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: #9732 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

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

About the Author
Mervyn Peake was born in 1911. He is perhaps most famous for the 'Gormenghast' trilogy which were published between 1946 and 1959 - Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. He has also written a book for children, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor and several volumes of poetry. He was also a gifted book illustrator. He died in 1968.

Customer Reviews

the few square centimetres inside your head
Reading this book is like being fully immersed in an utterly fantastic world. The way of life is described in microscopic detail until the existance of a world outside gormenghast becomes unreal. When Titus ventures out of the castle, the world (and indeed our world) by comparison is a pale, washed out image of reality. This is a book with which I have become far more emotionally involved than anything I have read before or since. Every reading feels like a homecoming. Peake's imagery is beautifully, indulgently rich, and the prose has been written with constant precision I defy you to find one single line which does not read like poetry.

good book, bad edition
The book itself is excellent, great atmosphere etc. as everyone else has already said...however I give it 4 stars and am writing on here due to the fact that it's absolutely full of printing errors and has a habit of turning phrases like 'a long finger' into 'along finger'.

So if that kind of thing annoys you...just a warning.

Gothic heaven
There is no other book that I can think of that transported me so completely into its world as The Gormenghast Trilogy. Never before have I been so utterly absorbed by a book (and I've read a lot of books). When I finished it and was singing its praises to my friends, a few people said 'What happens in it then?' to which I found myself replying, 'Well, that doesn't really matter'. Because the thing that makes the Gormenghast books enchanting is the detail, the description, the characters. One of the things that I most loved was that initially, none of the characters seemed to have any redeeming features at all, but as the trilogy progressed, they became more and more complex and started to surprise me. Peake's characters are often compared to those of Dickens, but despite the fantastic setting, they will seem more real and vivid to you than anything Dickens ever wrote.

By the way, the accident in the schoolroom in Vol 2 is one of the funniest things I have ever read, although like everything in the Gormenghast trilogy, it's very, very dark. I can't say that Gormenghast was the most cheerful thing I've ever read, but as soon as I'd finished it, I started straight again.