I know I’ve been posting a lot of reviews, but don’t get the idea that I make a habit of reviewing things! It’s just that I’ve recently installed this blogging platform to my site, and these reviews are providing excellent practice in the use of its features.

This review is not like the others; I did not post it at Amazon. I composed it as part of a three-book roundup that I wrote for the Shimmer Magazine blog (a guest post—a perk of being published in Shimmer); as it turned out, I wrote too much! The editor wanted cuts … I ended up removing this review (and slimming down the other reviews as well! They weren’t really reviews anymore, just “appreciations.” Ha ha!). You can read the other reviews at the Shimmer blog if you’re interested.

As for my review of The Vorrh, here it is:

The Vorrh

by B. Catling

pub. Honest Publishing

The Vorrh commences with a gruesome ritual in which the narrator, named Peter Williams, fashions a bow from the flesh and bones of his newly departed wife, Irrinipeste (Este for short), thus binding her love (and her supernatural gifts, her protective shamanistic skills) into a utilitarian weapon that he may carry on his back as he makes his way into the ancient, holy landscape called the Vorrh—a vast woodland in Africa containing the original Garden of Eden, God’s vacation spot, populated by angels, demons, and all manner of grotesquely formed species and tribes:

     No planes dared fly over it. Its unpredictable climate, dizzying abnormalities of compass and impossibilities of landing made it a pilot’s and navigator’s nightmare. All its pathways turned into overgrowth, jungle and ambush. The tribes that were rumoured to live there were barely human—some said the anthropophagi still roamed. Creatures beyond hope. Heads growing below their shoulders. Horrors. [56]

The Vorrh (as we learn from the book’s jacket copy) originally appeared in Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, a proto-surrealist French novel from the early 20th Century, somewhat obscure but nonetheless producing significant acolytes among those familiar with it. I am not familiar with it (not yet!), and I was only peripherally familiar with the work of Eadweard Muybridge, the late 19th Century photographer who invented the “praxizooscope,” among other gadgets, which he used to investigate the principles of motion capture. (You’ve probably seen the famous horse gait sequence he produced by wiring a dozen or so still cameras together along a racetrack.)

Both Roussel and Muybridge appear as primary characters in this novel, as do other historical figures in secondary roles (including Sir William Gull—Queen Victoria’s royal physician—identified by some popular conspiracy theories as Jack the Ripper). The author takes enormous pains to represent these real-life personages with biographical accuracy, while at the same time involving them in paranormal and polymorphously perverse phenomona that would strain credulity if the novel were not labeled “Fantasy.”

Numerous narrative threads are woven together in this long novel:

• Williams’ journey with his peculiar living bow into the Vorrh;
• the hunting of Williams by Tsungali, a magically assisted warrior of the “True People,” hired to assassinate the Bowman before he completes his passage;
• Muybridge’s lifelong quest to suture technology to consciousness and assure himself thereby the eternal accolade of History;
• the adventures of Ishmael, a cyclops raised and tutored by tiny robots in a basement, then “rescued” from this idyllic living situation (and subsequently imprisoned) by a severe, yet passionate, young woman named Ghertrude Tulp;
• the passions of Cyrena Lohr, a blind woman given sight through a strange miracle involving Ishmael that more resembles the transmission of a virus than divine intervention;
• the supernatural depredations of the Limboia—a heterogeneous group (mostly indigenous Africans, but also some Whites and Asians) rendered nearly mindless by the Vorrh, addicted to its psychic effects, and conscripted as slave labor by moneyed European interests to harvest valuable timber from the forest and transport it out by train—these lost souls controlled and directed in criminal enterprise by their overseer Maclish and his partner Doctor Hoffman;
• and as a kind of framing device, the heedless pilgrimage of Roussel, who seeks to penetrate the Vorrh as a tourist—mostly motivated, I think, by his infatuation with Seil Kor, the native guide he has employed to escort him in.

These various characters are all clearly and crisply delineated, their workings and desires laid bare with dispassionate precision. It strikes me as an older style of telling, and thus, perhaps paradoxically, refreshing. The oiled precision of the rhetoric in this book is immensely satisfying to observe; Catling’s fluency and command of the language, poetically efficient, inspires a deep pleasure. There is little sentiment and much detachment from the typical literary plea for pathos or catharsis; instead, we are given a pitiless progress through events terrible and inevitable, in the vein of Old Testament stories or Greek tragedies.

Indeed, predestination saturates the narrative. Even as supreme and voracious wills exert their power in the world, one senses that these carefully constructed beings are in fact helpless to their fates. These characters clump toward their individual ends blindly, with boldness and bombast, like marionettes made to prance and pirouette by strings of magnificently dry, ennobling language. Enhancing this effect, of course, is the historical veracity of so many of the characters: their fates are absolutely determined, since they have already been played out in the real world beyond the novel … and that sense of inevitable destiny equally anoints the fictional characters with whom they interact.

I confess to a mild disappointment with the ending, which seems to wither somewhat on the vine; the heretofore scrupulously rendered characters come unmoored from discipline, although not egregiously, while the tight suspense of the first two parts slackens and disperses in the third … but it may be because The Vorrh is subtitled “Book One” on the title page, indicating that we are only part of the way through a more complete story—and so I can’t fault the novel for its overdetermined and less than satisfying dénouement, which after all may turn out to be only an interlude in a more complex and satisfying composition on a grander scale!

[EDIT 6-27-2015] Recently, I’ve noticed some increased traffic to this page … Apparently, an American edition of this novel has been released by a major NY publisher. Congratulations to the author, of course! And rereading my review, I think I was a little uncharitable in the ambivalence I expressed in the conclusion. (Not to mention, a little pompous throughout!) To be clear: the novel is excellent, exceptional even, and I unreservedly recommend it for your reading pleasure! (And I still look forward to a sequel … Is it a vain hope? There were hints of it on the publisher’s website a while back, but nothing has yet emerged.)