Status Updates From Gormenghast (Gormenghast Tr...

This pre Lord of the Rings British fantasy masterpiece contains the line "a lunar flash of buttocks" to describe a crazed man running naked through a garden at night. The circumstances for this episode are absurd and quite funny in a very British way. So far I am pleased to find Gormenghast to be a much more genuine and warm book compared to the brooding cynicism of Titus Groan, though both great in their own ways.

No, this isn't happening! There's no reason for me to go on! What... WHAT AM I FIGHTING FORRRRrrr...

And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and the field-mice draw upon their granaries. The air is murky and the sun is like a raw wound in the grimy flesh of a beggar, and the rags of the clouds are clotted. The sky has been stabbed and has been left to die above the world, filthy, vast, and bloody.

There is more than a little of ‘Swann’s Way’ in here, but with the comedy cranked up to 11.

As he paused for a moment before dropping from the window sill to the ground, he shuddered. The night was warm and there was no cause to shudder save that a twinge of joy, of dark joy, can shake the body, when a man is alone, under the moon, on a secret mission, with hunger in his heart and ice in his brain.