The Vorrh
by Brian Catling
First reviewed December 2015
This book stuck to my brain for its general weirdness. This essay needed a lot of editing because even though I know what I was trying to say, it didn’t come across as very clearly.
(I try to only edit for clarity, leaving in any silly conclusions or suppositions even if I don’t agree with them anymore).
The Vorrh reminded me of Mulholland Drive, evoking similar vibes to the flush of frustration I felt at 19 for not quite understanding what I had just watched. I later read a critique [uh, pretty sure it was Maddox from The Best Page in the Universe; I wonder why 2015 me tried to elide that? -ed from 2023] that said if you liked the movie but didn’t quite follow it you were announcing your insipid shallowness, telling the world you were dim enough to be entertained solely by flashing lights and moving colors. Those scornful words fed my ego: the movie didn’t really make sense; other people didn’t get it either; people who said they likd it weren’t smart, they were faking it. If I said I liked Mulholland Drive and ended up on the receiving end of such a criticism, late-teenaged me would have been so embarrassed as to quit espousing opinions. Such is the nature of representing your persona through cultural artifacts—you gotta back it up.
Move fifteen years into the future and that type of loud, self-righteous derision feels like a hollow assault, more telling about the speaker of the words than their target. I don’t actually understand why most people around me do what they do, and I suspect those that believe their own motivations are what fuels everyone else are the apotheosis of self-centered. Perhaps it is the Hollywood tropes—where motivations are clear and nothing is borne from chaos—that breeds such shallowness. Whatever the case, there is no shame in enjoying flashing lights and pretty colors, even if you cannot express exactly why.
That said, I’m not sure if I liked The Vorrh for what it was, or for what I think it might have been. I worry that I am simply covering myself with juvenile bravado: “Oh yeah, I think I remember liking some of her older stuff,” said with just enough hesitation when, after the song ends, you invariably refer to Rilo Kiley as a “she” and not as the name of the entire band. I do not know what I think The Vorrh was, though I am certain the words “surrealist,” and “existential,” and even “Kafkaesque” will bubble up from the depths of one’s literary vocabulary when trying to dissect the plot. It is pretty, though: “Like the experience of all about to separate, the strain of an imagined elsewhere bore a hurtful torque on the moments they actually inhabited.”
I’m not exactly sure what I pulled from the book; the VanderMeer trilogy of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance come to mind—those books squandered what they promised but were cohesive even if tedious. Maybe the fault lies with me, because I didn’t know enough about the real-world turn-of-the-last-century figures incorporated into The Vorrh. I couldn’t have said when it was set until about three hundred pages in. I knew there were airplanes and world wars and guns and cars, but who’s to say that in this mysterious timeline of bug-robots and first-person-present-narrative-bowmen, this wasn’t antediluvian Atlantis, or post-alien Egypt?
It does The Vorrh a disservice to try to encapsulate what it is; the beauty cannot be captured in the plot, but in the writing:
“William, which do you think: the blue or the green?”
“I only just bought ye the blue one; wear that.”
“Yes, but which do you think is best for tonight? The green is more my colour.”
“Then why did we buy the blue?” he said crossly, as the stud sprang from his fingers and disappeared under the bed. He cursed and crawled after it, his shiny black dress trousers ruffling up the small carpet. She ignored his response.
“It’s a choice between them, though; I only have the two.”
“Thank Christ for that, or we would be here all night!” he said from under the bed, his voice humming strangely in the resonance of the china chamberpot. He found the stud and crawled out to start pulling at his collar again.
Marie Maclish was not normally a woman to engage with such coquettish uncertainty; the rest of her stern life was run on simple facts and basic commodities, but she was enjoying herself. This little charade of choice took her back to the Highlands, to her grandmother’s house and the girls’ play of dressing up in women’s lives.
He had finished with the collar but his twisting tie looked limp and apologetic. He was admiring it, when she laughed.
“What?” he demanded.
“What? Oh, William, look at the state of it!”
“The state of what?”
She put the dresses down and went over to adjust the tie, smiling playfully. He bristled at her touch. The more she pulled, the more he stiffened. As her smile fizzled out, his warmth drained away.
“It was perfectly fine, woman; now it’s a mess,” he said, pushing her fingers away. “We haven’t got time for this—we can’t be late.”
She said nothing and went back to her dresses; they seemed shrunken and indifferent. He looked over his shoulder.
“Where’s the blue?” he said, against the fret of disappointment that was filling the room. “I don’t know what all the fuss is about; it’s not you they will all be watching tonight,” he concluded, grabbing his coat and yanking the door open.
She watched him disappear out of the room. After a few static moments, she dressed and went down to wait beside him for the arrival of the car to take them to the celebration. She looked graceful and quiet, standing in front of the house, her hair and eyes accentuated by the green of the dress, her husband too caught up and curt to notice.
Its oddness can really only be mirrored with snapshot non sequiturs, the aforementioned robots and bowmen contrasted with the rest of the absurdist’s litany: shaman and Cyclopes, mind control and soul distortion, ghosts and angels. You will find only what you bring in—to be prepared to enter The Vorrh is to not be prepared. At all. Forget about the bug-robots.
Personally, I could not release all of my hang-ups before reading The Vorrh, so I will warn you: this book were just straight-up icky. I retain my extreme prudency in fantasy fiction—one does not see Garion do more than kiss Ce’nedra, ever—but The Vorrh started with gore and moved into detailed prurience. I do not enjoy reading such things. Gross bits can and perhaps need to happen—strife as a source of character growth or to goad the plot, because the world is not idyllic—but not as titillation, not simply because you can. At least, not for me. And definitely not on the second page of the story. Not my thing. The Vorrh is, I suppose, not my thing in toto. But that might be part of why I read it:
“Seil Kor, my friend, are you telling me that the Garden of Eden is located in the Vorrh?”
“Yes, it is so. But Eden is only a corner of God’s garden; the rest of the clearing is where God walks, to think in worldly ways. It is impossible in heaven, where all things are the same, without form or colour, temperature or change. In his worldly garden, he wears a gown of senses, woven in our time. He lets rocks and stones, wind and water, clothe his invisible ideas. He pictures our life in the matter that makes us.”
The Frenchman was shocked and moved by such faith and by the clarity that bound it. Delaying his cynicism, he tried desperately to shape his next question outside of his normal patronizing indifference. “How do you know this?” he asked.
And that might be part of why I liked it. Maybe if it is your thing—weird, indescribable plots filled with horrible atrocities and seemingly pointless activities bound together in beautiful words and engaging, thoroughly bizarre, characters—then this will be your book. So I guess the question is, how did you feel about reading five hundred pages of flashing lights and pretty colors?