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.
PART ONE
1
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.’
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.