The Great Gormenghast Read discussion

This is for articles and information about Mervyn Peake, his work and any other related information that may prove fascinating.

Here's an interesting article of an interview with Peake's children:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/bo...

A quote I really enjoyed, from an essay about Peake's writing:

"While Tolkien waxes nostalgic for a fictional golden age of Behaving Ourselves, Peake appeals to that part of everyone's childhood that squirmed under the burden of unimaginative "goodness" and secretly wanted to see Hansel baked into gingerbreadboydom because he was, after all, an insipid little bugger. Tolkien's characters are aggressively simple, Peake's aggressively ambiguous. While Tolkien's hero fights for Right, Peake's tries to re-imagine it and defends order only to exile himself from it, ultimately. Tolkien's world is black and white; Peake views his kingdom with the ambivalence of one entranced and repulsed by it simultaneously. The strange lure of Peake's epic, The Gormenghast Trilogy, is its love of ritual which goes hand in hand with its loathing of regimentation."

I love that excerpt, and it jogs the thinking muscles.

I'll try and find the actual full essay.

Kyle wrote: "A quote I really enjoyed, from an essay about Peake's writing:

"While Tolkien waxes nostalgic for a fictional golden age of Behaving Ourselves, Peake appeals to that part of everyone's childhood t..."


Note: I don't usually approve of comparing Gormenghast to LOTR, or Peake to Tolkien, but I actually found the comparison here to be valid, since it highlights a point the author is trying to make about Gormenghast, rather than attempting to be an actual "vs." comparison.

Chine Mieville often waxes lyrical about Peake. He wrote a wonderful introduction to this edition of the Gormenghast books: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98...

And in this article he compares Peake with Tolkien, about half way down:
http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org..... It includes:

Peake is just incomparably better. His writing is textured and lush, his ideas are complex, his characters defy pigeonholes. The politics embedded in the Gormenghast trilogy are sometimes tragic, and never simplistic. Peake is one of the few writers of fantasy that mainstream critics treat with respect. It's true that Peake doesn't fit neatly into the genre--though he's revered by fantasy fans--and didn't have the sense of writing in a genre tradition, unlike most fantasy writers. He's inside and outside fantasy at the same time.

I think that's what gave his writing such a sense of uniqueness--it's hard to trace influences on Peake (in genre and out). And although his influence has been very strong, it's been quite diffuse and nebulous. It's nowhere near as strong, for example, as Lord of the Rings, which was easily and totally assimilated into the genre of fantasy.

The nicest thing anyone ever said about Perdido Street Station was that it read like a fantasy book written in an alternate world where the Gormenghast trilogy rather than Lord of the Rings was the most influential work in the genre.

Ha ha: our posts crossed!

Kyle wrote: "Kyle wrote: "A quote I really enjoyed, from an essay about Peake's writing:

"While Tolkien waxes nostalgic for a fictional golden age of Behaving Ourselves, Peake appeals to that part of everyone'..."

I quite like the comparison there too. I dislike when someone says that any work is better than another as Mieville says but I suppose he says that because Gormenghast is so often underrated. I stand more with C.S. Lewis in approving both works as pure artistry.

Cecily wrote: "Ha ha: our posts crossed!"

Great minds!

I have to admit that it's the championing of Peake's work by people like Mieville, who then turn around and have to disparage Tolkien in the same breath, that has been one thing keeping me away from the Gormenghast books (silly as it may seem).

Whatever you may feel about Tolkien's politics I really don't think his abilities as a writer are fully appreciated by his detractors, and his characters and ideas are much more nuanced than the bashers like to admit (esp. once you start looking at the wider context of his writings outside of just _The Hobbit_ and LotR.)

I realize that this dichotomy/opposition of Tolkien vs. Peake is purely artificial, but I find it hard to come to Peake with an open mind and clean slate when I know so many who champion his work do so often with a mind to tear down my dear old JRRT.

Mieville, Peake and Tolkien are all very different (though I don't deny there are some similarities). If you can keep them in separate compartments and not fret too much about what fans of one say to disparage another, maybe it will be easier to enjoy Peake?

Terry wrote: "I have to admit that it's the championing of Peake's work by people like Mieville, who then turn around and have to disparage Tolkien in the same breath, that has been one thing keeping me away fro..."

Which is one thing I love about C.S. Lewis as a literature critic. He could both appreciate the work of his friend as a thing of beauty and the work of Peake as another type of beauty.

I first came to Peake and Gormenghast through Anthony Burgess, who listed TITUS GROAN among his 99 NOVELS as one of the best English language novels published between 1939 and 1984. His little paragraph on the novel in that book is well worth checking out.

Burgess also wrote an introduction to the novel that I have in my old Methuen paperback, and it is one of the best introductions of its kind that I know of. He sets up the novel beautifully and gives a very good idea what to expect. I think it is reprinted in other editions of the novel, isn't it?

That rings a vague bell, though I haven't read it. It is apparently in the 1988 edition by Overlooked Press that combines the three main works and has another introduction by Quentin Crisp (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39...)!

I tried some Googling and found a more generic article (which I'll post in Gormenghast/Mervyn Peake related articles: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...).

I couldn't find the full Burgess text (not surprising, really).

I did find a snippet, though:

"... The madness is illusory, and control never falters. It is, if you like, a rich wine of fancy chilled by the intellect to just the right temperature. There is no really close relative to it in all our prose literature. It is uniquely brilliant, and we are right to call it a modern classic."

Some excerpts from Mieville's introduction to the 2011 version of The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy.

"With its first word the work declares itself, establishes its setting and has us abruptly there, in the castle and the stone. There is no slow entry, no rabbit-hole down which to fall, no backless wardrobe, no door in the wall. To open the first book is not to enter but to be already in Mervyn Peake's astonishing creation. So taken for granted, indeed, is this impossible place, that we commence with qualification. "Gormenghast," Peake starts, "that is, the main massing of the original stone," as if, in response to that opening name, we had interrupted him with a request for clarification. We did not say "What is Gormenghast?" but "Gormenghast? Which bit?"

It is a sly and brilliant move. Asserting the specificity of a part, he better takes as given the whole - of which, of course, we are in awe. This faux matter-of-fact method makes Gormenghast, its Hall of Bright Carvings, its Tower of Flints, its roofscapes, ivy-shaggy walls, its muddy environs and hellish kitchens, so much more present and real than if it had been breathlessly explained. From this start, Peake acts as if the totality of his invented place could not be in dispute. The dislocation and fascination we feel, the intoxication, is testimony to the success of his simple certainty. Our wonder is not disbelief but belief, culture-shock at this vast, strange place. We submit to this reality that the book asserts even as it purports not to."

Later...

"It is in the names above all, perhaps, that Peake's strategy of simultaneous familiarising and defamiliarising us is at its zenith... such strange and unlikely composites clearly echo Trollope and above all Dickens. But where for them the nomenclaturic agenda worked, often moralistically... for Peake, no such readings are feasible... names are so overburdened with semiotic freight, stagger under such a profusion of meanings, that they end up as opaque as if they had none."

And again...

"At the start of the middle volume, Peake introduces to a boy we've so far known only as a baby... How has he been raised?

'Suckled on shadows'.

It is an astonishing phrase. A vivid Gormenghastian paradox, an impossible dialectic of nurture and imprisonment, of sustenance and emptiness, out of darkness."

(I confess I rather like the fact that the phrase he picks out was one of my favourites, long before I'd heard of Mieveille. Mind you, I prefer the whole sentence, "Suckled on shadows, weaned as it were on webs of ritual".)

Finally:

"There was nothing like The Gormenghast Trilogy before it came, but despite the gratifyingly growing number of readers...[it] has no book children. It and only it does what it does.