This was my first taste of a B. Catling novel. I’ve had the first two books in the Vorrh trilogy waiting in my TBR for a while now and this seemed like a nice taster for Catling’s prose style.
The first, second, third, fourth, and fifth words that spring to mind when I think about this book are weird, weird, weird, weird, and weird. You can fill the rest of the top ten with that as well.
Aalbert, aka Earwig, is paid to watch over a young girl in a flat in Liège shortly after WWI. She wears dentures made from ice which have to be replaced every 3 hours. That’s the starting point of the book. After that, things get strange.
On a rare trip out to a local bar, Earwig runs into a mysterious gent with magical powers who engineers a horrendous accident. This somehow leads to an evil immortal cat with the worst case of fleas in history being delivered to the flat to share their lives and a trip to Paris.
As I said, weird.
I think I enjoyed this book. I was certainly never bored, but I haven’t the faintest idea what it was about or why any of it happened. The prose reminded me very strongly of Mervyn Peake with his habit of never using one word where three paragraphs will do instead, and the cast of well-drawn grotesques behaving in grotesque manners. Luckily, the word choices are extremely good and frequently very funny, despite the longwindedness.
I'm slightly disappointed that the evil cat aspect promised by the book cover doesn't really live up to the expectations raised by the blurbs.
I can't deny it's well written, frequently funny and never boring but I’m almost nervous to start on the Vorrh trilogy now. This book is so strange, but only 150 pages. Will over 1000 pages of this same style be readable?
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