Running Towards Nothing: B. Catling’s The Vorrh Trilogy

by Daniel Pietersen

B. CATLING. The Vorrh. Vintage Books, 2015. 512 pp. $16.99 pb. ISBN: 9781101873786

B. CATLING. The Erstwhile. Vintage Books, 2017. 480 pp. $16.99 pb. ISBN: 9781101972724

B. CATLING. The Cloven. Vintage Books, 2018. 448 pp. $16.99 pb. ISBN: 978–1101972748

The strange thing about forests is that they don’t really exist. Or, to put it another way, forests only exist when viewed as forests. A forest is a collection of trees and the myriad plants that fill the gaps between trees, the glades and pathways that perforate the density of plant matter, the animals and humans who might live within it. If a tree falls or an animal dies then you will still have a forest because the forest exists as an idea outside of its constituent parts — ill-defined and nebulous but resilient.

Yet, we know a forest when we see one. In many ways, we are pre-programmed to see forests — to see collections of small constituents as gestalt wholes — rather than become lost in the fractal detail of the world. As soon as we can, we elevate our understanding from one level of detail to the next. We say that someone “can’t see the wood for the trees” when they become bogged down in detail and pedantry. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to acknowledge it, does it matter? No, because the forest remains and it is the forest, not the tree, that matters.

So, you ask, what does all this have to do with reviewing a book? It is a warning, in a roundabout way, that your allegories may turn against you.

The Vorrh is a story about forests. A forest, specifically; the Vorrh being the name of the angel- and demon-haunted forest that lurks at the centre of the narrative both figuratively and literally. Yet it is also a story about constituents and gestalts, as evidenced not only by The Vorrh being the first installment in the Vorrh trilogy but by Catling’s blending of real and imaginary characters into the narrative. It tells the tale of how humans and angels, known as Rumours and The Erstwhile in the series’ ergot, are each attempting to recover something they have lost and, in finding it, lose even more.

The main joy in this series is to explore its density so I’m not going to dwell too heavily on major plot-points or provide a narrative overview in this review. You can find your own path through this particular forest and you will no doubt find a different path from the one I took. What I will do is stand back, quite far back, and look at the forest that the book creates. When I speak of “The Vorrh” from now on I am referring to the trilogy as a whole.

Brian Catling is, above all, a poet and the language used to construct The Vorrh is rarely less than dizzyingly poetic, almost Gormenghastian, in its arcane manufacture. Lyrical vignettes sparkle like waterfalls in some sunlit glade and even the most vile scenes — flesh is persistently broken and debased whilst half-human creatures writhe in agony under peaty soils — have a kind of sublime beauty that makes them feel more unknowable than unpleasant. When Catling talks about Cyrena’s blindness, for example, or Meta’s fist-clenched fury then these characters jump into sharp relief and seem to glow on the page. The weirdly labyrinthine city of Essenwald also bends and mutates as Catling decides to describe first this section and then another — first Teutonic cobbles and then Moorish carpeting.

The reader is drawn along, flicking between times and characters and narratives and realities to…

Well, that’s entirely the problem. To where indeed?

Brian Catling is, above all, a poet. He is not, despite the amount of words used to write The Vorrh, an author.

After a while — not actually that long a while — it becomes fairly obvious that the dense and deft language is a cover for a very thin and ill-considered plot. If indeed there is a plot at all. Things happen, but for no apparent reason, and each book seems to just sort of end until the whole trilogy, in its own way, just sort of ends. At first what I thought was a lack of drive is revealed as an excess of drive. Narrative threads are either forgotten or left to dangle as Catling skitters to the next object of his interests, of which he has many. In fact, Catling flicks from character to theme so quickly and so superficially that the experience of The Vorrh becomes very much like reading a Boy’s Own adventure as random Wikipedia entries are mansplained at you.

Eadweard Muybridge, who is working on a consciousness-expanding zoopraxiscope at the behest of (obviously) Sir William Gull — explaining, in one fell swoop, Alan Moore’s gushing praise for at least the first volume of The Vorrh trilogy — travels to meet rifle-heiress Sarah Winchester at her ever-more labyrinthine and ever-more haunted house, ostensibly to try and photograph evidence of the hauntings. After much long-winded discussion and extemporising this whole digression is dismissed by Muybridge himself as a waste of time and is never mentioned again nor has any real impact on the Muybridge or the wider story.

One of the Erstwhile — who was (again, obviously) the inspiration for William Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar — has renamed himself Nicholas Parson, a name he appears to have heard on the radio despite the story being set when the real Nicholas Parsons was only one year old, apparently purely so that Catling can indulge in some Just A Minute-esque whimsy.

The Bakelite faux-robots that tend to Ishmael and lurk menacingly in a basement for reasons that are never completely explained are named after the children of Adam and Eve, do you see, because that’s suitably angelic (even though they appear to have no connection to the Erstwhile).

Add all that to characters simply falling off cliffs when they’re no longer needed, the Vorrh’s memory-eroding ability only really working when it needs to, mysterious voices and note-deliverers remaining mysterious when it’s realised we won’t meet them again, one of the key character’s CORKSCREW PIG PENIS suddenly not being a weird thing and the whole forest, albeit constructed from sturdy trees, starts to feel very patchy indeed.

And once you realise how patchy The Vorrh actually is, that’s when you realise it also starts to become pretty sketchy.

Beyond the problems that The Vorrh has with its narrative and construction it is also very Capital-P Problematic. The whole mansplaining, do-you-see-how-clever-I-am tone of the books is only a symptom of how very, very white middle-class male they are (that the pull-quote praise lavished on the book is also all from white middle-class males should, in hindsight, have been a premonition of this).

Female characters become hysterical and broody (or maliciously contrary) whenever a jolt of conflict is needed, their interactions with each other often feeling clockwork and insubstantial. Homosexuality is dealt with in an innuendo-laden way that never lets anyone less than lustfully heterosexual seem fully formed. Characters of colour are treated even worse as they stroll out, with their rolling eyes and jangling fetishes, of the most frenzied excesses of colonial fever dreams.

Which is ironic because, as much as The Vorrh wants to be a story about rebellion and defiance it is a hugely colonial narrative, in the deepest and most imperialist senses of that word. Native civilisation and belief, even nature itself, is persistently shown as unreliable and malevolent. This could well be meant to indicate the Western characters’ views, but it feels so pervasive and ingrained through the narrative that it seems a far deeper concern. Equally, the dominance of white male characters is inescapable; Muybridge’s device ‘elevates’ an African woman to furious enlightenment, Williams creates a magical bow from the body of his native wife (who, again, is defined almost entirely by her mystical and unknowable nature) and native workers in the Vorrh are reduced to leering, insensate animals who have an inexplicable appetite for aborted foetuses. Admittedly, the colonial figures themselves aren’t shown in a particularly ingratiating light (nobody is, in many ways, which adds to the tiresomeness of the series) but they still have power and position to add agency to their unpleasantness.

Ultimately, I found The Vorrh to be a frustrating and tedious read, with the poetic prose being stretched increasingly thin to disguise ever-deeper shortcomings as it rumbled on to its anticlimactic finale. Worse, perhaps, even than that is the fact that the story doesn’t actually say anything of any real interest or insight over three books (and there is absolutely no need for this to be three books). Catling no doubt thinks of the books as a rumination on the human condition — beast, man and angel simultaneously — when it is really an Ozymandian memorial to boorishness and stolidity.

If The Vorrh is any kind of forest then it is one daubed on a theatre backdrop, seemingly lush and exotic from the stalls but truly little more than stained canvas supported by aged and worm-ridden plywood.

Published in Dead Reckonings no. 25.

Daniel Pietersen is a writer of weird fiction and horror philosophy. He has a blog of fragmentary work and other thoughts at https://pietersender.wordpress.com/.