Gormenghast

Overview

Gormenghast is a castle so vast that parts of it have been forgotten, its "Tower of Flints" rising above crumbling wings, flooded halls and roofscapes where a boy can wander for days. It is ruled not by a king so much as by Ritual — an immense, unexplained daily liturgy administered by a hereditary Master of Ritual and his books. Mervyn Peake's novels about this place and its heir, Titus Groan, are among the strangest and most admired works of twentieth-century fantasy. They contain no wizards, no dragons and no spells. What they have instead is an overwhelming sense of place and a gallery of grotesques drawn with a painter's eye.

The books appeared almost in parallel with The Lord of the Rings, and they have been paired with it ever since as fantasy's two great mid-century monuments — the heroic quest and the gothic labyrinth.

Origins

Peake was a painter, poet and illustrator before he was a novelist. He began Titus Groan in the late 1930s and continued it during the Second World War, when he served in the army and, later, as a war artist; among his commissions he visited the liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, an experience that marked him deeply. Titus Groan was published by Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1946 and Gormenghast in 1950. A novella, Boy in Darkness, followed in 1956, and Titus Alone in 1959.

By then Peake was ill with a progressive neurological disease that would end his writing life; he died in 1968. Titus Alone had been heavily cut and edited on its first publication, and a fuller version, reconstructed from his drafts, appeared in 1970. He had begun a fourth Titus novel; his widow, the painter Maeve Gilmore, later completed it, and Titus Awakes was finally published in 2011.

The story

Titus Groan opens with the birth of the heir to the Earldom of Groan, the seventy-seventh Earl. Around the infant revolve his melancholy, bookish father Sepulchrave; his mother, the Countess Gertrude, who loves only her cats and birds; his romantic, lonely sister Fuchsia; the twin aunts Cora and Clarice; the skeletal servant Flay and the monstrous chef Swelter, locked in a feud; the fussy Doctor Prunesquallor; and Steerpike, a kitchen boy who escapes the kitchens and begins a patient, murderous climb through the castle's hierarchy. Steerpike manipulates the twins into burning the library, which drives the Earl mad, and by the end of the first book Titus is a baby Earl.

Gormenghast follows Titus's boyhood, his schooling among absurd professors, his fascination with a wild girl called "the Thing," and the long struggle to expose Steerpike, ending in a great flood that drowns much of the castle. Titus Alone sends the young Earl out of Gormenghast into a world of cars, factories and secret police, where no one believes his home exists.

Reception & impact

The books won devoted admirers rather than mass sales in Peake's lifetime. Anthony Burgess called them "uniquely brilliant," and the critic Harold Bloom later predicted they would join the twentieth-century canon, preferring them to the fantasy of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Michael Moorcock, a longtime friend of the Peake family, championed the books and set them against what he saw as the comfortable consolations of Tolkien.

Adaptations have favored radio and television over film. BBC Radio 4 broadcast two 90-minute plays in 1984, adapted by Brian Sibley, with Sting as Steerpike; the BBC's four-part television serial of 2000 starred Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Steerpike, alongside Christopher Lee as Flay, and was a critical success. A further BBC radio adaptation in 2011 covered all the novels, including Titus Awakes.

Legacy

Gormenghast showed that fantasy did not need magic or quests to be fantastic. Its kin are the gothic, architectural fantasies of later writers such as China Miéville, who has cited Peake as an influence, and the fantasy of manners in which intrigue replaces battle. In the gaming world its closest cousins are not dungeons but social settings: courts where status, ritual and ambition are the true obstacles. For readers who arrive from high fantasy, Peake remains the great counter-example, proof that the genre's range runs from Mordor to the Hall of the Bright Carvings.