The Erstwhile

This book is Brian Catling's sequel to the incredible fantasy novel The Vorrh, which I raved about. The reason it's taken me several months to finish a book I was extremely excited about is something you may have picked up on in the post about its prior instalment - this is a very hard series of books to follow. Not to swallow - as with its predecessor Catling's prose herein is of the utmost calibre in imaginative flights of darkness, beauty, horror and bizarreness. So as with the first book in the trilogy I can't, and even if I could wouldn't for want of spoiling such a fresh experience, tell you exactly what is going on in these books yet.

   Again, fantastical elements of this biblically-overgrown alternate version of Earth history are blended together with real historical bits, like William Blake or the Bedlam insane asylum. There is at least one thing I can tell you of what happens in this instalment with certainty. As the colonial settlers of Essenwald continue to plunge deeper into the Vorrh, they are beginning to disturb long-dormant strange creatures: these are the erstwhile, the angels who were given by God the task of guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden when humanity had been yeeted from it. However over the millennia, with the growth and thickening of the forest, they have lost their purpose, and in many cases their minds; most burying themselves in the ground and going to sleep. But now, as the Europeans disturb ever closer to the heart of the forest, they are waking up. And doing, to put it mildly, weird shit. One of these erstwhile has ended up in Bedlam, and makes friends with a German doctor who is visiting to investigate a tangential matter. Honestly, that's about all I can say with much surety. It certainly feels like things are drawing together loosely - plot elements overlapping increasingly and variably other characters from differing strands of the prior story crossing paths or conflicting unseen; but as with the first book this is an enigmatic novel and a half. Still beautifully-written though. Catling has a knack for describing actions and expressions or inheritances with a turn of phrase barely three or four words long that punches you in the brain's language centre so hard you wonder how you had never heard that combination of components used before, now it seems so obviously apt.

   As with the first book, a strong recommendation to any and all readers willing to get a bit lost. But be warned. If you spend too long in the Vorrh, it starts to affect your mind...