Product Description

Enter the world of Gormenghast...the vast crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is Lord and heir. Gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, manipulation and murder - a tour de force that ranks as one of the twentieth century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing. "Gormenghast" is more than a sequel to "Titus Groan" - it is an enrichment and deepening of that book. The fertility of incident, character and rich atmosphere combine in a tour de force that ranks as one of this century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47153 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

From the Publisher
‘The Gormenghast Trilogy is one of the most important works of the imagination to come out of [this] age’ Anthony Burgess, Spectator

About the Author
Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in Kuling, Central Southern China, where his father was a medical missionary.His education began in China and then continued at Eltham College in South East London, followed by the Croydon School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools.Subsequently he became an artist, married the painter Maeve Gilmore in 1937 and had three children.During the Second World War he established a reputation as a gifted book illustrator for Ride a Cock Horse (1940), The Hunting of the Snark (1941), and The Rime of The Ancient Mariner (1943).Other books include Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland and Grimm's Household Tales (both 1946) and Treasure Island (1949).Titus Groan was published in 1946, followed in 1950 by Gormenghast.Among his other works are Shapes and Sounds (1941), Rhymes Without Reason (1944), Letters from a Lost Uncle (1948) and Mr Pye (1953).He also wrote a number of plays including The Wit to Woo (1957), which was met by critical failure.Titus Alone was published in 1959.Mervyn Peake died in 1968.

Customer Reviews

Gothic Fantasy at its all-time best!
Mervyn Peake's seminal work of gothic fantasy is by far the most amazingly crafted piece of English Literature of the 20th Century. Macabre, dark, brooding, and hipnotic.

The desciptive passages (which can take up whole chapters!) are trully spell-binding. This isn't a work to be taken lightly. This is not light reading by any stretch of the imagination - and it will certainly stretch yours.

The ancient, crumbling city of Gormenghast is in an age-old fight for its very existence, bowed under the weight of ritual, and set to implode.

Enter Steerpike, a young man with ambitions to undermine and destroy everything that keeps Gormenghast and the Groan dynasty alive.

Dastardly plots, Murder, madness, treachery... Weird and wonderful characters that Dickens would envy. You name it, it's all here!

Forget the BBC dramatisation (as good as it was), it didn't even come close to this claustrophobic tour de force!

Written like paint on canvas.
Gormenghast is in my opinion the greatest work of imaginative, original and descriptive fiction I have ever read.

It isn't Tolkein, it's nothing like his work. It IS unique. The characters are brilliantly written, bright, mad, dark, and bad; the descriptive passages - which can be whole chapters long - could only have been written by an artist of Peake's ability. The attention to detail will blow your mind.

The plot is murderous - literally, with intrigue and betrayal, madness and merciless violence.

Heck, Peake went insane himself after writing about it so much.

If you're an author - or a wannabe writer - this book will probably have one of two effects on you - or both, but not simultaneously. First it will inspire you; but it can just as easily scare the crap out of you. It did me. But genius is genius. You can't argue with it, fake it or cultivate it. All you can do is admire it.

Thank you for reading this review.

Intoxicating.
This is a review of Gormenghast, that is, the second part of the Gormenghast trilogy (after Titus Groan, and before Titus Alone).

After a somewhat slow beginning, in which Mervyn Peake first briefly summarizes Titus Grown by drawing up a list of which characters have died or gone missing, then introduces the reader with the plethora of new characters that are the teachers of Titus, the now seven-year-old seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast, the pace hopefully picks up again. And as the pages turn, the story becomes more and more exciting.

Irma Prunesquallor's party, and then her romance and the way the whole affair eventually backfires on Wellgrove, although it does not push the plot further, were fun to read. Titus's growing love for his sister Fuchsia, and at the same time his attempts at shunning both the physical prison that is Gormenghast castle and the mental cage that is its sacrosanct ritual, attempts that lead him into the mysterious forest where lurks the Thing, and to the grotto where Flay has taken shelter, were passionating. Finally, Steerpike's mischievious, murderous ambition, and the others' suspicions that gradually turn into evidences, and the memorable chases in the shadowy maze of the fortress that ensue, were purely mind-boggling.

Mervyn Peake's characters are so complex that in the end you like the ones you despised and hate the ones you loved in the first book. His words give life to such an amazing imagery, it vibrates and dazzles, it's intoxicating. This is magic.