Brian Catling

In a novel that combines history and fantasy, the author explores the Vorrh, a vast forest at the edge of Essenwald, a colonial city in a parallel Africa. Original.

A Novel

The Vorrh

Taking its name from the imaginary African forest in Raymond Roussel's Impressions of Africa, The Vorrh is a magnificent, vibrant backdrop on which to stage a high octane narrative led by hunter, Tsungali, the Cyclops, Ishmael and famous photographer Eadweard Muybridge. In contrast with the tired cliches of the traditional fantasy tale, The Vorrh is an invigorating, epic fantasy at its most original, ground-breaking and visionary.

An exquisitely weird tale about a gigantic forest and how the lives, fates, and undoings of people and other beings are intertwined with its magic.

Nezumi

Kyle Curry

Don't take my words, take Alan Moore's- " Easily the current century's first landmark work of fantasy."

Aptly put. Don't let the word "fantasy" put you in the mind of the same old stories about wizards and monsters. Catling transcends the genre, reminding us that fantasy comprises the fantastical and for to long it has been confined to a specific set of archetypes (however enjoyable they may be). He not only shows us a new type of fantasy, based in new cultures, but uses them to exmamine some of the classic tropes we are so use to reading.

We need more fantasy writers like this.

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.

Emily Perkovich

The beginning of this book was reeeeeeeeally hard for me to get through. It was strange past the boundaries of most sci-fi shock factor. But the writing is descriptive and magical and the story line is haunting and worth pushing through the uncomfortable beginning.

Phil James

Multiple points of view and stories of monsters, angels and historical characters circle around a forest in Africa that might be Eden. It doesn't quite pull together it's huge ambitions but there again it's only the first part of trilogy so maybe it will.

Bryan Alexander

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.
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, (view spoiler)[several characters are killed, their slaves freed, and the crucial timber trade falls apart. We also never really learn about the heart of the forest, denying that grail to foreigners and readers alike. (hide spoiler)] 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.

Eric Jacobsen

Martin

Sadie Kimbrough

'In The Vorrh we have one of the most original and stunning works of fantasy that has ever been my privilege to read.' Alan Moore In the tradition of China Miéville, Michael Moorcock and Alasdair Gray, B. Catling's The Vorrh is literary dark fantasy which wilfully ignores boundaries, crossing over into surrealism, magic-realism, horror and steampunk. In B. Catling's twisting, poetic narrative, Bakelite robots lie broken - their hard shells cracked by human desire - and an inquisitive Cyclops waits for his keeper and guardian, growing in all directions. Beyond the colonial city of Essenwald lies the Vorrh, the forest which sucks souls and wipes minds. There, a writer heads out on a giddy mission to experience otherness, fallen angels observe humanity from afar, and two hunters - one carrying a bow carved from his lover, the other a charmed Lee-Enfield rifle - fight to the end. Thousands of miles away, famed photographer Eadweard Muybridge attempts to capture the ultimate truth, as rifle heiress Sarah Winchester erects a house to protect her from the spirits of her gun's victims.

The Vorrh A Novel

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