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3.9 AVERAGE
3.9 AVERAGE
adventurous
funny
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Everything about this book is so beautifully and gothically realised. It's pretty clear that Mervyn Peake obviously just loved words and had the same reasons for writing as Tolkien: that there was simply no way he couldn't create a world, and that publication or anything else was incidental to that.
Plot wise, it felt less like a novel but more like serialised instalments in an open-ended and lengthy saga, which I guess is what it is.
My favourite characters are still Fuschia Groan and Sourdust but I will add Sepulchrave Groan to the list because of his constant, unending melancholy and because I think that if someone burned all my books I'd probably start to turn into an owl as well.
Plot wise, it felt less like a novel but more like serialised instalments in an open-ended and lengthy saga, which I guess is what it is.
My favourite characters are still Fuschia Groan and Sourdust but I will add Sepulchrave Groan to the list because of his constant, unending melancholy and because I think that if someone burned all my books I'd probably start to turn into an owl as well.
challenging
funny
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
dark
funny
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I first read this book and the other two in the trilogy when I was 13 or 14, and I was OBSESSED. I also have very fond memories of learning a plethora of new words whilst reading this book, sitting with a dictionary (yes I'm that old) to discover what they all meant. I don't know why it's taken me quite this long to go back for a re-read, but it's just as dark and weird and brilliant as I remember. I highly recommend this book, and the others in the trilogy.
challenging
funny
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
A tiresome read, like wading through a sinkhole filled with words. Peake exchanged plot and characterisation for the mastery of the language. The result is an inch-by-inch description of a painting in Peake's head. Never trust a poet to write a book with anything that resembles a novel. I'd take a good book over a good literature any day.
3.5/5
There's something about the self-absorbed style of composition that will either suck you into a window of written word or put you off entirely. Peake's writing is one of constant connections, associations, adulterations, and discombobulations, superimposition upon superimposition upon what is often the barest, grimmest aspects of a portrayed reality: a craggy peak, a boney tree, an ancient ritual, a calcified patriarch. It's not necessary that you vibe with every choice of syntactical accretion, but it does help to not care so much about action compared to the experience of seeing, contemplating, analyzing, committing to the sort of gaze that never glances without classifying, witnesses without correlating, engages without judging. I've been the contemplative type, voluntarily and otherwise, long enough to have amassed the sensibility required for not only enduring, but also enjoying such a breed of narrative build and character thrust. So, while the pages were broad and the font size compacted, I found that, even after a hard day's work, this would flow, even when the trilogy-in-one-edition grew too weighty for my arms and I had to lie alongside the open book to sustain my reading for more than a few pages. A feast for the senses, but only a very specific, highly Eurocentric set of senses, and much as I could have easily continued on to 'Gormenghast' upon finishing the first work, it doesn't do my reading pursuits any good to follow staid old trajectories for too long, especially when they feed more into narratological complacency than into exploration. So, if you know yourself to have tastes tending towards this sort of thing, go for it. Just don't pretend that you're any better for having said tastes.
When I started composing this review, it was September 23, 2022, and I had just finished this, my last read planned for this year's challenge reads. It wasn't the best, but neither it was the worst or even the middling, and to be satisfied that at least one dead white guy isn't entirely held up by the yellowbellied onanism of many a critic, armchair or otherwise, is an uncommon pleasure in its own right. Indeed, I can even see the glimmers of the crossroads that this particular work exists at the corner of, but that doesn't mean this piece deserves having its entire cast of characters listed out on Wikipedia whilst many entire continents of writing go with barely five to fifty pages to their collectively acknowledged existence. So, shove off Burgess and Crisp with your convoluted mutterings and insular proclamations, and welcome the rest of the world whose phantasmagorical underpinnings found mainstream trellises in Peake's prose but whose origins lie far beyond anything ever conceptualized by those who worship at the altar of Shakespeare and co. Buildings breathe, the dead walk, and the horror of this work lies not in its portrayals of madness and intimations of the grotesque, but that it so tritely attempts alongside the multitudes of its ilk to couple anarchism with the end of all things. These days are played to the tune of the queen is dead, long live the king, but how much would it really take to change it to the queen is dead, long live the people? It's the sort of conceptualization that forms a complete antithesis to this work and its sequels, but how else is one to test whether monarchy is something that actually works in practice, rather than solely on paper?
And what voluptuary ever lolled with half the languor of that boneless thing!GR data (what little Amazon has left to us) tells me that I added this book either during the month of or during the month preceding that in which I dropped out of college. I was at a low point, to put it mildly, and GR at that time was what I used to fortify myself with little to no thought of the wider context that all these books I was committing to operated within. In other words, I was swelling my shelves with old/dead white dudes with veritable abandon, and when the time inevitably came when I saw that this wasn't sustainable, it was difficult to determine what was worth keeping around and what could be safely (even healthily, to be quite honest) jettisoned, especially when the same coterie praised the majority of the works to the skies to the to the tune of same status quo shit, different day. My solution was to let the works sit in their metaphorical vault for a time and give the natural flow of events and information a chance to do some weeding for me, and this work, embedded as it was in a trilogy, is a prime example of something that I'd do well to wait on until I could judge it in a less blinkered fashion. Now that I've finished, I have to say what many have said already: Peake can certainly write, and there's a certain staging of setting and atmosphere that takes the definition of "gothic" to new, grotesquely sensual heights in every page of this piece. Displacing Tolkien, though? I'm afraid Peake would have had to have been a tad less self indulgent in his solipsistic bent and a tad more embedded in the sort of compassionate logic born of a wider historical world community: a little less Steerpike and a tad more Fuschia, if you will. All in all, I certainly liked it a great deal more than I thought I would, but I don't regret taking the rest of the trilogy off my TBR. The sequel may find its way back, but only once it's earned it.
There's something about the self-absorbed style of composition that will either suck you into a window of written word or put you off entirely. Peake's writing is one of constant connections, associations, adulterations, and discombobulations, superimposition upon superimposition upon what is often the barest, grimmest aspects of a portrayed reality: a craggy peak, a boney tree, an ancient ritual, a calcified patriarch. It's not necessary that you vibe with every choice of syntactical accretion, but it does help to not care so much about action compared to the experience of seeing, contemplating, analyzing, committing to the sort of gaze that never glances without classifying, witnesses without correlating, engages without judging. I've been the contemplative type, voluntarily and otherwise, long enough to have amassed the sensibility required for not only enduring, but also enjoying such a breed of narrative build and character thrust. So, while the pages were broad and the font size compacted, I found that, even after a hard day's work, this would flow, even when the trilogy-in-one-edition grew too weighty for my arms and I had to lie alongside the open book to sustain my reading for more than a few pages. A feast for the senses, but only a very specific, highly Eurocentric set of senses, and much as I could have easily continued on to 'Gormenghast' upon finishing the first work, it doesn't do my reading pursuits any good to follow staid old trajectories for too long, especially when they feed more into narratological complacency than into exploration. So, if you know yourself to have tastes tending towards this sort of thing, go for it. Just don't pretend that you're any better for having said tastes.
When I started composing this review, it was September 23, 2022, and I had just finished this, my last read planned for this year's challenge reads. It wasn't the best, but neither it was the worst or even the middling, and to be satisfied that at least one dead white guy isn't entirely held up by the yellowbellied onanism of many a critic, armchair or otherwise, is an uncommon pleasure in its own right. Indeed, I can even see the glimmers of the crossroads that this particular work exists at the corner of, but that doesn't mean this piece deserves having its entire cast of characters listed out on Wikipedia whilst many entire continents of writing go with barely five to fifty pages to their collectively acknowledged existence. So, shove off Burgess and Crisp with your convoluted mutterings and insular proclamations, and welcome the rest of the world whose phantasmagorical underpinnings found mainstream trellises in Peake's prose but whose origins lie far beyond anything ever conceptualized by those who worship at the altar of Shakespeare and co. Buildings breathe, the dead walk, and the horror of this work lies not in its portrayals of madness and intimations of the grotesque, but that it so tritely attempts alongside the multitudes of its ilk to couple anarchism with the end of all things. These days are played to the tune of the queen is dead, long live the king, but how much would it really take to change it to the queen is dead, long live the people? It's the sort of conceptualization that forms a complete antithesis to this work and its sequels, but how else is one to test whether monarchy is something that actually works in practice, rather than solely on paper?
I have always been fascinated by those who want to work, ha, ha. Most absorbing to observe them. Ha, ha, ha! most absorbing and uncanny.By the way, that first quote describes a just-sliced-off ear swinging from an arc of spiderweb. It's at instances like those where I have to give Peake credit where credit is due.
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
‘’Voices that grind at night from lungs of granite. Lungs of blue air and the white lungs of rivers. All voices haunt all moments of all days; all voices fill the crannies of all regions. Voices that he shall hear when he has listened, and when his ear is tuned to Gormenghast; whose voice is endlessness of endlessness. This is the ancient sound that he must follow. The voice of stones heaped up into grey towers, until he dies across the Groan’s death-turret. And banners are ripped down from wall and buttress and he is carried to the Tower of Towers and laid among the moulderings of his fathers.’’
An earldom of stones and rocks and silence. The land beyond isolated and rejected. Everything is performed to the Lordship’s delight. Every poem, every carving, every song. The carvings that are rejected are burned. The honoured carvings are stored away in dusty chambers, never to be seen again. The cooks prepare the meals. The ceremonies carry on, no matter what, day after day, year after year. What is will always be. A new heir is born. Tradition is all. Everyone obeys it. Everyone knows their place.
Yet there is one person who refuses to conform and sets off to doubt, disrupt and destroy the status quo of the Stones. Steerpike. From kitchen boy, victim to Swelter’s crimes, to confidant and all-around creator of utter chaos. But his chaos is better than their ‘order’.
‘’This was the darkness she knew of. She breathed it in. It was the late autumn darkness of her memories. There was no taint of those shadows which had oppressed her spirit within the walls of Gormenghast.’’
A suffocating place of mystery and secrecy. A palace populated by characters that would easily reserve a place in the nearest asylum of their choice. A land governed by ‘musts’ and ugly people who call the beauty horridness. A nest of fools.
‘’I’d go far from here - to another kind of land,’’ said Fuschia, ‘where people who didn’t know that I was Lady Fuschia would be surprised when I told them I was; and they would treat me better and be more polite and do some homage sometimes. But I wouldn’t stop bringing home my leaves and shining pebbles and fugnesses from the woods, whatever they thought.’’
‘’But you’re only a girl!’’ cried Nannie Slag louder than ever. ‘’You don’t matter. You’re not going to be anything.’’
Fuschia dislodged the old woman’s hand and walked heavily to the window. The rain poured down. It poured down.’’
A royal daughter, full of charisma, who has convinced herself she is ugly and stupid. A girl living in a fairytale world because her reality is one of being diminished, disregarded, neglected. Your father has forgotten you. Your mother doesn’t even look at you. Only a half-mad old nanny and a strange doctor acknowledge your existence. And when freedom comes through the window, you take it. You’d be truly mad not to.
‘’I live in the Tower of Flints,’’ he cried. ‘’I am the death-owl.’’
An Earl who has been drowning in melancholy and sadness. A man of knowledge which puts to no use at all. In love with his books, but unable and unwilling to act and rule for what use is knowledge if you cannot practice what you preach? A Shakespearean figure of utter sorrow.
‘’Let them touch him. For every hair that’s hurt I’ll stop aheart. If grace I have when turbulence is over - so be it; and if not- what then?’’
A mother that can hardly be called thus. Her Ladyship of birds and cats and loud voices. Yet, her mind is not as idle as one would believe. She senses the change in the air. And she waits for the invisible threat to manifest itself.
‘’And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears - the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?’’
The first volume of one of the most legendary trilogies in World Literature. A dark tale for the autumn and the summer. And the bitter souls.
My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/
An earldom of stones and rocks and silence. The land beyond isolated and rejected. Everything is performed to the Lordship’s delight. Every poem, every carving, every song. The carvings that are rejected are burned. The honoured carvings are stored away in dusty chambers, never to be seen again. The cooks prepare the meals. The ceremonies carry on, no matter what, day after day, year after year. What is will always be. A new heir is born. Tradition is all. Everyone obeys it. Everyone knows their place.
Yet there is one person who refuses to conform and sets off to doubt, disrupt and destroy the status quo of the Stones. Steerpike. From kitchen boy, victim to Swelter’s crimes, to confidant and all-around creator of utter chaos. But his chaos is better than their ‘order’.
‘’This was the darkness she knew of. She breathed it in. It was the late autumn darkness of her memories. There was no taint of those shadows which had oppressed her spirit within the walls of Gormenghast.’’
A suffocating place of mystery and secrecy. A palace populated by characters that would easily reserve a place in the nearest asylum of their choice. A land governed by ‘musts’ and ugly people who call the beauty horridness. A nest of fools.
‘’I’d go far from here - to another kind of land,’’ said Fuschia, ‘where people who didn’t know that I was Lady Fuschia would be surprised when I told them I was; and they would treat me better and be more polite and do some homage sometimes. But I wouldn’t stop bringing home my leaves and shining pebbles and fugnesses from the woods, whatever they thought.’’
‘’But you’re only a girl!’’ cried Nannie Slag louder than ever. ‘’You don’t matter. You’re not going to be anything.’’
Fuschia dislodged the old woman’s hand and walked heavily to the window. The rain poured down. It poured down.’’
A royal daughter, full of charisma, who has convinced herself she is ugly and stupid. A girl living in a fairytale world because her reality is one of being diminished, disregarded, neglected. Your father has forgotten you. Your mother doesn’t even look at you. Only a half-mad old nanny and a strange doctor acknowledge your existence. And when freedom comes through the window, you take it. You’d be truly mad not to.
‘’I live in the Tower of Flints,’’ he cried. ‘’I am the death-owl.’’
An Earl who has been drowning in melancholy and sadness. A man of knowledge which puts to no use at all. In love with his books, but unable and unwilling to act and rule for what use is knowledge if you cannot practice what you preach? A Shakespearean figure of utter sorrow.
‘’Let them touch him. For every hair that’s hurt I’ll stop aheart. If grace I have when turbulence is over - so be it; and if not- what then?’’
A mother that can hardly be called thus. Her Ladyship of birds and cats and loud voices. Yet, her mind is not as idle as one would believe. She senses the change in the air. And she waits for the invisible threat to manifest itself.
‘’And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears - the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?’’
The first volume of one of the most legendary trilogies in World Literature. A dark tale for the autumn and the summer. And the bitter souls.
My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/