Brian Catling’s great trilogy takes its title from The Vorrh, his first volume. This final book fulfills all the promises of the first two. It has a place beside such modern masters of the imagination as E.R. Eddison, Tolkien or Peake, and it is as completely unlike them as those three-deckers are of each other.
Again we visit the Vorrh, the endless forest based on Raymond Roussel’s in Impressions of Africa. Built on its outskirts, Essenwald, a crumbling colonial city, exists because of the timber it cuts with the labour of ‘the Erstwhile’, the forest’s enslaved, semi-human inhabitants. Every day they are taken in to the gloomy green vastness to cut, trim and bring back timber on the narrow-gauge steam train whose tracks go as deep into the Vorrh as the loggers dare drive.
Some citizens have grown rich, building massive baroque mansions in Essenwald, thanks to the fascinating forest where Hebraic and Christian images abound. Most people have learned to respect the source of their livelihood. For the Vorrh is sentient, perhaps even more than the Erstwhile, who might be the fallen angels once guarding Eden. Some believe that Eden still lies at the heart of the Vorrh and at its centre can be found the Tree of Knowledge. Certain people will always be drawn in by the forest’s myths and mysteries. All kinds of natural terrors lie there too.
Various characters have come to live at the forest’s edge, most of them in Essenwald or its delta. A few previous visitors have moved far away. Even some of the Erstwhile have found asylum in the outside world, where they exist in various stages of apparent brutishness. Nicholas, perhaps the most human and articulate of them, lives in Bethlem Royal mental hospital and does his best to communicate, but most of his cultural references derive from BBC radio’s Just a Minute or from his earlier life with William Blake, ‘my ol’ man’, who rescued him from the Thames mud.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in