If someone held a gun to my head and said, ‘Tell me your favourite book, ever, now!’ (which, so far, happily, no one has, nor is it easy to imagine why they might, but still, best to be prepared, eh?), I would, without any thought or deliberation, say Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake. A trilogy, the three novels appeared over a thirteen year period, from 1946 - 1959, and were immediately hailed as a masterpiece. They have never gone out of print, and have been adapted for film and TV (never very convincingly). It was earnestly thrust on me by my father when I was fifteen or so, and I don’t think I have ever been so wholly and helplessly gripped and held by a book. It returns to me in dreams frequently, and I often find myself walking the halls and the corridors of the story, 33 years later. A good ‘un, in short.

Gormenghast is a castle, but it is more than that: as the story proceeds, the extent of it becomes almost limitless. It is a city, a nation, an entire universe, made of ancient crumbling stone and completely separate from the world. There is no other place, only Gormenghast. It is within these grim, forgotten precincts that the story of The House of Groan unfolds. We open with the birth of a male heir to the throne, Titus, the 77th Earl of Groan. His destiny is to carry forward the immemorial line, to spend his life performing an unending sequence of rituals, which have been handed down, generation upon generation, in ancient books of law. We meet his doctor, Prunesquallor; his mother, the ferocious Countess Gertrude with rooks nesting in her hair; and his father, Sepulchrave, who will soon succumb to the belief that he is an owl...

No description of the story can convey the richness, the sheer beauty of this book. There are descriptions of breathtaking, visionary power: Peake will spend pages simply telling you what a feather looks like as it slowly falls down a forgotten stairwell. The characters are grotesques, but what grotesques! The names recall Dickens - Flay, the faithful servant; Swelter, the epicene chef; Steerpike, the upstart kitchen lad who will in due course turn the whole place on its head; Sourdust, the Master of the Law, and his appalling son, Barquentine. The storylines are of secret, deadly rivalries and hatreds, fierce ambitions, desperate loyalties.

The first two novels are set in the castle: the third, Titus Alone, takes us out into the world beyond the castle walls, as Titus escapes from his fate and makes his way through another world, wilder, more brutal, maddder even than the one he has left. Peake’s mental health was deteriorating while he wrote this (Parkinson’s disease), and the book, despite a major editing job, is in places on the edge of coherence, but gains enormously in emotional power.

My father was wrong about a lot of things, but about this he was right. Find a copy, read it. It will stay with you forever.