The Gormenghast Trilogy: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone - Softcover

Peake, Mervyn

4.02

9,413 ratings by Goodreads

9780099284383: The Gormenghast Trilogy: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099284383 ISBN 13: 9780099284383

Publisher: Vintage, 2000

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trade edition paperback vg++ condition film tie-in omnibus edition In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

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Review:

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy has grown out of its reputation as a cult classic and into the mainstream of fantasy, as a book no reader interested in Gothic dare to miss. It is one of the most distinctive, absorbing and wonderfully strange books ever written. The story concerns Titus, heir to and afterwards 77th Earl of Groan and his adventures in the sprawling, crumbling castle of Gormenghast. Gormenghast is an entire world and Titus comes to grips with his prime antagonist, the sinister kitchenboy Steerpike, amongst a brilliant profusion of characters and vivid detail. Peake's work is rarely compared with that other great fantasy trilogy to come out of the immediately post-war years, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings but in ways the two works do go together. Although Tolkien is plain and expansive where Peake is elaborate, poetic and inward-looking, both authors nonetheless use a detailed imaginative escapism in order to talk about the concerns of their day--specifically the passing of the old certainties of traditional England and the coming of something new. "'Equality is the great thing', said the sinister Steerpike, pulling the legs off a stag beetle and preparing to take on the whole hierarchy of Gormenghast, 'equality is everything'." This is why the short, surreal oddity of Titus Alone, the third novel, is the best: finally leaving his castle home Titus finds the larger world stranger even than his birthplace.

The new television series, with which this edition ties in, promises great things but the best part of Mervyn Peake is to be found in his ornate, poetic writing; his grasp of the Dickensian oddities of character and the utterly unique atmosphere of the books. --Adam Roberts

Review:

"Peake's books are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience."
-- C.S. Lewis
"One of the most important works of the imagination to come out of the age that also produced The Four Quartets," "The Unquiet Grave," "Brideshead Revisited," "The Loved One," "Animal Farm and""1984.""
-- "Anthony Burgess
"His novels, said Burgess, are "aggressively three-dimensional... showing the poet as well as the draughtsman. It is difficult in post-war English fiction to get away with big rhetorical gestures. Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means diffuseness' there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of his descriptions. He is always exact... [Titus Groan] remains essentially a work of the closed imagination, in which a world parallel to our own is presented in almost paranoiac denseness of detail. But the madness is illusory, and contr

Praise for Mervyn Peake:
"Gormenghast is grotesque, gory, ghastly, mystical, lyrical, monstrous, mind-bending, and inarticulably beautiful." -- The Scattering Blog
"A gorgeous, volcanic eruption . . . a work of extraordinary imagination." --"The New Yorker"
"Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It is a very, very great work . . . a classic of our age." --Robertson Davies, author of The Deptford Trilogy
"[Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience." --C.S. Lewis
"The true fantasy classic of our time." --"The Washington Post"
"Peake's style is marvelous... His inventiveness, his ingenuity, and his humor are astonishing." --"San Francisco Chronicle"
"Many readers admire Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, buto

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