Customer Reviews

Peake's Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I had tried to get this book ever since I read the Gormenghast books a few years back, but was informed it was unavailable. Imagine my surprise when it shows up on Amazon as available. I bought it as part of a deal with Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor. Had a slight twinge of anxeity when Slaughterboard showed up by itself, but Progress showed up about a week and a half later. Talk about worth the wait. Short stories, plays, illustrations, poems, Peake's Progress is a great collection of major work and oddities that showcases this amazing talent. My personal highlights are the Titus Groan in all but name story "Boy in Darkness" and his full length play "The Wit to Woo". If you are a Peake fan, you should have this, if not, why aren't you?

I need say no more - this alone is worth the book:

THE VASTEST THINGS ARE THOSE WE MAY NOT LEARN

The vastest things are those we may not learn.

We are not taught to die, nor to be born,

Nor how to burn

With love.

How pitiful is our enforced return

To those small things we are the masters of.

This book contains all of the great moments of Mervyn Peake, save the Gormenghast books. His poetry is excellent, his short stories are great, and his art is just cool.

If you are a Peake fan, you must buy this book.

Most people who get to know the work of the English novelist, poet, and artist Mervyn Peake (1911-1968), if they get to know him at all, will do so through the three published "Gormenghast" books - the beginnings of what would have been a lengthy roman-fleuvre covering the life and exploits of Titus Groan. I believe the "Titus" books (a better name for them, as the third book doesn't touch on Gormenghast castle at all) are among the great imaginative novels of the last century, and they made me a Peake-devotee for life. This collection of miscellaneous writings and art, compiled by his widow Maeve Gilmore a decade after his death, is a great place to continue (or start) an exploration of this amazing multitalented artist's life and work.

Peake the poet is well-represented here - his lengthy "Rhyme of the Flying Bomb", various "Nonsense" poems and a large number of shorter works are present; Peake the prose stylist is on evidence, in a selection of short stories and also, fascinatingly, in early renditions of his children's story "Captain Slaughterboard" and an early prose-sketch of Titus and Gormenghast, "The House of Darkstones." The previously-published "Boy in Darkness" is also here, but most of the contents in this lengthy volume (576 pages in the Overlook 1st US edition I have) are previously unpublished. The real revelations are in the author's fascinating full-length plays, "The Wit to Woo" and "Noah's Ark" - the fascination with grotesquerie and the fantasy-lives of children are fully in evidence in both of these works, the first ostensibly an "adult" play and the second clearly aimed at children. Both were unpublished before this volume was put out, and remain unavailable anywhere else, as is the case with the majority of work herein.

There are also plenty of reproductions of Peake's drawings: pencil sketches, pen-and-ink, charcoal washes, block prints and woodcuts, etc. It would have been nice to have had some color plates, though the artist wasn't as far as I can tell all that prolific as a painter; one can't have everything though. Lovingly produced, nicely printed (in the edition I have, at any rate), next to the "Titus" books, I'd recommend this to anyone planning a sojourn through the gothic weirdness of Mervyn Peake.

Excellent stuff. The Gormenghast Trilogy is still the book you must read, but this volume is a fine introduction to Mervyn Peake. Btw, ignore the previous reviewer. I'm an admirer of Tolkien and I have no trouble at all appreciating Peake.

This is a perfect introduction to the work of Mervyn Peake whose great Gormenghast trilogy reprsents the 'other' tradition in British fantasy writing. For me this is altogether much more satisfying than, say, Tolkien. Here you can find Peake's short stories, plays, drawings -- everything that made him the creative genius he was. If Tolkien isn't for you, Peake probably is!