A New GWG Blog Series

Hello, readers! Lately, I’ve been fielding a lot of requests for book recommendations, mostly from clients and students eager to deepen their fiction reading practice. (I guess my latest blog had the desired effect!) These requests are, of course, music to my ears; I always jump at the chance to share the novels that have shaped my own intellectual and creative life.

So, from now on, I plan to post reading recommendations on this blog in addition to my usual thought-pieces. These posts will take a much more casual tone than my academic and professional work; I’ll write them quickly, in casual language, and post them with minimal edits. In time, my colleagues might also post their own recommendations, likely in a similar style. I hope you find them inspiring! All of the Gilliam Writers Group’s tutors and coaches are voracious readers, and because we all have such different literary interests, I suspect this new blog series will make for good entertainment.

Without further ado, here’s my first reading recommendation for the Gilliam Writers Group blog:

Brian Catling’s The Vorrh (2012) is one of my all-time favorite works of speculative fiction, but it’s also a daunting one to review because it doesn’t conform to the labels we normally use to categorize books. The book world’s reliance on these labels (genre terms and descriptors like “coming-of-age,” “YA,” “fantasy,” “romance,” “literary,” “upmarket,” “high-concept,” “popular,” and, perhaps most egregious of all, “World”) is something I partially dislike; they so easily become self-fulfilling prophecies, limiting the creativity of individual authors and the willingness of agents and publishers to support original work. On the other hand, literature needs some kind of shorthand to function. It may be that the book industry currently over-relies on commercial classifications, and it may also be that this is making us lazy as readers and writers, but there’s still a lot to be said for the impulse to sort. 

The Vorrh, however, requires no classification but the following: “good book – read it.” I’m not even going to try to tell you exactly what it’s about, because there are multiple protagonists and the plot is, shall we say, ‘challenging’ to compare with the plots of other books. Here’s what I can tell you. First, the setting is a fantasy version / alternate history of colonial-era Africa and Europe (and the US, but not as much), grounded specifically in the mid-to-late 1800s. Second, the novel’s main conceit is that there’s an immense, sentient jungle in the heart of Africa called the Vorrh, within which lies the lost Garden of Eden.

A few more details: The further you travel into the Vorrh, the crazier you get, and the crazier everything else gets, too; time and space are warped in the jungle’s heart, and the whole locale teems with mythical creatures from the Bible and other important works of literature. Several human tribes also inhabit the forest’s fringes, and I guess they’re just used to its malign influence, because they don’t struggle with constant low-grade insanity like the travelers who sometimes stray into their midst. They do, however, struggle with some very impressive clairvoyants who live among them, frightening all and sundry with their ability to see the future.

The novel’s plot centers on a series of horrifying, beautiful events related to a) the Vorrh, b) a colonial city encroaching on one of its borders, and c) a sensitive young cyclops who lives in that city. Through these events, Catling explores various unusual subjects, including the psychological discontents of early modern globalization, the historical fallout from the Age of Exploration, subconscious archetypes of Western thought, the genesis of stop-motion film, and the allegory of the hero’s journey.

The Vorrh is admittedly a lot to handle. It’s also an absolutely brilliant work of art. Before writing this novel (his very first!), Catling was, and still is, active as a poet, sculptor, performance artist, Oxford don, and film maker. Unsurprisingly, this pan-medium creative background shines through to stunning effect in every inch of his prose. Catling’s style is immediate, tactile, shamelessly sprawling and descriptive. His characters are solidly constructed, each of them wrought of old, very old, source material worked into a vigorous new shape.

Most importantly of all, his novel is incredibly satisfying to read. So pick up your machetes, folks, strap on your boots, and prepare to hack your way through this luscious nightmare of a book. It’s a drama and an adventure and a tragedy; it’s a romance and a sinister comedy; it’s got horror and mystery and high-concept smut; in a word, it’s speculative fiction. And it’s going to blow you away.