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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE PEAKE OF CREATIVITY,
By
This review is from: Gormenghast Trilogy (Paperback)
I have been reading some of the more negative reviews of these books and decided it was time to update my remarks. Let me put it this way: Gormenghast, (like the Magic Theater in Hesse's STEPPENWOLF) is NOT for everybody. It is, indeed, just as great as others (including myself) have said. But! If you're a big fan of action--you won't find that here. If your particular bane is a lot of descriptive passages---flee these books as you would the Bird Flu.
HOWEVER: If you're in the mood for a slower read that inundates you with the wonderful power of the English language---then these books are for YOU!!! In THAT sense, this trilogy is perfect. This is the way the Masters USED to do it. Peake uses English the way Virgil used Latin...in other words, he had the vocabulary DOWN, man, and he shows it and there are a lot of loverly sounding (and emotionally evocative) words that we rarely encounter in the works of more modern writers that are, nevertheless, part of our heritage...and you will find a great many of THOSE here. But, as I say, it isn't for everybody. It's for madmen only.Titus Groan (Gormenghast Trilogy)
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Gormenghast Trilogy,
By Goalie35 "Goalie35" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Gormenghast Trilogy (Paperback)
I read this set in 1968 on the advice of a friend who also turned me on to Lord of the Rings that same year. I was never so enthralled with any piece of lit. as with Gormenghast. A reviewer of the time said that it was impossible to actually tell someone else what the story is about, other than to say that it is about itself. I found that to be true, also. Mervyn Peake had an incredible imagination and was as able to create his own world as Tolkien was, although I find Peake's characters to represent a much deeper archetypal sort than Tolkien's do, in a Jungian sense -- in the years since reading The G. Trilogy, I have met a number of the characters in real life . . . a very interesting experience and a testament to Peake's reality-based fantasy and powers of observation. I think he could see people in an archetypal way very clearly. Another interesting note: I was able to read Lord of the Rings multiple times over many years, but each time I tried to pick up the G. Trilogy again, I could never get beyond a few pages. I felt that I knew it so well that I almost had too much of the story memorized. Therefore, in the 42 years since the first read, I have not re-read it! As the other reviewer has stated, if you do not LOVE the English language and what a master poet can do with it, even in prose, don't read Gormenghast. You will hate it. But if you are entraptured with the language (you are probably a poet yourself) and want to be influenced by a master storyteller and imagine-er, begin reading The Gormenghast Trilogy as quickly as possible. It will become a part of who you are for life.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful writing!,
This review is from: THE CORMENGHAST TRILOGY- TITUS GROAN/ GORMENGHAST / TITUS ALONE (Mass Market Paperback)
Mervyn Peake's The Gormenghast Trilogy (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone), published between 1946-1959, was originally conceived as a four or five book series, but the author died after the publication of only the first two books, the third having been reconstructed after his death from his notebooks. In this work, Peake created a locale and story almost hallucinogenic in atmosphere, internally consistent but sufficiently phantasmagoric as to seem dreamlike, fantastic, twisted and bizarre. Titus is the seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast, a realm located who knows where, in a time who knows when. Most obviously, Gormenshast is a huge and deteriorating castle, miles in extent, much of it uninhabited for hundreds of years and even unknown to and unexplored by its current inhabitants. The pervasive mood is one of dissolution, decay, deterioration, mindless remaining ritual and tradition without residual meaning; Gormenghast as a physical structure is falling apart, most of its primary inhabitants are in varying states of decline, and perpetuation of what has always been seems its only motivation. Peake uses language and images to create an archaic sense of gloom and unease, and his characterizations are unique and striking. "No eye may see dispassionately...(W)hat haunts the heart will, when it is found, leap foremost, blinding the eye and leaving the main of Life in darkness." "Their faces ...were quite expressionless, as though they were the preliminary lay-outs for faces and were waiting for sentience to be injected." "Seven clouds like a group of naked cherubs or sucking-pigs, floated their plump pink bodies across a sky of slate." "She appeared rather to inhabit, than to wear her clothes." He uses leitmotivs, almost as in a Wagner opera, to evoke personages again and again: "high, narrow shoulders and pale full forehead" always evoking Steerpike; identical purple dresses and reedy voices, the ancient twins; goggling eyes behind thick glasses, the doctor; spindly knees cracking like broken sticks, Flay. His vocabulary, with words like "hierophantic," "marcid," "adumbrate," "planked" (as a verb), further fostered for me a sense of the outré, the strange.
The story begins with Titus's birth and continues into his young adulthood. Drama is provided by Peake's setting up dyads and triads of antipathies in his characters, conflicts intensifying and almost always resulting in the deaths of one of his primary personages, the intrigue and tension building throughout the first two books, which are very much of a unified pair themselves, and always highlighting the development of the character of Titus as the accelerating claustrophobia of his own life deepens his self-understanding. The third book, Titus Alone, was reconstructed posthumously from Peake's notebooks and has an ambiance all its own; it is almost as if the story starts anew, for now Titus has left Gormenshast on a quest primarily to escape the constricting demands and expectations of his hereditary role. The world in this book is modern, even postmodern, and frankly dystopic. All other characters from the first two books have been left behind, and an entirely new realm opens. At first, even the writing seemed disappointingly different, and I wondered if this was the result of clumsiness in the utilization of Peake's notebooks; but gradually both language and plot became fascinating in their own right and more consistent with the first two books, providing a rich and rewarding reading experience, even if one that at the end seemed truncated and inconclusive, consistent with Peake's original plan to continue the saga further. So what is this work about, anyway? Is it a critique of our civilization, its ambivalent relationships to tradition and progress? Is it primarily the story of the psychological journey from childhood to adulthood? Something else entirely? Any of these interpretations, and others, is possible. Suffice it to say that Peake has created a unique and enthralling story and atmosphere, one that pulls the reader into a world strange and haunting, one that I would not wanted to have missed.
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