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jds70 's review for:
The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy
by Mervyn Peake
I've been wanting to read the Gormenghast series since I first heard of it a few years ago. When I saw that my local library had the trilogy in one volume (a fourth book was published decades after Mervyn Peake's death), illustrated, with the author's sketches, I dropped the other books I was reading and checked out the ebook. I was not disappointed!
These three books are wonderful, exciting, hilarious, suspenseful, sad, surreal, unique adventures, and yet hard to describe. Mervyn Peake was a painter and illustrator as well as a writer. He writes like a painter, using words in the same way as he would a paintbrush. He has a way of describing an event, and freezing it in time, not unlike a painting or a photograph. It's wonderful, beautiful, astounding, and very suspenseful. You're left hanging in a moment, wondering what'll happen next, and you can't put the book down. It's not unlike the experience of an event that happens so fast, maybe only a few seconds, that feels longer, or seems suspended in time. And I love it!
The first two books take place entirely in Gormenghast Castle and it's grounds. They feel like they've been painted in various shades of gray and subdued, dark colors, with only occasional pops of color, mostly red (such as Fuchsia's red dress and necklace, Gertrude's hair, and blood). It feels claustraphobic and stifling. Characters live like ghosts or wisps of smoke, their daily activities dictated by strange and ancient ceremonies, sacred laws whose meanings have been lost, yet tradition is in charge and must be followed.
The third book, in which Titus escapes the confines of his ancient home and discovers a modern world as strange as his own, welcomes a bit more color, feeling brighter, lighter, and less ancient; not to mention less dusty (Gormenghast must have traditions preventing repairs, cleaning, and general maintainance. The castle is constantly crumbling and decaying, covered in thicker layers of dust and cobwebs than a haunted house, choked with vines and other various creeping vegetation; it's vast and sprawling halls filled with lost and forgotten quarters. When a gigantic flood reaches the castle, Peake remarks that the castle hasn't been so clean in a millenium! I wanted desperately for someone to contact a contractor and fix the whole compound up).
Peake's sketches give us a peak (no pun intended - no, really) into the author's mind, adding yet another layer to a uniquely unique and inspiring creation.
Utterly un-put-down-able and unique. A world I want to revisit again and again. And soon.
These three books are wonderful, exciting, hilarious, suspenseful, sad, surreal, unique adventures, and yet hard to describe. Mervyn Peake was a painter and illustrator as well as a writer. He writes like a painter, using words in the same way as he would a paintbrush. He has a way of describing an event, and freezing it in time, not unlike a painting or a photograph. It's wonderful, beautiful, astounding, and very suspenseful. You're left hanging in a moment, wondering what'll happen next, and you can't put the book down. It's not unlike the experience of an event that happens so fast, maybe only a few seconds, that feels longer, or seems suspended in time. And I love it!
The first two books take place entirely in Gormenghast Castle and it's grounds. They feel like they've been painted in various shades of gray and subdued, dark colors, with only occasional pops of color, mostly red (such as Fuchsia's red dress and necklace, Gertrude's hair, and blood). It feels claustraphobic and stifling. Characters live like ghosts or wisps of smoke, their daily activities dictated by strange and ancient ceremonies, sacred laws whose meanings have been lost, yet tradition is in charge and must be followed.
The third book, in which Titus escapes the confines of his ancient home and discovers a modern world as strange as his own, welcomes a bit more color, feeling brighter, lighter, and less ancient; not to mention less dusty (Gormenghast must have traditions preventing repairs, cleaning, and general maintainance. The castle is constantly crumbling and decaying, covered in thicker layers of dust and cobwebs than a haunted house, choked with vines and other various creeping vegetation; it's vast and sprawling halls filled with lost and forgotten quarters. When a gigantic flood reaches the castle, Peake remarks that the castle hasn't been so clean in a millenium! I wanted desperately for someone to contact a contractor and fix the whole compound up).
Peake's sketches give us a peak (no pun intended - no, really) into the author's mind, adding yet another layer to a uniquely unique and inspiring creation.
Utterly un-put-down-able and unique. A world I want to revisit again and again. And soon.