The Gormenghast Trilogy [Paperback]

I have never read anything like this before. I am a huge fan of fantasy, but Mervyn Peake's style is truly unique. The trilogy is epic in proportion even though the first two books are set almost exclusively within the confines of Ghormenghast Castle. The characters are fascinating, complex and mad as badgers, every one. I loved these people. Peake writes with such descriptive love that you care about the characters and what happens to them. He creates such sympathy between you and the characters that you care despite their many flaws. My favourite character was Steerpike, and in anyone elses hands this character would have been odious, but I found myself on his side! The last book is perhaps the weakest, mainly because it is the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Castle that creates alot of the tension and atmosphere in the book, and having moved to pastures new in the last the tension is somewhat lacking. That said still a great read.
A deep, dark enthralling story which will keep you turning pages, and leave you with a slight aching sadness when you finish it.

Reading this book is like being fully immersed in an utterly fantastic world. The way of life is described in microscopic detail until the existance of a world outside gormenghast becomes unreal. When Titus ventures out of the castle, the world (and indeed our world) by comparison is a pale, washed out image of reality. This is a book with which I have become far more emotionally involved than anything I have read before or since. Every reading feels like a homecoming. Peake's imagery is beautifully, indulgently rich, and the prose has been written with constant precision I defy you to find one single line which does not read like poetry.

I first read The Gormenghast Trilogy ("Titus Groan", "Gormenghast" and "Titus Alone") nearly 20 years ago as a teenager, after it was recommended to me by a friend. Having tried unsuccessfully to penetrate the posthumous Tolkein novel "The Silmarillion", I had almost given up on the fantasy genre. Thank God for Mervyn Peake. As I fell deeper and deeper into the trilogy it became my favorite work of literature, and a far, far supierior work to "Lord of the Rings". I have since read it 3 or 4 times and have not changed my mind. The first novel, Titus Groan, introduces the reader to a world that is at once mesmerizing and horrible. Very few of the characters are even remotely likable, but the reader is drawn to them nonetheless. It is Peake's triumph, then, to bring the reader to tears when these characters eventually meet their inevitable fates (all save the villainous Steerpike). The burning of the Library and it's consequences in "Titus Groan"is as violent as a rape. Titus' loss of the Thing in "Gormenghast" is more tragic than "Romeo and Juliet", "Othello" and "Oedipus" put together. Even the Countess commands total respect by the end of the second novel. The unspeakable blasphemy committed by young Titus leading into "Titus Alone" leaves us hollow with the loss of the monstrous castle, but it takes Titus into a world so far removed from his own that we hardly have time to notice. This is the story of Titus as an adult, in exile from all he has ever known, trying to come to terms with his irreversible actions. He enters a world that has more malevolence than Steerpike ever dreamed of, but also more real emotion, a first for Titus. His final (near) return to his birthplace triumphantly puts him on a new path, much the same way Britain and the world changed direction forever following World War II, and the way English literature changed forever following the publication of The Gormenghast Trilogy. It is one the finest peice of fiction ever written, and worthy of much more popular exposure than it has received in the 50 years since it was first published. I am proud to own a boxed (!) set of the Penguin paperback editions, complete with all of Peake's original illustrations.