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  The Vorrh

  ( The Vorrh - 1 )

  B Catling

  Prepare to lose yourself in the heady, mythical expanse of the Vorrh.

  In B. Catling’s twisting, poetic narrative, Bakelite robots lie broken – their hard shells cracked by human desire – and an inquisitive cyclops waits for his keeper and guardian, growing in all directions. Beyond the colonial city of Essenwald lies the Vorrh, the forest which sucks souls and wipes minds. There, a writer heads out on a giddy mission to experience otherness, fallen angels observe humanity from afar, and two hunters – one carrying a bow carved from his lover, the other a charmed Lee-Enfield rifle – fight to the end.

  Thousands of miles away, famed photographer Eadweard Muybridge attempts to capture the ultimate truth, as rifle heiress Sarah Winchester erects a house to protect her from the spirits of her gun’s victims.

  In the tradition of China Miéville, Michael Moorcock and Alasdair Gray, B. Catling’s The Vorrh is literary dark fantasy which wilfully ignores boundaries, crossing over into surrealism, magic-realism, horror and steampunk.

  B. Catling

  THE VORRH

  Book One

  For David Russell and Iain Sinclair

  who gave me the compass, map and machete

  and insisted on the expedition.

  ‘I cannot think back to those days without recalling, over and over again, how difficult I found it in the beginning to get my breathing to work out right. Though I breathed in technically the right way, whenever I tried to keep my arm and shoulder muscles relaxed while drawing the bow the muscles of my legs stiffened all the more violently, as though my life depended on a firm foothold and secure stance, and as though, like Antaeus, I had strength from the ground.’

  Eugen Herrigel, Zen and The Art of Archery

  ‘The vitality of the demonic – what is guided by genius in the most literal sense – dies of course with the renunciation of a limitless lebensraum (formation of colonies).’

  Leo Frobenius, Paideuma. Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre

  ‘Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence. While I stood horror-struck, one of these creatures rose to his hands and knees, and went off on all-fours towards the river to drink. He lapped out of his hand, then sat up in the sunlight, crossing his shins in front of him, and after a time let his woolly head fall on his breastbone.’

  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  Foreword

  by Alan Moore

  B. Catling is a man of many callings. As a poet, his remarkable The Stumbling Block remains a darkly glittering obelisk on the form’s late twentieth century landscape. As a performer, he presents a presence which is visceral and solid and yet borders on a kind of alchemy, while as the artist of obsessive cyclops miniatures he catalogues the haunting totem-figures of a personal dreamtime. In his writings, in his savage and compassionate novella Bobby Awl, there is an earthy shamanism to his resurrection of the dead from archive fragments and forgotten plaster death-masks.

  All these areas of accomplishment, however, are subordinated to the fact that Catling, first and foremost, is a sculptor. His affecting piece to mark the Tower of London’s former execution block, a tenderly indented cushion cast from glass so hot that it required a year of careful cooling, a degree a day, displays the mixture of robust and sometimes hazardous material process with a deep, heartfelt humanity which typifies his work. The quality of lithic stillness brought to his performances is sculptural, as too is the apparent working method which informs his poetry and prose: there is a sense of raw experiential elements crushed manually together into a new shape; of language worked between the fingers into different and surprising contours. This procedural approach is witnessed in The Stumbling Block’s successful crafting of a piece of mental furniture, or Bobby Awl’s stark evocation of the physical from a surviving cast of its historical protagonist’s tormented features.

  Nowhere, though, is Catling’s way with literary clay revealed more eloquently than within the genuinely monumental pages of The Vorrh. It’s represented in the trilogy’s enormous mass and in its artful combination of bark, metal, mud and stone to build an edifice inside the reader’s mind; a tactile craftsman’s attitude that’s signalled from an unforgettable opening scene which centres on the manufacture of a legendary bow. The scene in question, from this brief description, might be taken for a standard trope of fantasy and myth that could derive from Tolkien, Robin Hood or Rama, were it not for the material of the item’s manufacture. With this early revelation, the intrigued and startled reader is informed that, if indeed this is a work of fantasy, it is a fantasy quite unlike anything they may have previously encountered in that much-abused and putatively primal genre.

  Primal because in this field of things that never happen we can perhaps see the origins of the imagination as a human faculty, and much-abused because of the absurdly limited palette of concepts which have come to represent fantasy’s most identifiable features and markers. By definition, surely every fantasy should be unique and individual, the product of a single vision and a single mind, with all of that mind’s idiosyncrasies informing every atom of the narrative. A genre that has been reduced by lazy stylisation to a narrow lexicon of signifiers… wizards, warriors, dwarves and dragons… is a genre with no room for Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, arguably the earliest picaresque questing fantasy; for David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus with its constantly morphing vistas and transmogrifying characters; for Mervyn Peake’s extraordinary Gormenghast books or for Michael Moorcock’s cut-silk Gloriana. It is certainly a genre insufficient to contain the vegetable eternities of Catling’s Vorrh.

  Please note that this is not to say that this feverish epic ruthlessly eschews genre conventions such as legendary bows, freakish monstrosities or, for that matter, haunted woodlands. Rather, in the fierce embrace of Catling’s language and in the context of the work’s hallucinatory and astounding milieu, such potentially shop-worn material transforms into a different substance altogether, as does the now corseted and hidebound genre struggling to encompass this unclassifiable extravagance. While in fantastic literature we’ve previously encountered the enchanted forest, it has not before included modern Irish peat-bogs and the jungles of colonial Africa amongst its various extremities. And where we may have chanced on angels in our fictions formerly, they are not simultaneously as awesome and as poignant as the disenfranchised Erstwhile. Although it is not in fact the case, The Vorrh could easily be taken for the work of someone who, prior to that point, had never read a line of fantasy, such is its staggering originality.

  As with the very best works in this slippery and elusive genre, one cannot pursue the intricacies and phantasmagorias of The Vorrh without a mounting certainty that the unfolding story is concerned with something other than its own remarkable contortions and reversals. Just as in the ritual labyrinth of Gormenghast that conjures twentieth century England so astutely, or in Lindsay’s Tormance which appears to speak to issues of both sexuality and metaphysics, so too in The Vorrh are fugitive suggestions of a world that’s obsolete and vanished, reconfigured radically and reassembled as the speculative inner-space cartography of territories to come, with personal psychology construed as undergrowth. Bakelite chimeras recall the 1950s working classes’ endless sepia indoors, just as the book’s crepuscular Victoriana conjures some lost Children’s Treasury of Empire, a resort of rained-off Sundays, vivid line engravings of unlikely animals, of dervishes,
plate-lipped Ubangi, men with antiquated guns. In its Ernst-like collage of elements and sculptural assemblage of found objects, Catling’s striding debut builds a literature of unrestrained futurity out from the fond and sorry debris of a dissipating past.

  The Vorrh’s distinctive approach to character and cast of players is worth noting. Prising out obscure yet true-life stories from their real-world mountings to reset within his lurid and profound mosaic, Catling gives us Eadweard Muybridge, the anatomist of the moment, in an unbelievable but actual consultation with Sir William Withey Gull, alleged anatomist of Whitechapel, the historicity of these protagonists not for an instant out of place amidst the pageant of monocular and brooding outcasts or distressing headless anthropophagi. Within the moss-blurred reaches of The Vorrh’s untended paradise, the factual is not privileged in its relationship with the fantastical and each intrudes upon the other’s territory, an insidious kudzu creep that rewrites memory and leaves the fixed past open to invasion. There is the impression, as with any genuine mythology or romance, that these inconceivable events must in a sense have happened or perhaps be somehow happening perpetually, somewhere beneath the skin of being.

  Easily the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy and ranking amongst the best pieces ever written in that genre, with The Vorrh we are presented with a sprawling immaterial organism which leaves the reader filthy with its seeds and spores, encouraging new growth and threatening a great reforesting of the imagination.

  Comedies of manners set in mews and crescents that have lost their meaning, auto-heroising romps through sloppy pseudo-medieval fens, our writings are increasingly outgunned by our experience and are too narrow to describe, contain, or even name our current circumstance. In the original-growth arbours of The Vorrh, new routes are posited and new agendas are implicit in the sinister viridian dapple. As the greyed-out urban street-grid of our ideologies and ways of thinking falls inevitably into disrepair and disappearance, Catling’s stupefying work provides both viable alternatives and meaningful escape into its tropic possibilities.

  It offers us a welcome to the wilderness.

  Northampton, 12 June 2012

  PART ONE

  1

  “That which is marred at birth Time shall not mend,

  Nor water out of bitter well make clean;

  All evil thing returneth at the end,

  Or elseway walketh in our blood unseen.

  Whereby the more is sorrow in certaine—

  Dayspring mishandled cometh not agen.”

  The hotel was ponderous, grand and encrusted with gloom. Its tall baroque rooms and corridors were grudgingly fortified by the vicious light that desperately tried to penetrate the heavy curtains and starched formalities. The Frenchman’s suites of rooms were the hotel’s finest, but drab and without the illusive flair which sometimes makes audacious architecture appear natural.

  He stood naked and shrivelled in the marble and glass bathroom, the last feeble surface scars on his neck and wrists throbbing red, the deep plucking of his other wrist stitched back together. The dose of barbiturates had done nothing and he was being mocked by flights of gilded putti and ignored by the wafting indifferent female figurines that shared the room. He stood with his cock in his hand, trying not to see his reflection in the gigantic mirror before him. He was small and prematurely old. The services of his hand were without effect and the purple veined stump was more fatigued than he was. He could summon no image to his service to enthrall and instigate the action, even though he had witnessed many and imagined more. He knew that Charlotte, his maîtresse de convenance, and his servant were waiting for him in the next room. He knew that the chauffeur might have brought him some fruit of the gutter or the docks to arouse him. He knew that they were as bored as he. He knew that he had invented everything in his and their lives and maybe elsewhere in the world. Sometimes he thought he had dreamt reality itself. Dreamt it outside of sleep, which now eluded him continually.

  The drugs sometimes coddled him into that place without his mind nagging on, but it was rare. The right combinations of doses refused to remain stable. The growing quantities of the shifting cocktails wrung him without the softness, the blur that he so craved. He made Charlotte write it all down. The quantities, the mixtures, the times. It must be there, concealed in the now concrete broth of unbeing. He liked the idea of being Dr Jekyll, experimenting with secret potions, when he remembered what it was like. He sometimes doubted Charlotte’s ability to keep accurate records. She could be making careless mistakes or lying about the doses. They were not working in the way he wanted. He had crossed words with her over the last few days. She claimed to be doing exactly as instructed, trying to calm him with her infuriating patience. But he knew she was tricking him with her cunning servant’s slyness. Some nights and most mornings found him on the floor, crawling on hands and knees, away or towards the thing that was strangling his heart. He had begun to sleep on the floor. The terror of falling off his shaking bed made him drag the mattress down there. He had found the medicine and the bathroom and stood again before the smirking mirror.

  Last night, there had been a carnival and fireworks outside. Music and gaiety had clawed at his upper windows. This morning it was wet outside. He could hear the grit and spent festivities being swept away in the quiet rain. A tinge of sulphur and nitrate in the clinging air.

  He raised his eyes to the mirror and smirked. Max Kinder was standing 4 in the gilded frame where the glass should be, naked and looking exactly like him again. He lifted his tired arm and Max mirrored it perfectly. This had been the comedian’s great invention: the live reflection. An act that would be copied throughout the century and beyond. He had often copied Kinder’s acts. The hopeless fop incapable of understanding how the world worked. His comic gestures of abrupt shock and dazed examination carved out the first continual comic character identity to grace the new flickering screen. He tugged his moustache and Max did the same. Then Max pointed at the open wound in his arm, deeply vented and bloodless. He had died nine years before, at the height of his fame, in another grand hotel, his wife cutting first, his hand gripping hers on the razor. This was a very different mirror dance. The Frenchman nodded and averted his eyes as Max stiffened back into him and glass. He knew he had exhausted his imagination, his wealth and his libido. He knew he had lost a precious gift, but did not know what it had been. He knew he had once been Raymond Roussel. He knew the hollow longing and guilt were growing stronger, and that there was no money or memory to hold on to. There were no facts to grip and the fictions were worn out. He then realised it was time to die, and he did.

  2

  ‘The eyes have fallen into disuse in their method of stringing them. Nor is the notch frontally in the middle ends of the bow.’

  Leo Frobenius, The Bow, Atlantis,

  The Voice of Africa. Vol. 1

  The bow I carry with me into the wilderness, I made of Este.

  She died just before dawn, ten days ago. She had seen her death while working in her garden, saw the places between plants where she no longer stood, an uncapping of momentum in the afternoon sun. She prepared me for what had to be done, walking back into our simple house and removing her straw hat, returning it to its shadow and nail on the north wall.

  She was born a seer and some part of her seeing lived in the expectancy of her departure, a breeze before a wave, before a storm. Seers die in a threefold lapse, from the outside in. The details and confinement of each infolding had to be carefully marked and heard without panic or emotion on my part, for I then took on a different role.

  We said goodbye during the days leading to her night. Then all of my feelings were put away; there were more important rituals to perform. All this I knew. From our first agreement to be together it had been described, it had been unfolded. Our love and companionship grew in the confines and the constantly open door of its demand, and secretly I rehearsed my distance and practised the deceit of loneliness.

  As I stood bef
ore our solid wooden table with her blood drying stiff on my skin, her body lay divided and stripped into materials and language. My back and hands ached from the labour of splitting her apart, and I could still hear her words. The calm instruction of my task repeated over and over again, embedded with a singsong insistence to erase my forgetfulness and its fence of doubt. The entire room was covered in blood, yet no insect would trespass this space, no fly would drink her, no ant would forage her marrow. We were sealed against the world during those days, my task determined, basic and kind.

  She had explained all this to me while I served her breakfast on a rare rainy morning. The black bread and yellow butter had seemed to stare from its plate with mocking intensity, the fruit pulsing and warping into obscene ducts and ventricles, vivid in innocence at every direct glance. I perched on the edge of the bed, listening to her simple words glide and agree with the rain, while my fear ignited them into petrol wires of ferocious anger, stuffed into my oxygenless, hidden core.

  I shaved long, flat strips from the bones of her legs. Plaiting sinew and tendon, I stretched muscle into interwoven pages and bound them with flax she had cut from the garden. I made the bow of these, setting the fibres and grains of her tissue in opposition, the raw arc congealing, twisting and shrinking into its proportion of purpose. I removed her unused womb and placed her dismembered hands inside it, sealing the misshapen ball which sometimes moved a little in its settling. I shaved her head and removed her tongue and eyes, and folded them inside her heart. My tasks finished, I placed the nameless objects on the wooden draining board of the sink. They sat in mute splendour, glowing in their strangeness, untouched by any criminal light. What remained on the table and floor was simply waste. I left it for the wild dogs when I departed that place with all its doors and windows open. For three days I lived with the inventions of her and the unused scraps, the air scented by her presence, the musk-deep smell of her oil and movement. The pile of her thick, unwashed hair seemed to breathe and swell against the bars of sunlight that turned the room towards evening. These known parts of her stroked away the anxious perfumes, the harsh iron of her blood and the deeper saturated smoulders of her unlocked interior. On the third day I buried her heart, womb and head in the garden in a small, circular pit she had dug with her very hands a week before.