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.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in