The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

Chapter One Hundred and Nine

Chapter One Hundred and Ten

Chapter One Hundred and Eleven

Chapter One Hundred and Twelve

Chapter One Hundred and Thirteen

Chapter One Hundred and Fourteen

Chapter One Hundred and Fifteen

Chapter One Hundred and Sixteen

Chapter One Hundred and Seventeen

Chapter One Hundred and Eighteen

Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-One

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Two

COPYRIGHT

About the Book

Enter the world of Gormenghast. The vast crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is Lord and heir. Titus is expected to rule this Gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons, cloisters and corridors as well as the eccentric and wayward subjects. Things are changing in the castle and Titus must contend with a kingdom about to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, manipulation and murder...

About the Author

Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in Kuling, Central Southern China. He was educated at the Croydon School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. A gifted book illustrator, he is remembered for Ride a Cock Horse, The Hunting of the Snark, The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Grimm’s Household Tales and Treasure Island. He is best known for his fictional masterpieces Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959). Mervyn Peake died in 1968.

MERVYN PEAKE

THE ILLUSTRATED

GORMENGHAST

TRILOGY

Titus Groan

Gormenghast

Titus Alone

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

China Miéville

Introduction

‘Gormenghast’.

With its first word the work declares itself. Establishes its setting and has us abruptly there, in the castle and the stone. There is no slow entry, no rabbit-hole down which to fall, no backless wardrobe, no door in the wall. To open the first book is not to enter but to be already in Peake’s astonishing creation.

So taken for granted, indeed, is this totality, this impossible place, that we commence with qualification. ‘Gormenghast’, Peake starts, ‘that is, the main massing of the original stone’, as if, in response to that opening name, we had interrupted him with a request for clarification. We did not say ‘What is Gormenghast?’, but: ‘Gormenghast? Which bit?’

It is a sly and brilliant move. Asserting the specificity of a part, he better takes as given the whole – of which, of course, we are in awe. This faux matter-of-fact method makes Gormenghast, its Hall of Bright Carvings, its Tower of Flints, its roofscapes, ivy-shaggy walls, its muddy environs and hellish kitchens so much more present and real than if it had been breathlessly explained. From this start, Peake acts as if the totality of his invented place could not be in dispute. The dislocation and fascination we feel, the intoxication, is testimony to the success of his simple certainty. Our wonder is not disbelief but belief, culture-shock at this vast strange place. We submit to this reality, that the book asserts even as it purports not to. Of course Gormenghast is.

Many more than these three books were planned: this was an accidental trilogy. Each of its parts, and each of those unborn others, has and would have had its own quiddity. Gormenghast is not only the title of the midpoint text, but the shared foundation of the three books: yes, even of that last, so-strange, scandalously neglected volume, changeling among changelings. The events it describes all occur in exile from the castle, but Gormenghast, absent presence, could hardly be more there than it is in those pages.

It is a cliché of course to insist that this or that work ‘evades classification’, is ‘sui generis’, or so on. Caution is indicated. But the sheer strangeness of Gormenghast is very real. The work is irreducible to the sum of any of the influences we can find in it. Given its brilliance and the devotion in which it has always been held, one might be surprised at how relatively restrained its overt influence has been. Of course it has always had partisans and those grateful for its shadow, but it seems rather astonishing that it has not been a taproot text, a genre-starter, spawning generations of post-, and, inevitably, sub-Gormenghast fantasies.

The particular flavour of its oddness helps explain this somewhat subterranean history. What faces us is not a radical and violent estrangement so much as a sustained sense of almost-familiarity, of not-quite-familiarity, a strong but wrong recognition. Reading The Gormenghast Trilogy can be like the moment the friend we greet turns and is not our friend at all, but an only vaguely similar stranger.