Imagination is a gift, prophecy a curse.

The Vorrh trilogy is a visionary work that takes vision as its guiding theme — sight and blindness, reality and imagination, past and prophecy. Here, tangled in the primeval foliage of Catling's weird prose, are the cyclops-messiah Ishmael, raised by insectoid steampunk robots, a blind girl gifted with sight, a slavedriver deprived of his, and motion picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, resurrected from his own ghostly colloidal plates. The original cockney seer, Blake, shows up in colloquy with an autistic angel called Nicholas Parsons; and Blake's pre- and post-lapsarian visions are echoed in the trilogy's grounding of the Eden myth in the Vorrh, the sentient forest at the heart of Africa, its various colonial penetrations symbolic of the Fall. What's lost from the world, as alluded to in the title of this third volume, is unity, the oneness of vision embodied in Ishmael and sought by the failed angels, the "erstwhile", to atone for their failure to rein in mankind's hideous excesses — the ugliest of which looms over The Cloven in the shape of the second world war.

I think Catling is unique in several respects. One is his ability to write action scenes, and scenes of violence and torture, in ways that defy cliché: his bad guys are thoroughly, creatively, nasty, the assassin and all-round instrument of evil Sidrus being exhibit A. In this third installment, Sidrus finally gets his comeuppance in one of the series' trademark incidents of gloriously original body horror, but even what's left of him remains deeply menacing. Another is the effortlessness with which he introduces the historical to the fictional — Muybridge, Blake, and, in The Cloven, Eugène Marais are as integral to and as at home in the story as Ishmael, Meta, or Solli the teenage cockney Jewish gangster. It's like they lived to be in these stories! Another is the uncultivated profusion of his prose style. Verbing of nouns often comes across as a cheap and flashy authorial trick, but when Catling does it it's always a thrill. His language is so rich, baroque at times, that it should be impossible to sustain over a 1200+ page trilogy, but it's indefatigable, endlessly surprising.

I still think the trilogy format is basically stupid and redundant, but I understand it from a publishing standpoint. The Cloven draws together most, but not all, of the myraid plot strands scattered across the first two books. It's a highly satisfactory collection of conclusions, and the epilogue with my favourite two characters, the angel Nicholas and his counterpart, lovable old Prof. Schumann, wading into the Thames estuary, actually made me well up a little. The conclusion to the story as a whole is beautiful, breathtaking — a grand perversion of the usual "fate of mankind" binary. I stupidly let 2+ years elapse between books one and two, and 18 months between 2 and 3, so I'd forgotten many details. But that just heightens my anticipatory pleasure at the prospect of wandering again through this weird and endlessly wonderful fantasy world full of horrors, curiosities and delights. ( )