Review: The Vorrh

The Vorrh by Brian Catling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fifteen pages into this one, I was ready to declare it a masterpiece. The opening scene describes a man constructing a bow from the bones and sinews of the woman he has loved, a woman who, supposed to have various dryad like powers, has just died. It’s haunting and memorable, a cross between a love story and a fever-dream fantasy. And then it goes even further when the man ventures into a mysterious forest – “the Vorrh” of the title – finding his way by shooting arrows from his bow/lover and then following the path they trace for him.

A hundred pages into this, I had almost resolved to give it up altogether. I wanted more of our original protagonist, but the book had spun into at least half a dozen seemingly unrelated tangents. There’s a story about a cyclops being raised in the basement of a well-preserved old mansion (where disembodied creatures keep a vague but terrifying order) by creatures made of bakelite plastic. There’s a native hunter, resentful of the British who have trained and armed him, who determines to kill our bow-explorer. There’s a “Frenchman” who, as various footnotes and commentaries explain, is Raymond Rousell, the French surrealist poet, who determines to venture into the Vorrh in dilettante fashion. There’s the pioneering photographer Edward Muybridge who’s venturing around the world taking pictures and dipping a toe into the Victorian occult. There’s a vicious Scottsman, MacLeish, who oversees work crews of slaves who are the only ones able to harvest the timber of the Vorrh – and then only because they are near-zombies.

And those separate plots – I may have missed a couple – all have further branches that divide into ever smaller tributaries of narrative, only some of which later come together. It’s so busy, so crowded with strange characters and radically shifting metaphysics, that it seemed – after those first 100 pages – an impenetrable mess.

But I did keep reading. For a time it was out of perversity, with a sense that I wanted to be able to counter some of the great hype I’d heard about the book. Then I felt a growing curiosity as I saw some of the different elements beginning to cohere. And at last I discovered an unexpected and deep joy: this was a book that seemed never to exhaust its inventiveness. It implies familiar fantastic tropes, mythological possibilities, and historical touchstones, all of which come together in a balance I could never have predicted but that I can still somehow appreciate.

Nothing here turns out as you would expect. [MAJOR SPOILERS:] Williams, our bowman, loses everything – his bow, his memory, and finally his life. Ishmael, our cyclops, gets a second eye and becomes a dull figure inclined to settle down with the woman whose sight he has restored while remaining friends with the woman who “raised” him and now bears his child. The economy of the great city by the Vorrh begins to falter as the slave work crews have fled and no one can bring in the wood. What begins as a quest concludes as a murder but, maybe, we see our hunter Tsungali assume the mantle and proceed in what will be the second part of the trilogy.

[END SPOILER:] The surprising and, to some readers I imagine, disappointing outcomes are only part of what makes this a concussive, memorable work. This is – as Alan Moore says in his spectacular afterword – an effort to wrest the fantasy novel from the narrow tropes and signifiers of the post-Tolkien experience. This is fantasy written by someone who may never have read a word of George R.R. Martin, and that’s all to the good even as Martin does many things very well.

Moore’s point, one I’ve tried to make without Moore’s articulateness, is that the imagination ought to be freer to follow its own course. All of this book is vaguely familiar, yet none of it proceeds as we expect it might. This is a glimpse of how we might free fantasy from the tyranny of the Tor paperback, those punishingly long “high fantasies” of kingdoms governed by rules from what Blake would have called “Newton’s night” rather than from a truly unfettered imagination.

I see some reviewers comparing this to the Gormenghast trilogy, and I do buy it. Gormenghast is haunted by what-might-have-beens, though – a fine ambition, but one that makes it feel as if we are coming too late to the real magic of its vision – while this feels more like ever-unfolding possibility.

By way of comparison, I’d add Drew Magary’s The Hike and Josiah Bancroft’s Sendlin Ascends, recent books that explore a similar refusal to play by “the conventions” of the quest narrative and, instead, plunge into the surreal and imaginative. Solid as each of those is, though, neither is at this level.

Instead, the only comparison that really holds for me is Alan Moore’s own Jerusalem, a vast and ambitious novel that begins not with the surreal but with the lower-case-D divine of Blake himself.

I’d rank Jerusalem even above this – it’s more coherent while achieving a similar sense of deep wonder – but I have two more books of Catling’s trilogy to go so maybe it will get there by the end.

You’ll know if this sounds too busy and too strange for you, and, if it is, stay away. If you’re intrigued, though, if you think there’s a chance that the deep weird might attract you, then give this a shot. With Moore’s Jerusalem and a handful of other books, it’s at the heart of a set of novels showing the potential for the true fantastic to produce a literature as vast and colorful as dream.


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