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A World Away: A Memoir of Mervyn Peake

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Anyone who appreciates Mervyn's work should be touched by his late widow Maeve's excellent and poetic memiors. She was a formidable artist and writer, and this book, along with son Sebastion's Child of Bliss, give a unique, beautiful, and priveledged insider's view from those who shared Peake's life.

This book was obviously written more for the benefit of the writer than the reader. Put together almost immediately after Peake's premature death from Parkinson's Disease in 1968, it is a fragmented, nostalgic, sentimental, largely incoherent moan of distress by a weak, overly-dependent woman unable to see her lost husband as anything other than a Romantic demi-god or the world as anything other than a violent, malicious site of evil. I cannot quite see what Gilmore hoped to achieve by writing this memoir. Peake's talent needs no apology or explanation: even in his own lifetime the peculiar genius of his Gormenghast books was well-recognised. Nor does this account make any attempt at being a factually full biography. All it tells us is how much Gilmore loved her husband, and how unfairly she felt he was treated by fate and the world. I think that is of extremely limited interest. It is only Mervyn Peake, after all.