![]() ![]() ![]() Lord of the Rings, a cohesive narrative spanning three volumes constructed around a quest with a difference, the disposal of a dangerous ring, Gormenghast the text lives on in the mind because of its extraordinary images, the physicality of long, gloomy stone passageways and characters that live off the page, particularly the scheming Steerpike, the boy who fights his way out of the castle's kitchens and grasps control through a series of cunning moves. ![]() Themes of power, duty and freedom dominate the self- contained set pieces, and the reader is caught up in a visual maze that is grotesque, often funny and desperately profound. The same could be said of the strange, Gothic Gormenghast trilogy written by the artist and poet Mervyn Laurence Peake, who was born in China 100 years ago tomorrow. GORMENGHAST: IT is a castle, vast and forbidding, not an easy place in which to live, tied as it is to impossible rituals, but even more difficult to escape, as the 77th earl, Titus Groan, lord and heir to it all, discovers. He lives on still in his surreal masterpiece of comedy, gloom and grotesque A hundred years ago tomorrow, Mervyn Laurence Peake, the author of the ‘Gormenghast’ trilogy, was born. ![]()
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