Product Description

Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is lord and heir. Titus is expected to rule this gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons, and his eccentric and wayward subjects, according to strict age-old rituals, but things are changing in the castle. Titus must contend with treachery, manipulation and murder as well as his own longing for a life beyond the castle walls.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3899 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 960 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy has grown out of its reputation as a cult classic and into the mainstream of fantasy, as a book no reader interested in Gothic dare to miss. It is one of the most distinctive, absorbing and wonderfully strange books ever written. The story concerns Titus, heir to and afterwards 77th Earl of Groan and his adventures in the sprawling, crumbling castle of Gormenghast. Gormenghast is an entire world and Titus comes to grips with his prime antagonist, the sinister kitchenboy Steerpike, amongst a brilliant profusion of characters and vivid detail. Peake's work is rarely compared with that other great fantasy trilogy to come out of the immediately post-war years, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings but in ways the two works do go together. Although Tolkien is plain and expansive where Peake is elaborate, poetic and inward-looking, both authors nonetheless use a detailed imaginative escapism in order to talk about the concerns of their day--specifically the passing of the old certainties of traditional England and the coming of something new. "'Equality is the great thing', said the sinister Steerpike, pulling the legs off a stag beetle and preparing to take on the whole hierarchy of Gormenghast, 'equality is everything'." This is why the short, surreal oddity of Titus Alone, the third novel, is the best: finally leaving his castle home Titus finds the larger world stranger even than his birthplace.

The new television series, with which this edition ties in, promises great things but the best part of Mervyn Peake is to be found in his ornate, poetic writing; his grasp of the Dickensian oddities of character and the utterly unique atmosphere of the books. --Adam Roberts

Review
This epic trilogy centring on Titus, 77th Earl of Groan and heir to the delapidated castle of Gormenghast, is an imaginative tour de force. The novels are peopled with a host of memorable characters such as Titus's sister Fuchsia and the crafty Steerpike, while the shadowy, monstrous castle itself surrounded by the mud huts of the 'outer dwellings' are brilliantly created. These gothic fantasy novels were written between 1946 and 1959, and British author Peake also provided the evocative illustrations. (Kirkus UK)

From the Publisher
Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which the 77th Earl, Titus Graon, 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 ritual, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, manipulation and murder-- a world suggested in a tour de force that ranks as one of the century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.

"The Gormenghast trilogy is one of the most important works of the imagination to come out of the age that also produced Four Quartets, The Unquiet Grave, Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One, Animal Farm and 1984" --Anthony Burgess, Spectator