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A review by bhirts
The Vorrh by Brian Catling
5.0
This is the most I’ve enjoyed reading a book and the first time I’ve had that “don’t want to it to be over” feeling in a long while. This may be a bit of a “Boss Baby”** take, but it reminded me a lot of Primeval by Olga Tokarczuk, and almost nothing else; albeit with more of a “blockbuster” feel, more violence, sex, monsters and magic (but much less of the latter than most proper “fantasy” novels).
I’ve casually noticed many of the reviews complained about the writing in this novel, calling it pretentious and overwrought etc., which surprised me greatly because the writing was one of the first things that I specifically so enjoyed. To me, prose *usually* only strikes me as “pretentious” when it comes from a clumsy and overeager attempt to “seize” beauty, mostly by extending descriptions in endless baroque arabesques (Lovecraft for example, as much as we all love him), while in The Vorrh Catling’s prose seems to simply describe things *differently*, rather than *over* describe them, in a way that, to me, felt like a genuine attempt to get at the fundamental experience of things. For instance, one sentence that particularly stuck with me was (paraphrased, as I can’t locate the exact passage) something about a stagecoach driver driving “as the street talked to hands through the reins”. Some may find that kind of thing unnatural, but to me it’s simply viscerally capturing the feeling of driving on a bumpy road.
This is more of a 4.5 for me truthfully, and I know that part of the reason I am skewing my rating so high is an optimism stemming from the fact that this is book one of a trilogy, and a hope that many, or at least some, of the as-yet-still-untied loose ends (essentially all of them) will find satisfactory resolutions in future books; a hope that both my heart and brain know is almost certainly misguided…
**by “Boss Baby take” I am referring to a classic tweet from @afraidofwasps which reads “Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this...”; meaning a take that sprouts much more from the (limited) vocabulary of references of the viewer than anything else.
I’ve casually noticed many of the reviews complained about the writing in this novel, calling it pretentious and overwrought etc., which surprised me greatly because the writing was one of the first things that I specifically so enjoyed. To me, prose *usually* only strikes me as “pretentious” when it comes from a clumsy and overeager attempt to “seize” beauty, mostly by extending descriptions in endless baroque arabesques (Lovecraft for example, as much as we all love him), while in The Vorrh Catling’s prose seems to simply describe things *differently*, rather than *over* describe them, in a way that, to me, felt like a genuine attempt to get at the fundamental experience of things. For instance, one sentence that particularly stuck with me was (paraphrased, as I can’t locate the exact passage) something about a stagecoach driver driving “as the street talked to hands through the reins”. Some may find that kind of thing unnatural, but to me it’s simply viscerally capturing the feeling of driving on a bumpy road.
This is more of a 4.5 for me truthfully, and I know that part of the reason I am skewing my rating so high is an optimism stemming from the fact that this is book one of a trilogy, and a hope that many, or at least some, of the as-yet-still-untied loose ends (essentially all of them) will find satisfactory resolutions in future books; a hope that both my heart and brain know is almost certainly misguided…
**by “Boss Baby take” I am referring to a classic tweet from @afraidofwasps which reads “Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this...”; meaning a take that sprouts much more from the (limited) vocabulary of references of the viewer than anything else.