Michael Moorcock Quotes

“Peake was neither a saint nor a satanic presence, and what was so marvellous for me, when I first went to see him as a boy, was realizing that so much rich talent could come from such a graceful, pleasant, rather modest man who lived in a suburban house much like mine. He was amused by my enthusiasm. I was in no doubt, though, that I had met my first authentic genius.

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Peake had a huge, romantic imagination, a Welsh eloquence, a wry, affectionate wit and his technical mastery, both of narrative and line, remains unmatched. “To be a good classicist,” he said, “you must cultivate romance. To be a good romantic, you must steep yourself in classicism.” He was both an heir to the great Victorians and a precursor to the post-modernists, the magic realists.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“In his introduction to the first collection of his drawings Peake wrote, 'After all, there are no rules. With the wealth, skill, daring, vision of many centuries at one's back, yet one is ultimately quite alone. For it is one's ambition to create one's own world in a style germane to its substance, and to people it with its native forms and denizens that never were before, yet have their roots in one's experience. As the earth was thrown from the sun, so from the earth the artist must fling out into space, complete from pole to pole, his own world which, whatsoever form it takes, is the colour of the globe it flew from, as the world itself is coloured by the sun.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“Fundamentally Peake's imagination was, without question, a romantic one, but, perhaps paradoxically, it is his humanity, his less idiosyncratic gifts (including the gift of farce), that distinguish him from other great visionary novelists such as Wyndham Lewis, Yevgeny Zamyatin or John Cooper Powys.

In the Titus Groan books especially, with their ornate language, long soliloquies, bursts of nonsense verse, vivid descriptions, weird anecdotes, comic extravagances, we continue to interested in the characters and their stories. Peake's control of his subject matter, his skill at handling such a large cast, is demonstrated on every page of Titus Groan and Gormenghast , which are essentially a unity. The plot marches, with all the remorseless inevitability of a novel by Victor Hugo or Joseph Conrad, towards an unpredictable resolution.

These abilities and his genuine love of people, his concern for others, his relish for life, make Peake, in my opinion, the greatest imaginative writer of his age. Neither J.R.R. Tolkien nor T.H. White, for instance, has Peake's monumental complexity or originality, his moral and formal integrity. Perhaps this is why Peake was so often praised by writers most identified with naturalistic novels of character, such as Elizabeth Bowen or Angus Wilson, who also appreciated the moral qualities of Peake's novels.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art

“...Peake's writing is as mercurial as the man himself. For sixty years it has defied classification - and has therefore been sneeringly dismissed by some as 'fantasy writing' (as if real issues and real emotions could not possibly exist within such a context as an imaginary world).

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And yet the Titus books are imbued with a profound sense of realism. Some of this comes from the hallucinatory attention that Peake gives to the smallest of details - shapes and textures; colours and scents; the jut of a collar-bone; the fuggy stench of subterranean kitchens; the cracking sound of man's knee-joints as he strides stiffly along a stone corridor.

Interestingly, for a writer frequently described in terms of 'Gothic' and 'fantasy', there is no trace of the supernatural in the Titus books. There are no witches, no ghosts, no magic, no religion - but for the wholly secular ritual of Gormenghast. Nor is there any sign of the usual non-human suspects that tend to permeate fantasy fiction. To Peake, humanity itself already contains so much potential for grotesquerie that there is no need for orcs or dwarves. Instead we are shown a vision of humanity at its most diverse and perplexing. Physical and mental deformity abounds; and yet beneath Peake's obvious delight in portraying the human being in all its astonishing variety he retains a quality of insight and sympathy for his creations that raises his work beyond technical brilliance into something warmer and more universal.”
― G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art