Reading Corner

I’ve never met anyone else who has read Peake’s Gormenghast series. Which is such a shame. A poetic and intense satire of control set in the ivy-strewn stone domain of Gormenghast, I re-read this series recently and loved it just as much as I had the first time.

Pre-dating Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Titus Groan is often classified as fantasy. But it’s not your typical fantasy. No magic, no romance, no looming evil or grand quests. Just the daily task of navigating duty and ambition and avoiding despair. Peake’s prose can be dense, but only because his world is densely inhabited and tangible. His psychological insight and depiction of quotidian melancholy evokes Dostoevsky and Emily Brönte. I found this book mesmerising and hope you might too. For a more distinguished recommendation, you might be interested to know that C. S. Lewis wrote of the Gormenghast series:

“I would not for anything have missed Gormenghast. It has the hall mark of a true myth: i.e. you have seen nothing like it before you read the book, but after that you see things like it everywhere. What one may call “the gormenghastly” has given me a new Universal.”