The Gormenghast Trilogy

"Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast comes out at a pretty similar time to Tolkien. It’s a book that fantasy writers who are less keen on Tolkien often hold up as the one that inspires them. Michael Moorcock , who famously thinks Tolkien is deeply conservative and unpleasant in all sorts of ways and limits what fantasy can be; China Miéville similarly – they’re both big Peake fans. I don’t think you have to choose between Tolkien and Peake, necessarily, but I think Peake is doing something that’s a bit different. There’s no real magic in Peake; there are no wizards as such. Instead, there’s this enormous castle – that’s what he usually calls it – which is Gormenghast. It sprawls over vast distances and is inhabited by deeply weird people living by strange rituals. It begins pretty Gothic in the first book. The second book opens out and is a bit sunnier. In the third book, Titus Alone, the principal character leaves Gormenghast and travels into a strange city, which is surprisingly modern based on what you’ve come to expect from the first book… Peake was unwell when he was writing the third book, and sometimes the difference has been attributed to that. I’m less sympathetic to that argumen because if you look at the drafts, which are in the British Library, it’s very clear that he’s trying to change his writing style when he’s writing the outside-Gormenghast stuff, trying to go for something more like Samuel Beckett . Titus Alone makes you really disappointed that it’s not set in Gormenghast, but that’s by design. It’s about missing Gormenghast and being somewhere else. One of the things Peake does really well is write about his weird characters in deeply sympathetic ways. Gormenghast is about a community of people who can’t quite connect or communicate with each other, and who rely on rituals to set the boundaries of their lives. That’s the environment in which the central character, Titus Groan, grows up; and the environment that Steerpike, who starts seeming heroic but becomes more villainous, takes advantage of – because Steerpike is a brilliant manipulator of people, and the fact that people in Gormenghast don’t talk to each other very well makes it easy for him to manipulate them. It’s a weird book to read, because you can admire Steerpike as the most active character, the one who’s trying to change things, but he’s ripping apart the world of these people who you’re also quite sympathetic towards. It’s interesting. Peake is a brilliant prose stylist in all sorts of ways. He writes very beautifully about the castle, and he really conjures up its slow rhythms. It’s a book that will stop you from reading it fast. If you’re someone who’s used to being able to go through books quickly, you will lose the thread, because the prose is deliberately quite labyrinthine and lumbering. It’s designed to slow you down so that you feel the weight of Gormenghast itself, and you need to let the prose do that work on you. But its enchantment is a very powerful one. People who can slow down to its pace usually get drawn in. Yes. It gives this incredible sense of place. That’s partly through the prose. Peake’s also a very effective stager of scenes. He has a really brilliant bravura scene at the beginning where Steerpike is climbing over the roofs of Gormenghast, looking through windows and dropping in and out, and is in danger of various kinds… Peake is prepared to skip periods of years where not very much happens. He puts you next to lots of different characters, so you can see how they see the world. At the same time, he denies you access to certain characters’ minds. So the world building is done through glimpses of this strange society, being put next to different characters, through the tone of the prose, and through providing strange but believable interactions. I think my personal favourite scene is when Titus has rebelled and is being kept imprisoned in a place called the Lichen Fort. His headmaster, Bellgrove, turns up to try and scold him. He’s terrible at scolding, so they end up playing marbles instead. After a while, another quite sympathetic character arrives, and the headmaster looks up, embarrassed… But they just all end up playing marbles for ages. It’s the kind of weird, trivial thing that a lot of writers would not have thought to put in their fantasy. It’s a really wonderful little scene, in this world where people often can’t build bridges of sympathy to one another, but it does happen for a moment. Peake’s great at that kind of variation: he writes characters who feel like believably weird and dysfunctional people, and then he puts them together and wonderful things ensue."

"How do I describe Gormenghast ? Let’s put it this way: if Edgar Allan Poe had written epic fantasy, he would have written Gormenghast . I love these books. The first one is about the castle Gormenghast, where this ancient family lives, and the castle itself is almost endless. It seems to exist in its own little pocket dimension, and is fairly disconnected from the rest of the world. Again, the language is gorgeous. It’s so Gothic – it’s like marzipan, it’s so rich, so overly described and wonderful. He goes into excessive but delightful detail, and all of the characters are grotesques in the best possible way. It’s like Peake has taken Dickens’ tendencies towards grotesquery, and just pushed that to eleven. I thoroughly enjoyed it because of the setting, the mood. The characters are memorable and the language is delightful. I came to the series in an interesting way. I was on book tour for the self-published edition of Eragon – this would have been in 2002 or early 2003 – and I was in Galveston, Texas. I was in a used bookstore doing an event, and after I was done signing, I wandered around in the shelving, and found a copy of the third book in the series: Titus Alone . Now, I had never heard of these books. The internet was just starting to really gear up, and I’d been homeschooled, so I was fairly disconnected from the larger sphere of the fantasy tradition. I picked up this book, and started reading it completely out of context, with no idea of the previous two books… And it was so strange and eerie, it almost read like science fiction. In the third book, Titus, the main character, who is the heir to Castle Gormenghast, leaves his little pocket world. He goes out into the larger world. Mervyn Peake had some psychological issues, which caused him problems later in life. He also fought in World War I and saw quite a bit of savagery, as people did who fought. And it comes out in that text, in the same way you see it with other authors who went through the experience of that generation. Everyone processed it differently, but Mervyn Peake, I think, was processing it through his writing and his illustrations. He started as a children’s book illustrator, of all things – so through the books, you’ll come across these pages of illustrations of all the characters, which adds so much to the flavour of the story. So I recommend this if you’re looking for something that feels like a dark fever dream. People say that about books – ‘Oh, it reads like a fever dream’ – but Gormenghast really does. And to be fair, the original version of Titus Alone that was published was an unfinished manuscript, which was chopped up by the publisher, and later on a more complete form of the manuscript was discovered, and that was released as part of an omnibus – which has a foreword by Michael Moorcock, I believe. It does not entirely bring the book up, perhaps, to the standard of the first two, but it does substantially improve it. I’ve always said that if I could have picked one director to do a good Gormenghast adaptation, it would have been the guy who did Amelie , Jean-Pierre Jeunet. If you see some of his other movies, like Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, they’re very much in the vein of Gormenghast . If you like those movies, I think you would like these books. They’re not even in the same universe. Eddison and Tolkien you can compare, because they’re both writing a big epic quest story. The morality is just completely different with Gormenghast . It feels like he decided to focus on a place, and make the place itself a character, even more than Middle-earth is a character within The Lord of the Rings . I’m not from the UK, but as an outsider, it does seem also as if Peake was very much interested and concerned with class structures and established aristocracy, in a way that Tolkien wasn’t interested in examining. The biggest difference is that Peake pursued the grotesquery of his setting and his characters. And although there is a striking beauty to that at times – for example, there’s a fight scene lit by lightning, and the way it’s described is incredibly stark and startling and awesome; I wouldn’t be surprised if Cormac McCarthy had read Mervyn Peake – but he doesn’t focus on the beauty of things the way Tolkien does. He’s a much harsher soul than Tolkien. There’s a certain gentleness to Tolkien – a steel too, but a certain gentleness and goodness. Peake may have been a perfectly good person himself, but he focuses on different things in his writing. But it’s not depressing – it’s not grimdark in the modern sense."