blissblogger
Well-known member
Anyone into the Mervyn Peake trilogy?
I had a second-hand Penguin copy of the first one for about 25 years - it was already yellowing when I picked it up, and it just got browner and browner and less appealing to handle. Eventually I chucked it out, unread.
But then this summer I saw the whole trilogy in a Penguin box set in an Oxfam - when I say 'box set' I mean a flimsy cubicle of scuffed cardboard into which the paperbacks are shunted. Something about the daftness of buying all three books when I'd failed to read even the first appealed to me. And then I found myself with three browny-yellowing paperbacks balefully challenging me from the shelf.
So I took the plunge finally.... and I'm loving it. I may actually finish Titus Groan this time, and then it'll be on to the other two.
The things that stand out are Peake's abnormally developed and intricate powers of visual description - his sense of space and architecture.
And then the pungency of the characterisation.
I'm enjoying the unsettled blend of fantasy and realism. The concreteness of the description ensures that nothing feels fanciful. As of yet there's no supernatural or mystical element I can discern. It's a cut above Tolkien in that regard. It's "Medieval" but modern at the same time. Everything is grotty and decrepit and corrupt.
I wonder if (c.f. Orwell writing 1984 as a kind of version of 1948) that's because it's a literary osmosis of the grot and decrepitude of Britain during WW2 and the immediate post-war years.
It's tempting to divine a political allegory in the Gormenghast world, but that feels reductive.
I had a second-hand Penguin copy of the first one for about 25 years - it was already yellowing when I picked it up, and it just got browner and browner and less appealing to handle. Eventually I chucked it out, unread.
But then this summer I saw the whole trilogy in a Penguin box set in an Oxfam - when I say 'box set' I mean a flimsy cubicle of scuffed cardboard into which the paperbacks are shunted. Something about the daftness of buying all three books when I'd failed to read even the first appealed to me. And then I found myself with three browny-yellowing paperbacks balefully challenging me from the shelf.
So I took the plunge finally.... and I'm loving it. I may actually finish Titus Groan this time, and then it'll be on to the other two.
The things that stand out are Peake's abnormally developed and intricate powers of visual description - his sense of space and architecture.
And then the pungency of the characterisation.
I'm enjoying the unsettled blend of fantasy and realism. The concreteness of the description ensures that nothing feels fanciful. As of yet there's no supernatural or mystical element I can discern. It's a cut above Tolkien in that regard. It's "Medieval" but modern at the same time. Everything is grotty and decrepit and corrupt.
I wonder if (c.f. Orwell writing 1984 as a kind of version of 1948) that's because it's a literary osmosis of the grot and decrepitude of Britain during WW2 and the immediate post-war years.
It's tempting to divine a political allegory in the Gormenghast world, but that feels reductive.
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