Gormenghast (Gormenghast Trilogy (Book Two)) (Paperback)

The desciptive passages (which can take up whole chapters!) are trully spell-binding. This isn't a work to be taken lightly. This is not light reading by any stretch of the imagination - and it will certainly stretch yours.

The ancient, crumbling city of Gormenghast is in an age-old fight for its very existence, bowed under the weight of ritual, and set to implode.

Enter Steerpike, a young man with ambitions to undermine and destroy everything that keeps Gormenghast and the Groan dynasty alive.

Dastardly plots, Murder, madness, treachery... Weird and wonderful characters that Dickens would envy. You name it, it's all here!

Forget the BBC dramatisation (as good as it was), it didn't even come close to this claustrophobic tour de force!

It isn't Tolkein, it's nothing like his work. It IS unique. The characters are brilliantly written, bright, mad, dark, and bad; the descriptive passages - which can be whole chapters long - could only have been written by an artist of Peake's ability. The attention to detail will blow your mind.

The plot is murderous - literally, with intrigue and betrayal, madness and merciless violence.

Heck, Peake went insane himself after writing about it so much.

If you're an author - or a wannabe writer - this book will probably have one of two effects on you - or both, but not simultaneously. First it will inspire you; but it can just as easily scare the crap out of you. It did me. But genius is genius. You can't argue with it, fake it or cultivate it. All you can do is admire it.

Thank you for reading this review.

After a somewhat slow beginning, in which Mervyn Peake first briefly summarizes Titus Grown by drawing up a list of which characters have died or gone missing, then introduces the reader with the plethora of new characters that are the teachers of Titus, the now seven-year-old seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast, the pace hopefully picks up again. And as the pages turn, the story becomes more and more exciting.

Irma Prunesquallor's party, and then her romance and the way the whole affair eventually backfires on Wellgrove, although it does not push the plot further, were fun to read. Titus's growing love for his sister Fuchsia, and at the same time his attempts at shunning both the physical prison that is Gormenghast castle and the mental cage that is its sacrosanct ritual, attempts that lead him into the mysterious forest where lurks the Thing, and to the grotto where Flay has taken shelter, were passionating. Finally, Steerpike's mischievious, murderous ambition, and the others' suspicions that gradually turn into evidences, and the memorable chases in the shadowy maze of the fortress that ensue, were purely mind-boggling.

Mervyn Peake's characters are so complex that in the end you like the ones you despised and hate the ones you loved in the first book. His words give life to such an amazing imagery, it vibrates and dazzles, it's intoxicating. This is magic.