Gormenghast (and Mervyn Peake in general)

god I so need to read this, my ex always wanted me to.

The more you know your Dickens, the easier it is to get a handle on Peake's approach. It's very much his style turned into something more viciously satiric than Dickens ever entirely dared, being too much the sentimentalist for the most part.

"All Cats Are Grey" was based on one of the Gormenghast books. And "The Drowning Man" I think. And pretty much everything Fat Bob ever wrote down.

I wouldn't go THAT far.

"Steerpikes Don't Cry"

"Why Can't I Be Flay"

"Just Like Fuschia" (also handy for the JAMC)

great, will read and watch bbc dvd's again +++ but I always seem to lose interest after a while and am disappointed with the end :-(

first book great
second book fine
third book meh

bbc adaptation ugly and silly :(

But the characters are grotesques, why not play 'em as such?

yeah, i just thought the bbc adap was ... i dunno, kind of low rent and tacky? to me the book seems an oily tone painting that only uses its narrative as base carrier. the book strikes me mostly as about peake's ability to have gormenghast castle exude ooziness, dankness, dark chilly rock with slime-mold and dried blood and bird shit. the story-substance itself interests me less than the setting. i'd go so far as to say it feels almost incidental to my eyes.

so when the tv movies basically ignore the descriptions of a particularly nasty locale (but one that i adore) and toss steerpike & co onto a circque de soleil training facility to act out a drama i've never – even as a reader – been heavily invested in, i think it's hard to applaud the effort. that said, i don't think it's particularly badly staged or acted.

the story-substance itself interests me less than the setting.

Good way of looking at it, really -- Gormenghast as mental geography in particular is surely one of the chief themes.

IMHO he crossed the line between awesome descriptive powers and "look how long I can write about an imaginary castle" showboating a bit, so I don't mind that the BBC series didn't show closeups of every location for half an hour before every scene started.

I had forgotten Sting played Steerpike in the 1984 radio adaptation. Yeeps.

I think the problem with the BBC adaptation is that it's too soon. They should have waited a couple of years until computer animation in TV shows was really good and less expensive than it was when they made it. I wouldn't change the cast, though, I thought they were all great. JRM as Steerpike has become something of a cultural hero to people like me and Rener and the Vicar.

They should have waited a couple of years until computer animation in TV shows was really good and less expensive than it was when they made it.

Yeah, this is definitely the last of the old-style BBC 'models and mattes please' approaches from what I can tell. Lends it a certain charm, I'd say!

JRM rocks the green formal clothes, I noticed.

god I so need to read this, my ex always wanted me to

"You haven't read that Gormemghast book yet have you?"

"Um, er, um, er......"

"That's it. I'M LEAVING YOU!"

Seems quite reasonable! I'll have to see the BBC adaptation again. Over-slick cgi definitely wouldn't have been right.

They didn't do 'Titus Alone', which I like a lot. I think there were meant to be ten books, making up a complete life of Titus, but Peake was to ill to continue.

Peake's illustrations are amazing.

The BBC adaptation left me a bit cold as well. I know it's a cliche to say "book x is unfilmable", but I think with Gormenghast that might actually be the case. Funnily enough, it's an unrelated computer game that best managed to evoke the labyrinthine hugeness of Gormenghast, and that was Ico on the PS2. Some of the Zelda games have the same feel too.

I really enjoyed Titus Groan and bought Gormenghast and Titus Alone as a result.
Gormenghast was so hard going that I've never finished reading it, which means I've never even started Titus Alone.

This...is worrying.

https://deadline.com/2018/04/neil-gaiman-a-beautiful-minds-akiva-goldsman-to-adapt-fantasy-novels-gormenghast-for-fremantlemedia-north-america-1202356738/

gaiman is a 'non-writing producer' though so that's good

I was more worried about Goldsman!

i had my first kiss the night that the first episode of the bbc adaptation was broadcast.

just fyi, update your xls accordingly

The Conventional Wisdom is to skip the third book, as it's during Peake's decline - there's a story that his wife took the manuscript to the publishers, and when they returned it with edits to make, she made it clear that this was entirely beyond him, and it's publish that or nothing.

But on the other hand, I've heard that it's basically fine and that it's only fallen from grace since it's the book not included in the BBC adaptation. It seems to be a reverse trilogy, in that the first two books are one story cut in two.

I've only read the first two, though looking at the plot summary for Titus Alone on Wikipedia is, how you say, o_O.

"The first edition contains many changes wrought by a heavy-handed editor, including the omission of entire chapters. The editor also removed various references to modern technology such as helicopters and cars. Critical reception has been more mixed since the complete novel was published"

started in on Titus Groan for xmas, never read before

Where you been?

eh it's been on my list "to read" list for awhile and I was wandering around the library and there it was, so

In a collection of his essays I was interested to find that Edwin Morgan was a fan. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25293605?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

remy otm above, I think

the book seems an oily tone painting that only uses its narrative as base carrier. the book strikes me mostly as about peake's ability to have gormenghast castle exude ooziness, dankness, dark chilly rock with slime-mold and dried blood and bird shit. the story-substance itself interests me less than the setting.

that being said, I did get kinda tired of the endless descriptions of minutiae by the end, dunno if I will bother with the second book

I bailed midway through the second book ~10 years ago. I remember forcing my way through a seemingly endless scene involving a party being thrown for a new character and then just not caring at all anymore.

Ran into another odd reference to Peake. In ‘Children and their Books’ (which is a collection of essays involving the Opies), in the essay on Beatrix Potter.

The claim is that Graham Greene, in ‘Under the Garden’, tries to refer to Potter but ends up in Peaks territory.

Ran into another odd reference to Peake. In ‘Children and their Books’ (which is a collection of essays involving the Opies), in the essay on Beatrix Potter.

The claim is that Graham Greene, in ‘Under the Garden’, tries to refer to Potter but ends up in Peaks territory.

https://i.imgur.com/F7APXs1.jpg

(Forgive the shadow of my pint and my...hand, maybe?)

I saw there's an illustrated biography of him in a local bookshop. Got several things from papers, magazines etc in.
MIght grab a copy if I get the chance.

ILX is reading my mind/phone. Just bought the trilogy (for the second time) AND the BBC dvd. I can't get enough of the long descriptive...er...bits tbh.

I’m. It sure I’ve ever seen the adaptation - I remember watching an episode when it came out, but I didn’t pursue it.

the first two books of the trilogy are so fucking good (i haven't read titus alone yet - i have it and will read it but am also aware that it does not have a great reputation). it's not even a genre i usually enjoy but i love the emphasis on description and routine and ritual, the feeling that everything has always been like this and that nothing would have happened at all if steerpike hadn't decided that being a kitchen boy sucked. i like how each in each volume, almost nothing happens for most of the book and then there's a flurry of action right at the very end that has wide-ranging ramifications. the writing is so dark but so funny.

Excellent and accurate summary!

i'm sure this has been discussed ad nauseum but it's interesting to me that these books are considered "fantasy" when there's nothing fantastical in them - no magic, no mythical creatures, etc. i guess because there's a castle and royalty and it seems to exist outside of our world and our history, but still, "fantasy" doesn't seem right to me. i don't really know how else they could be classified - baroque gothic fiction?

As good a term as any. I first learned about them via a general fantasy overview anthology with Gormenghast illustrations from Ian Miller, and they were quite good.

as noted above, i loved the first two books of the trilogy, but i started titus alone the other day and immediately it just feels off. not taking place in gormenghast, the car, the short chapters, etc. i know about peake's struggles with dementia and that it impacted his work. should i persevere with titus alone or is it OK to skip? it doesn't help that i have an old cheap paperback printing and the text is very light and hard to read.

Found the same. Couldn’t persevere.

i loved the first one but heard rumors about the second--not as good. maybe I'll revisit as this book stayed in my mind a long time

imo the second one is up to par with the first, and concludes the titus/gormenghast story satisfactorily. which is another reason why i'm not sure about the third - it feels unnecessary after how the second one concluded

cool--I had this copy from the library and it helped my reading--I can definitely see being annoyed by a small type paperback version of this

https://www.amazon.com/Titus-Groan-Mervyn-Peake/dp/1585679070/ref=asc_df_1585679070/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312009759033&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=7913209827340266691&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9052970&hvtargid=pla-450287186064&psc=1

There's a good Backlisted episode about Gormenghast that has a decent defense of the third book