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    The Vorrh
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    The Vorrh
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    The Vorrh
    Audiobook17 hours

    The Vorrh

    Written by B. Catling

    Narrated by Allan Corduner

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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 the will of the Vorrh.

    Afterword by Alan Moore

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 28, 2015
    ISBN9781101922651
    Unavailable
    The Vorrh

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    Reviews for The Vorrh

    3.5/5

    122 ratings13 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I admit to liking fantasy with a strong narrative; then I can put up with any amount of weirdness. The Vorrh has lots of narrative - some of it quite compelling - but the problem is that there are rather too many different narratives, and most of them are rather too loosely connected - by the Vorrh, the great primeval forest that sits somewhere in Africa. The idea of the Vorrh - which contains the Garden of Eden itself, and where Adam and the angels still hang out - is fascinating; as is the effect it has on people who spend too much time there, loosing their memories and eventually their whole personalities. The Germanic town of Essenwald, which has been built on the edge of the forest and has even imported some European weather into Africa, is an appropriately weird idea. I loved the character of Gertrude, whose persistent curiosity leads her to discover the secrets of the house at 4 Kuhler Brunnen. Her growing relationship with Ishmael, the young cyclops she discovers there, and the mystery of his guardians are the strongest narrative thread in the book - but have very little to do with the Vhorr itself.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.
    • 1/5
      Looks like the author was so enamoured of language and style he forgot to add characterisation or story. (The language isn't that enthralling either!)
    • 3/5
      I may not be smart enough to get it. Maybe it hasn't sunk in yet. This is definitely more of a book of poetry and art and not plot. It's purpose is to dazzle with language and it certainly does that. However, there are entire subplots that happen in a different setting and seem to have only the most tenuous connection to the story. They seem added in because the author just wanted to but to my mind, they don't fit. Overall, the book is beautifully overwritten but the story is simply laborious.
    • 4/5
      An impressive and hard-to-classify fantasy set in a nameless African country in an approximation of the late 19th or early 20th century. Central to this book is the Vorrh, an ancient and mystically impenetrable forest. Various characters from the colonial town of Essenwald and beyond -- including a few fictonalised historical figures -- orbit around the Vorrh and each other.
    • 5/5
      Wow, this book was everything I'd hoped for, and morrh.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, angels, a dour Scotsman with a drink problem, quite a lot of sex and violence, sentient weapons, some steampunky bits... it's got everything and it coheres just enough and not too much. Some of the narratives end up entwining and one or two stay separate, but the thematic links justify their inclusion.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.
    • 3/5
      So this was a pretty insane book. It reminded me a lot of Cloud Atlas. Lots of different stories told only tentatively linked. Except this jumps around a lot more. It was hard to follow at times, but the writing was beautiful and the ideas where exotic and capricious. I can't say I loved it because I was often lost , but I did it on audio so that may be part of the problem.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.
    • 3/5
      Was intrigued by the original premise but it got too twisted and convoluted for me. It was several subplots--one involving a curious girl and a cyclops; another involving a soldier who has made a bow out of a person and the black man who chases him into the Vorrh [forest which will steal a person's memory]; another involving the real-life photographer, Edward Muybridge and another involving a surrealist writer, "The Frenchman". The forest ties them all together. To me it read like a lot of hallucinogenic fever dreams. It was certainly an original concept, but I have no interest in reading the sequel. The cover is the phases of a lunar eclipse, supposedly of Muybridge's photographs. The picture plays a part in the novel. I'm glad I spent no money on the book--thank goodness for libraries!
    • 4/5
      I read The Vorrh on the recommendation of that doyen of psychogeography Iain Sinclair. Mr Sinclair is a writer and a walker with a sense of place, history and a knack of seeing less obvious connections between places and people. Mr Catling is a painter, sculptor, poet and performance artist. His book is painted and sculpted in poetic language not just written. The unfathomable jungle which is its centre is a tableau of Rouseau paintings, the characters who fill it, both human and inhuman, are from Bosch and Bruegel brought into three dimensions by Paolozzi. Its geography is certainly psychic. Time slips in and out in loops rather than proceeding in its ordained straight line. A deeper meaning? A metaphor? A philosophical treatise? Who knows? Treat it like the masterpiece that it is. Take it all in, contemplate, stand back and admire.
    • 4/5
      This story revolves around an eldritch forest populated with nightmarish beings. In that, it reminded me a bit of Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood, but the resemblance ends there. There are multiple characters with stories that twine around each other like jungle vines. The only narrative I was able to follow completely was that of Ghertrude and Ishmael, and eventually, Cyrene. All the other storylines just didn't hold my attention. I would be reading along and find myself thinking of something else. The language is rich and evocative, the sense of place permeates everything, but the narrative threads are not particularly clear or vibrant. It's like trying to read a spider's web. What the author has done is remarkable, but it isn't a work that invites one to while away an afternoon. I give it four stars for beauty and originality, but be warned, this isn't a typical read.
    • 4/5
      Multiple points of view and stories of monsters, angels and historical characters circle around a forest in Africa that might be Eden. It doesn't quite pull together it's huge ambitions but there again it's only the first part of trilogy so maybe it will.
    • 4/5
      beautiful language. sometimes the characters are hard to follow at times but i enjoyed overall
    • 4/5
      Definitely a different flavor of fantasy (mixed with historical fiction and folklore/myth/religion and sci-fi as well). The characters, objects, places, and circumstances were at least as interesting as the events themselves, building a colorful backdrop of mysterious depths for the story to play out against.
    • 5/5
      In the heart of Africa lies the Vorrh, a primal forest from which the world was created. The Vorrh is not a place to be wandered into lightly—it changes people, erasing memories.The Vorrh appealed to me because the premise echoed Vandermeer’s gripping Southern Reach Trilogy. Furthermore, Vandermeer’s blurb on the back cover said The Vorrh “is unlike anything I’ve read.” I had to find out for myself.B. Catling, a poet, sculptor, painter, and performance artist turned novelist, has created a compelling surrealist fantasy. It’s a world where an orphan cyclops raised by robots lives alongside historical figures like experimental photographer Eadweard Muybridge and French author Raymond Roussel. At times it reminded me of some of Michael Ende’s Mirror Within the Mirror stories.Speaking of Muybridge leads me to my only criticism of the book. Some of the plot threads refuse to coalesce. I finished the book thinking that Muybridge’s narrative could have been a separate novel without effecting the primary narrative of The Vorrh. I have read that in his sequel, The Erstwhile, Catling has tightened his storytelling. I can hardly wait dive back into Catling’s vision.