A review by chramies
The Vorrh by Brian Catling

slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

 If William Hope Hodgson was infected with the New Complexity! Riffing on Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” and “Apocalypse Now,” and any number of JG Ballard novels and imitators, and a sort-of feeling of Gwyneth Jones (is it) with her fondness for sentient humanoids who think in a completely different way. 

The New Complexity is like if you took music and encouraged growths within it, cancerous lumps, plot tumours wider than a smile. 

The Vorrh takes place – at least partly – in a colonial European city on the edge of a huge, all-engulfing forest, such that it does not necessarily have another side. Much that is human could get lost in a forest like that, and come out as something else, or not come out at all, feast for beasts, bones in a ditch for aeons. I have always expected such a fate to be mine, and so I suspect have the protagonists of The Vorrh. Ticking sex robots live in the runnels under this Gormenghastly excrescence, but Peake was an illustrator and saw the virtue of clarity. Catling, the sculptor and performance artist, is another matter.

A side-turning led me to an approving piece on Catling's performance art by one Aaron Williamson, whom I knew years ago back in London. Hell hath no fire-escape indeed! Iain Sinclair gets a look-in there also, perhaps not surprising when IS, reviewing a performance venue as 'poetastic outpatients', excepted the talented Williamson from that description.

Kingston upon Thames’ most (in) famous and wayward son Eadweard Muybridge makes an appearance, and as we know by now, while a pioneer of motion photography, he was not a nice man. Maybe he was the original Kurtz … a hollow man at 18 fps. Then there’s the baroque sex dolls (they seem to be) which are enough to put anyone off sex with robots or anything else. The book meanders like a river a mile wide (or even wider than a mile) between stands of horrifying trees redolent with the noise of strange creatures. There are stenches. Essenwald the Fitzcarraldesque city on the edge of forever, whose name means ‘the eating wood’ or something like that, and by jungo it ought to. With only one exception (Tsungali, who is a tribesman and a member of what looks like the Mau-Mau), all the characters are white people despite it being set in Africa. 

You know who did a really good job of describing a weird forest and the people whose lives are affected by it? The late lamented Robert Holdstock, in “Mythago Wood” and its sequels. Perhaps it’s the difference between a practical craftsman (RH) and a sculptor and ‘performance artist’ (BC).  I’d advise reading that instead. 

Here we go round the prickly Vorrh 

At five o’clock in the morning 

This is the way the world ends 

Not with a bang but … well, with several really 

The horror … the horror …

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Violence