Brian Catling’s entrancing novel comes with blasts of high praise from two heralds of the Great Literary Reconciliation, Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, who have long promoted the notion that popular genres – especially fantasy, with its sophisticated lexicon of narrative imagery – can be the seedbed for a new type of literary fiction. In the 1960s, this was the hope expressed by the likes of Ballard, Aldiss and others of us around New Worlds magazine who despaired of conventional literature’s inability to engage substantially with the modern world and thought to experiment with the subject matter and methods of imaginative fiction. A generation or so later Salman Rushdie and Michael Chabon, in particular, expressed similar frustrations and solutions, only to be attacked by those US academics whose livings were perhaps most threatened by the possibility that they were right.

Brian Catling has spent much of his creative life blending and bending. A performance poet, sculptor, novelist and sometime academic, he riffs here off the French surrealist Raymond Roussel, whose idiosyncratic book Impressions of Africa also featured a forest called the Vorrh. Thinly disguised, Roussel is a major character in what is one of the most original works of visionary fiction since Peake or Carpentier. Like them it is sui generis and like them will probably influence many future works of imaginative fiction.

The Vorrh is a semi-tropical forest older than mankind. It is immeasurable and apparently has no centre. Somewhere within it lies the Garden of Eden and near it roam Adam, Eve and their children, degenerate cannibals, or so some believe. Every story about the Vorrh is true and untrue, every narrative embodies countless other narratives, all taking place within the forest. The Vorrh, like so much in this novel, is sentient. It might be intelligent. At its southern edge it permits a few to hack a wedge in and take its timber. A great, decaying Middle European city, Essenwald, stands at the edge, existing chiefly on the timber trade. Large mansions display the wealth of its founders. A train makes regular journeys carrying a few tourists and explorers and near-human native slaves in and logs out. The slaves are unnaturally passive: only two Europeans at the log-front know the disgusting, unthinkable secret of making them work. They are tainted, addicted, morally and physically corrupt.

Elsewhere in the Vorrh colonial soldiers seek to civilise another native race who eventually turn on them and kill them. Hunters hunt hunters. A man makes himself a sentient bow from the spine of his dead lover, who might have been a forest goddess. The weirdness increases. Everywhere monsters are born and demigods created from their corpses. In Essenwald a boy, whom the world would destroy if it knew he existed, is educated by one-eyed Bakelite robots in the underground rooms of a house maintained by a mysterious watcher. Those who disobey the watcher are punished in bizarre ways. One has his son taken from him and returned with his hands sewn on backwards. During the city’s carnivale, when all go masked, two young women take daring actions which will affect many others for good and for ill.

Meanwhile, the Bowman, armed with a massive Gabbet-Fairfax Mars pistol and his sentient bow and arrows, seeks to cross the Vorrh, while a human native, Tsungali, tracks him, wanting to kill him with the Lee-Enfield rifle issued when Tsungali was a colonial policeman. All the weapons have names and personalities. Ghosts and dreams inform them. The Bowman cannot remember if he has crossed the forest or not. Mysteries proliferate. Every image has at least one meaning. Slowly, various narratives come together.

By the time “the Frenchman”, evidently the neurasthenic Roussel, arrives on the scene, followed a little later by the experimental photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the book has acquired some of the best qualities of a Pynchon novel. Indeed, Pynchon is Catling’s nearest comparison. His themes are the many forms of psychic and physical colonisation. Combining several different kinds of narrative, as well as referencing many more, Catling borrows from popular and marginal sources to tell a story which has all Peake’s remorseless drive and remains in the mind the whole time one is away from it.

The novel is written in good, muscular language as original as its imagery; it contains paragraphs and observations you continually want to quote. Like an early Ballard novel, The Vorrh does not promote exoticism for its own sake yet is full of wonderful, telling imagery and a strong sense of resolution. For all its page-turning story, it is a poet’s novel, a serious piece of writing. I understand there are to be two sequels. I can barely wait to read the next one.

• London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction, edited by Michael Moorcock and Allan Kausch, is published by Merlin Press. To order The Vorrh for £16 (RRP £20), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.Free UK p&p on online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.