Status Updates From Gormenghast (Gormenghast 2)

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.

Every evening it was taken up and placed outside Barquentine's door, this boulder, and every morning the old man lifted it up above the iron ring in the floor boards of his room, spat on it, and sent it hurtling down… [i]t was a warning to the servants that he was on his way down, that his breakfast and a number of other preliminaries were to be ready. To the clank of the boulder a score of hearts made echo.

To have a wife in exile who was dying in unthinkable pain appeared to Crust to give him a kind of romantic status. It was not sympathy he wanted but envy. Without an exiled and guttering mate what was he? Just Crust. That was all. Crust to his colleagues and Crust himself. Something of five letters that walked on two legs.

If you had told me I would grow to be so fond of Dr. Prunesqualor when I started book 1 I would've given you such a look of skepticism that you would have turned into a specter.

His cardinal virtue? An undamaged brain.