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The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Hardcover

 
9780099528548: The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy
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'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

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 subject. 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.

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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:
"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 control never falters. It is, if you like, a rich wine of fancy chilled by the intellect to just the right temperature. There is no really close relative to it in all our prose literature. It is uniquely brilliant.'" (Anthony Burgess)

"Dark, dense, baroque and hauntingly beautiful. Peake's lush prose and imagery are a pleasure to any lover of the beauty of the written word. A word of warning, however: this one takes its time. Most readers are used to more watery offerings - this is thick, creamy and extra-rich" (Carlos Ruiz-Zafron Guardian)

"A master of the macabre and a traveller through the deeper and darker chasms of the imagination" (The Times)

"I discovered it at 15 and have been rediscovering it ever since. It's a profoundly enchanting world, but there are no elves or spells the magic is purely in the writing" (Joanne Harris)

"I started reading it and did not stop.The images conjured up the most weird visions. Images that I had not encountered since absorbing my first introduction to the world of William Blake. It is a fantastic, almost surrealistic flow of vision" (Ronald Searle)

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  • PublisherVintageBooks
  • Publication date2011
  • ISBN 10 0099528541
  • ISBN 13 9780099528548
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages960
  • IllustratorMervyn Peake
  • Rating
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Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780879516284: The Gormenghast Novels: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780879516284
Publisher: Overlook Press, 1995
Softcover

  • 9780099288893: The Gormenghast Trilogy

    Vintag..., 1999
    Softcover

  • 9781590207178: The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy: Titus Groan / Gormenghast / Titus Alone

    Harry ..., 2011
    Hardcover

  • 9780749314262: The Gormenghast Trilogy- Titus Groan / Gormenghast / Titus Alone

    ARROW, 1997
    Softcover

  • 9780345242129: GORMENGHAST TRILOGY

    Ballan..., 1975
    Softcover

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