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Fantasy. Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. HTML: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 t… (more)
User reviews
There's an obsession with vision and eyes, narratives of colonialism and the outsider, vivid historical characters and just as roundly-conceived fictional ones. There are ghosts, monsters, zombies, and mixtures of all three with humans, demons,
The prose is uninhibited and always adventurous, maintaining a wild capering rhythm full of flourishes without ever tripping over its toes. Catling gets away with blunt (but apt) intensifiers like "unbelievable", "amazing" and "indescribable" because unlike Lovecraft, his images are so original and arresting; his use of verbs (or verbing of nouns) in particular is outstanding.
Strangely, one thing I didn't take from this excellent fantasy novel was a great sense of place. In theory this should be very much a genius loci book, but the Mitteleuropean town in which most of the action is set, and the titular forest itself, while very well described, don't quite manifest as agents in their own right as I had expected they would.
The Vorrh calls to mind many great writers - Ballard and Pynchon in its hallucinogenic sense of time and place (and the latter in its brilliant incorporation of historical characters), Lucius Shepard in its jungle scenes and magical elements, William Steig's fantastic children's books in its rich, inventive and exuberant but never hard to parse prose style. Conrad and Mungo Park in the narrow sense of the colonial intruder. It picks up on the best of any number of "new weird" writers and is the first really great story I've read in that genre.
Crazy good shit.
The writing is fluid and allusive; the problem I have is that, while allusive writing can be very effective when it alludes to familiar concepts, when it is used in the description of ideas and concepts that are the pure product of the author's imagination, it compounds fantasy on top of fantasy and gets a little too weird. I know that this a trilogy - I bought the first two books, but I will not be reading the second for a while - but I think some at least partial resolution should be achieved in each of the individual books.
There are so many characters that I actually went online and found a "dramatis personae" type summary someone had created. It seemed like the author just let his imagination run wild and this could have been helped by a tougher editor. Still having trouble finding a link between some of the characters and the rest of the story.
Anyway, if you're up for a challenge definitely check it out.
There are many stories working in tandem in
If anyone else has this book figured out, not just enjoyed it, but actually figured out the symbolism and intent, please do enlighten me.