I consider it pointless to compare Tolkien and Peake; you might as well argue whether Raymond Chandler is better than Ivy Compton-Burnett. I would only point out, since I believe no one has so far, that in Gormenghast, unlike Middle Earth, Sex exists. I also think Peake fits into the Gothic traditio...
How peculiar. A few days ago I typed a couple lines about getting close to finishing the trilogy and the BBC series. Um, where did it go? Has the Goodreads blue pencil swooped down from The Cloud and erased my insufficiently review-y review? /metaphor mixingWhat.The.Fuschia?
The Gormenghast Trilogy in its entirety is so vast that it's hard to give it a single review. But I'll do my best. It is the story of Titus Groan, heir to the vast and crumbling castle of Gormenghast, bound in ritual and ceremony. It is the story of the characters around him: the story of Steerpike...
These are deeply weird books that are difficult to describe or categorize. In the introduction, Anthony Burgess, who calls it a "modern classic," comparable to other celebrated British works of the 1940s such as those by Orwell or Waugh, says there "is no really close relative to it in all our prose...
Titus Groan: Part 1 of 3:Peake’s writing in this first Gormenghast novel reminds me of E.R. Eddison’s in The Worm Ouroboros, both for its fecundity and for the manifest enjoyment in the English language its author feels. Twenty years ago – even as few as 10 – I wouldn’t have appreciated this book an...
Currently rereading as part of summer 2013's Great Gormenghast Read. It's only just started, so it's not too late to join in: http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/101455-the-great-gormenghast-readA thing of beauty, like the words it contains: beautifully bound, with sumptuous illustrations. I'm often...
'Titus Groan': 'The moon slid inexorably into its zenith, the shadows shrivelling to the feet of all that cast them, and as Rantel approached the hollow at the hem of the Twisted Woods he was treading in a pool of his own midnight.'I shall read the other two stories in this volume in due course, but...
OK. I'm going to clarify that I really liked the FIRST TWO books of this trilogy ... and didn't bother with book three. Mervyn Peake was a wonderful describer - he could describe the same mountains from three angles and it would just make them that bit more 3-D ... if you could be bothered reading t...
Robert Dunbar recommended this book to me and from what I've read of the first few pages, I can see why. It's lovely.I purchased the edition that contained all three books in the series.It is a very large book with tiny print.This might take a while.
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