (34). Some indication that the Tetragrammaton “gave Adam a corner of his clearing, so that he may dwell in it […] It is his garden on earth. Paradise” (56). NB: “But nothing ever changed in the Vorrh” (121).
The text intervenes when the “scars left by the gutting rope of the Great War were still fresh”: “The rotting trenches had carved gangrene into the heart of the old countries” (17). Dude had “witnessed spectral visions floating over the smeared remains of men and mules. Angels of the Somme […] it had helped him survive and erase the impossible reality” (id.). Veteran’s relocation to the Vorrh in colonial service “reassured him,” “the ecstasy of opposites or the certainty that what he had witnessed could never happen here” (id.) (Hegel, yes?). He notes that “the sublimation [!!!] of the True People had led to the survival of their race and the obliteration of their meaning” (18), a standard mechanism of the procession of the dialectic, wherein “European countries had forcibly assisted their evolution” (id). The Hegelian interest will be borne out multiple times, such as with “memory in a twined conflict of disbelief and certainty” (356).
One of the protagonists (the only first person narrator) begins his recitation with descriptions of how he built his lover into a bow:
We said goodbye during the days leading to her night […] I stood before our wooden table, where her body lay divided and stripped into materials and language. My back and hands ached from the labour of splitting her apart. (9)That is,
I shaved long, flat strips from the bones of her legs. Plaiting sinew and tendon, I stretched muscle into interwoven pages and bound them with flax. I made the bow of these, setting the fibres and grains of her tissue in opposition, the raw arc congealing, twisting, and shrinking into its proportion of purpose. (10)As it happens, it is something like the Bow of Heracles, invariably accurate and lethal (recall Sophocles’ Philoctetes). What’s awesome is that this mystical bow will be paired with one of the coolest firearms in history, the Gabbett-Fairfax Mars, which “could stop a horse,” “sounded like the end of the world,” “its recoil could break the shooter’s wrist” (19).
Aside the forest itself is Essenwald, “a European city, imported piece by piece to the Dark Continent and reassembled in a vast clearing made in the perimeter of the forest,” “built over a century and a half, the core of its imitation now so old that it had become genuine” (33). It is “a facsimile of Europe nailed to the core of Africa” (120).
Forest fucks up persons who labor therein:
slaves had changed before the eyes of their owners. They had transformed into other beings, beings devoid of purpose, identity, or meaning. In the beginning, it was thought their malaise was the product of their imprisonment, but it soon became clear there was no personality left to feel or suffer such subtleties of emotion. The forest itself had devoured their memory and resurrected them as addicts. (35)They are capital’s preferred version of labor: “Core workers,” “they no longer had homes or families, but only work and sleep” (186), as “some part of them has been erased” (187); “in this strangest of places, the natural laws of the world, which were known and trusted, came unbound and bent” (191).
Other major protagonist is a kid who’s born into a vacant house in Essenwald and raised by robots: “The day that [female robot] showed how his body could extend into her and produce nectar was overwhelming” (44);
She coiled down closer to him. Her hard, gleaming hand stroked his thigh. The firmness of her shell drew an erection. “I will show that I have been fashioned like your kind to explain these marvels to you. These lessons of humans have been clearly taught to me alone, for you. She showed him a latch in the crease between her legs, normally hidden by its underside position. She asked him to move it and, with chattering fingers, he felt the mechanism of this secret thing. (45)So, yeah, that’s robot sex. When dude meets his first human person, “her face provoked horror, and he drily retched at her deformity: She had two eyes” (77)—i.e., dude is a cyclops.
This horror doesn’t stop the two of them from screwing each other’s brains out:
His purple cock was enormous, its spiraled barrel twisting and telescoping back and forth with his heavily beating heart. His eye continued to drip tears, now onto her legs as he braced her across the table. […] Their bodies united in the silent light, and deep inside she gave up […] In the long time of silence before he withdrew, a ruthless, automatic kindness unfolded in him, its weight matching the shock of excitement that laughed secretly in [her]. The rawness of both expressions bound them together in a shame that was sublime in the depth of its contradiction [!]. (132)Text’s crowning moment of awesome, which is probably the peripeteia of sorts (or perhaps the anagnorisis?), and which made me fall in love:
”What kind of thing are you?” barked a voice that was out of sight. “Don’t look around; lie still or you will bleed to death. Now, answer my question, or I will destroy you like I destroyed your little brothers.”There it is. Fuck off, binocular racists.
“They are no brothers of mine,” said Ishmael through clenched teeth.
“Then what are you?” said the booming voice, the Gabbett-Fairfax Mars pointing at Ishmael’s spine from behind an old oak tree.
“I am a man with one eye.” (361)
Text is bizarre insofar as historical personages Ray Roussel (whose goal is to “traverse the entire forest” (55)) and Ed Muybridge (a “hollow man” (63) “hunting stillness […] he carried an empty box on his back, a box with a single eye [!], which ate time” (71)) are running around, kinda tangential to the main narrative involving archer and cyclops, which kinda are not directly related, but rather revolve around the same star.
Great quasi-villain who is contemplated as “they had never come across an apparition like this before, never stood in the presence of indomitable wrongness” (105); Wrongness is paradoxically armed with “the blade’s shining words: truth” (106). Wrongness claims “jurisdiction” over the forest (107), and is otherwise characterized as demonic (e.g., 108).
Some gorgeous observations: “motes of dust swimming expressively in their beams, giving the simultaneous impressions of animation and stillness” (139); after screwing cyclops, one character’s blindness is miraculously cured, “only her dreams remained slow and auditory” (175)—which is a bizarre thing that becomes a foucaultian plague, subject to Coke’s writ de heretico comburendo, weirdly; baudrillardian semiurgical overload in “a continuous torrent of irrelevant detail” wherein “the profundity and articulation of her previous world was being frittered away, erased by an endless low tide of brightness and an infinite shingle of pictures” (255).
One great bit involves the mystical preservation of dead infants against putrefaction: “One couple never conceived again and secretly enjoyed the fictional infancy of their little corpse all their life” (217), which is a tidy hyperreality—fictive infancy more real than the real. Master figure of the text is probably “occupation,” such as:
“There are different Bibles, with different tales,” said [a guy]. “In these regions, the truth is told. Adam was never completely forgiven; his sons and daughter left this place and occupied the world. He waited for God, waited for forgiveness and for his rib to grow back. But he became tired of waiting and walked back into the forest. The angels that protected the tree let him pass because there was nothing else for him to do in that sacred place. But in his absence, God forgot him, and so he had remained. (247-48)It only descends from that height down to the colonialist bullshit, supra, iterating many times. (The Adam/Eden stuff is otherwise kickass.)
Overall, very high quality, many moving parts, contains moments of profound beauty. Many conceptually interesting bits (Derridean ‘traces’ inclusive of a radical decentering of the Vorrh at one point, foucaultian dissymmetries of vision, something weird with ‘dislocation,’ lotsa stuff about forced servitude in the limboia, the appearance of anthropophagi/blemmyes as indigenous anti-imperialists, and so on). It’s sufficiently severe through the first two thirds that when the orgasm machine shows up (295 ff.), I can take it seriously.
Recommended for those wandering into the deserts and high mountains without a whiff of Christ or Satan as companions, readers eager to put the man tube inside the cleft for pleasure and practice, and persons who have everything in abundance and for whom there is always a gap, a hollow that will never be filled.
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September 7, 2021Ako me prvih tridesetak strana ovoliko iritira, možda ipak da odložimo druženje za neku dalju budućnost :/
February 7, 2017
I came across ‘The Vorrh’ while browsing in a bookshop and was intrigued by the prospect of a vast sentient forest, as well as impressed by praise from Alan Moore, Jeff Vandermeer, and Phillip Pullman on the back cover. (Then I reserved it at the library, of course. I never buy new books, they’re so expensive.) I was eager to read it and did so within 24 hours on two long train journeys. The puff quotes make comparisons to Decadent literature, Michael Moorcock, and Mervyn Peake, none of which I can really agree with. Moorcock maybe, but I’ve read very little of his work so can’t really say. Peake, one of my all time favourite authors, is definitely not a suitable comparator. What I hoped for from ‘The Vorrh’ was a Gormenghastian story, in which a place was the main character and dominant force within the narrative. The title and length of ‘The Vorrh’ seemed to promise long descriptions, yet this forest felt flimsy and elusive. There were none of the dense, atmospheric descriptive passages that I wished for. I was instead reminded somewhat of Lanark by Alisdair Gray, which has similar non-linearity and confusing profusion of characters and points of view. Both novels twist it all together in the end although only limited sense can be wrung from events. I think Lanark is better written, though, as it contains much more memorable imagery. Perhaps because I was hoping for a lush, vivid, unsettling forest environment, I was disappointed by the limited visual presence of the Vorrh in its own book. Usually it’s just a dark smudge in the background, no more frightening and distinctive than distant stormclouds.
The horror of the place is instead depicted through its effect on people, which is certainly done effectively. There is a lot of impressively revolting body horror. The forest acts as a catalyst and setting for collisions between characters and significantly influences their lives. Once I had some sense of what was a flashback and what was happening in plot-time, I found it an engaging magical realist historical novel. There is some vague treatment of colonialism and a fair bit of mysticism, mingled with surreal and inexplicable details like bakelite robots. Also some very strange sex. I’m not really sure what it all adds up to, though. The narratives of the characters end abruptly and the book neither begins nor ends in the Vorrh itself. Did the sentient forest send those letters? Does it speak? Will we find out in the sequel?
After finishing, I went back to read Alan Moore’s introduction, which didn’t shed much light. He mentions ‘fugitive suggestions of a past that’s obsolete and vanished’ and ‘build[ing] a literature of unrestrained futurity out from the fond and sorry debris of a dissipating past’. That seems rather more ambitious than I could discern. Where was this unrestrained futurity? ‘The Vorrh’ struck me rather as a fantastical historical novel with a fixation on bodily mutilation. The tone seemed, if anything, fatalistic. Characters suffered, died, or survived and the Vorrh remained inexplicable and mysterious, sheltering monsters without allegorising anything specific. Technological advances were depicted as insufficient to conquer the forest, while risking madness in both those developing them and their unfortunate test subjects. Knowledge and wisdom seemed to be distributed arbitrarily across the cast. Perhaps the comparison with 19th century French Decadent literature is merited, as there is a certain fixation on the exotic, gruesome, and supernatural. Still not enough overwrought description for to truly merit the decadent label, though, which is a real pity. The general weirdness is appealing and quite possibly the abruptness is due to it being first in a trilogy. But when I read a novel about a dreadful sentient forest, I want to be able to visualise that forest. I want it to haunt my dreams! Instead, I was spooked by the beings in the forest and the effects the forest had on others. This could well have been intentional: maybe the real endless sentient forest was in our hearts and minds all along? Or maybe I just didn’t get it, for some reason. I really wanted to, though.
The horror of the place is instead depicted through its effect on people, which is certainly done effectively. There is a lot of impressively revolting body horror. The forest acts as a catalyst and setting for collisions between characters and significantly influences their lives. Once I had some sense of what was a flashback and what was happening in plot-time, I found it an engaging magical realist historical novel. There is some vague treatment of colonialism and a fair bit of mysticism, mingled with surreal and inexplicable details like bakelite robots. Also some very strange sex. I’m not really sure what it all adds up to, though. The narratives of the characters end abruptly and the book neither begins nor ends in the Vorrh itself. Did the sentient forest send those letters? Does it speak? Will we find out in the sequel?
After finishing, I went back to read Alan Moore’s introduction, which didn’t shed much light. He mentions ‘fugitive suggestions of a past that’s obsolete and vanished’ and ‘build[ing] a literature of unrestrained futurity out from the fond and sorry debris of a dissipating past’. That seems rather more ambitious than I could discern. Where was this unrestrained futurity? ‘The Vorrh’ struck me rather as a fantastical historical novel with a fixation on bodily mutilation. The tone seemed, if anything, fatalistic. Characters suffered, died, or survived and the Vorrh remained inexplicable and mysterious, sheltering monsters without allegorising anything specific. Technological advances were depicted as insufficient to conquer the forest, while risking madness in both those developing them and their unfortunate test subjects. Knowledge and wisdom seemed to be distributed arbitrarily across the cast. Perhaps the comparison with 19th century French Decadent literature is merited, as there is a certain fixation on the exotic, gruesome, and supernatural. Still not enough overwrought description for to truly merit the decadent label, though, which is a real pity. The general weirdness is appealing and quite possibly the abruptness is due to it being first in a trilogy. But when I read a novel about a dreadful sentient forest, I want to be able to visualise that forest. I want it to haunt my dreams! Instead, I was spooked by the beings in the forest and the effects the forest had on others. This could well have been intentional: maybe the real endless sentient forest was in our hearts and minds all along? Or maybe I just didn’t get it, for some reason. I really wanted to, though.
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November 29, 2017I was very tired of this book by the end. At 500 pages, it felt twice that long and I am exasperated to know that there are two more installments (one already on the shelves and a final installment planned), presumably of similar or greater length. The Vorrh a rumbustious book, kind of baggy, effusive, ambitious, sprawling and more than a little indulgent. I usually like that sort of thing, I’m more likely to forgive the overwrought than the undercooked--and I initially did here too, but still felt fatigued by the close. I don’t know if my interest in surrealism, horror and decadence is finally flagging or Catling’s book is just kind of a chore.
At one point I thought I had left my copy at a pub and I honestly felt relieved. I was ultimately disappointed to find the book fallen into the crevice between my desk and the windowsill the following morning. I’m not sure why I powered through, but if I had to give a reason, it would be that I was seduced by the titular forest. Which is, to the book’s credit, totally enthralling. I have never seen The Vorrh compared earnestly to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, but I’ve seen many reviewers wryly comment on the inevitability of the comparison--and there is some corollary between the ossified sociopolitical ecosystem of Peake’s dilapidated castle and Catling’s haunted forest. If absolutely nothing else, they are definitely the most interesting parts of their respective stories.
There are no good characters in this book, but the Bowman and the Frenchman (historical poet Raymond Roussel thinly disguised) at least both held my attention. Reading about Ishmael the Cyclops, however, flip flopped between boring and aggravating, and I see no reason that all his chapters could not have been cut--he is so much less interesting than Catling supposes he is. Catling means for the sex and violence in the book to be grotesque, and it is, but when he tries to portray literally anything else--tenderness, courage, melancholy, anything but angst, anger or lust--the book resolutely fails.
There are some half baked attempts at postcolonial thematizing, which are entirely unconvincing. If there is something to recommend this book, it is a purely fantastical mythmaking and flair for surrealistic teratology (a man having his hands cut off and sewed on backwards is indelibly scarred over my mind) but it does not or cannot tease out the full political dimensions of its setting. I’m increasingly ambivalent to political art, anyway, doubting the efficacy of the enterprise. I don’t know if it’s even possible to discuss or promulgate the political in art & literature, but if it is, The Vorrh does not succeed. Or really even try very hard.
At one point I thought I had left my copy at a pub and I honestly felt relieved. I was ultimately disappointed to find the book fallen into the crevice between my desk and the windowsill the following morning. I’m not sure why I powered through, but if I had to give a reason, it would be that I was seduced by the titular forest. Which is, to the book’s credit, totally enthralling. I have never seen The Vorrh compared earnestly to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, but I’ve seen many reviewers wryly comment on the inevitability of the comparison--and there is some corollary between the ossified sociopolitical ecosystem of Peake’s dilapidated castle and Catling’s haunted forest. If absolutely nothing else, they are definitely the most interesting parts of their respective stories.
There are no good characters in this book, but the Bowman and the Frenchman (historical poet Raymond Roussel thinly disguised) at least both held my attention. Reading about Ishmael the Cyclops, however, flip flopped between boring and aggravating, and I see no reason that all his chapters could not have been cut--he is so much less interesting than Catling supposes he is. Catling means for the sex and violence in the book to be grotesque, and it is, but when he tries to portray literally anything else--tenderness, courage, melancholy, anything but angst, anger or lust--the book resolutely fails.
There are some half baked attempts at postcolonial thematizing, which are entirely unconvincing. If there is something to recommend this book, it is a purely fantastical mythmaking and flair for surrealistic teratology (a man having his hands cut off and sewed on backwards is indelibly scarred over my mind) but it does not or cannot tease out the full political dimensions of its setting. I’m increasingly ambivalent to political art, anyway, doubting the efficacy of the enterprise. I don’t know if it’s even possible to discuss or promulgate the political in art & literature, but if it is, The Vorrh does not succeed. Or really even try very hard.
January 2, 2018
I did not finish this book. I abandoned it. I do admit that my review of this book won't be as fair or reliable as somebody who read the whole thing, but I think I've seen enough. I read it up to 25% of the way and was totally disappointed. I'll lay it out step by step. Firstly, this book was meant to be a 'classic fantasy tale', and I have to say that I have read much better fantasy and adventure stories like LOTR and Harry Potter, which were told in a much more captivating way. Secondly, overloading each sentence with adjectives does not make a story well-written. Making the plot confusing does not make a 'profound' read. Honestly, the author was just trying to write a story he was not capable of writing. I definitely do not recommend this book to anyone.
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