The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy Read online

  Contents

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TITLE PAGE

  INTRODUCTION

  A NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS

  TITUS GROAN

  The Hall of the Bright Carvings

  The Great Kitchen

  Swelter

  The Stone Lanes

  ‘The Spy-Hole’

  Fuchsia

  ‘Tallow and Birdseed’

  A Gold Ring for Titus

  Sepulchrave

  Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap

  The Attic

  The Frivolous Cake

  ‘Mrs Slagg By Moonlight’

  Keda

  ‘First Blood’

  ‘Assemblage’

  ‘Titus is Christened’

  Means of Escape

  ‘A Field of Flagstones’

  ‘Over the Roofscape’

  ‘Near and Far’

  ‘Dust and Ivy’

  ‘The Body by the Window’

  ‘Ullage of Sunflower’

  Soap for Greasepaint

  At the Prunesquallors

  A Gift of the Gab

  While the Old Nurse Dozes

  Flay Brings a Message

  The Library

  In a Lime-Green Light

  Reintroducing the Twins

  ‘The Fir-Cones’

  Keda and Rantel

  The Room of Roots

  ‘Inklings of Glory’

  ‘Preparations for Arson’

  The Grotto

  Knives in the Moon

  ‘The Sun Goes Down Again’

  ‘Meanwhile’

  ‘The Burning’

  And Horses Took Them Home

  Swelter Leaves His Card

  The Un-Earthing of Barquentine

  First Repercussions

  Sourdust is Buried

  The Twins are Restive

  ‘Half-Light’

  A Roof of Reeds

  ‘Fever’

  Farewell

  Early One Morning

  A Change of Colour

  A Bloody Cheekbone

  The Twins Again

  The Dark Breakfast

  The Reveries

  The Reverie of Cora

  Reverie of Alfred Prunesquallor

  Reverie of Fuschia

  Reverie of Irma Prunesquallor

  The Reverie of Lady Clarice

  Reverie of Gertrude the Countess of Gormenghast

  Reverie of Nannie Slagg

  Reverie of Sepulchrave, 76th Earl of Gormenghast

  Here and There

  Presage

  In Preparation for Violence

  Blood At Midnight

  Gone

  The Roses Were Stones

  ‘Barquentine and Steerpike’

  By Gormenghast Lake

  Countess Gertrude

  The Apparition

  The Earling

  Mr Rottcodd Again

  GORMENGHAST

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Spiregrain, Throd and Splint

  Chapter Fourteen

  Irma Wants a Party

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  TITUS ALONE

  Dedication

  Titus Alone: Publisher’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

&
nbsp; Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  Chapter Ninety

  Chapter Ninety-One

  Chapter Ninety-Two

  Chapter Ninety-Three

  Chapter Ninety-Four

  Chapter Ninety-Five

  Chapter Ninety-Six

  Chapter Ninety-Seven

  Chapter Ninety-Eight

  Chapter Ninety-Nine

  Chapter One Hundred

  Chapter One Hundred and One

  Chapter One Hundred and Two

  Chapter One Hundred and Three

  Chapter One Hundred and Four

  Chapter One Hundred and Five

  Chapter One Hundred and Six

  Chapter One Hundred and Seven

  Chapter One Hundred and Eight

  Chapter One Hundred and Nine

  Chapter One Hundred and Ten

  Chapter One Hundred and Eleven

  Chapter One Hundred and Twelve

  Chapter One Hundred and Thirteen

  Chapter One Hundred and Fourteen

  Chapter One Hundred and Fifteen

  Chapter One Hundred and Sixteen

  Chapter One Hundred and Seventeen

  Chapter One Hundred and Eighteen

  Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen

  Chapter One Hundred and Twenty

  Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-One

  Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Two

  COPYRIGHT

  About the Book

  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 subjects. 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...

  About the Author

  Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in Kuling, Central Southern China. He was educated at the Croydon School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. A gifted book illustrator, he is remembered for Ride a Cock Horse, The Hunting of the Snark, The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Grimm’s Household Tales and Treasure Island. He is best known for his fictional masterpieces Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959). Mervyn Peake died in 1968.

  MERVYN PEAKE

  THE ILLUSTRATED

  GORMENGHAST

  TRILOGY

  Titus Groan

  Gormenghast

  Titus Alone

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

  China Miéville

  Introduction

  ‘Gormenghast’.

  With its first word the work declares itself. Establishes its setting and has us abruptly there, in the castle and the stone. There is no slow entry, no rabbit-hole down which to fall, no backless wardrobe, no door in the wall. To open the first book is not to enter but to be already in Peake’s astonishing creation.

  So taken for granted, indeed, is this totality, this impossible place, that we commence with qualification. ‘Gormenghast’, Peake starts, ‘that is, the main massing of the original stone’, as if, in response to that opening name, we had interrupted him with a request for clarification. We did not say ‘What is Gormenghast?’, but: ‘Gormenghast? Which bit?’

  It is a sly and brilliant move. Asserting the specificity of a part, he better takes as given the whole – of which, of course, we are in awe. This faux matter-of-fact method makes Gormenghast, its Hall of Bright Carvings, its Tower of Flints, its roofscapes, ivy-shaggy walls, its muddy environs and hellish kitchens so much more present and real than if it had been breathlessly explained. From this start, Peake acts as if the totality of his invented place could not be in dispute. The dislocation and fascination we feel, the intoxication, is testimony to the success of his simple certainty. Our wonder is not disbelief but belief, culture-shock at this vast strange place. We submit to this reality, that the book asserts even as it purports not to. Of course Gormenghast is.

  Many more than these three books were planned: this was an accidental trilogy. Each of its parts, and each of those unborn others, has and would have had its own quiddity. Gormenghast is not only the title of the midpoint text, but the shared foundation of the three books: yes, even of that last, so-strange, scandalously neglected volume, changeling among changelings. The events it describes all occur in exile from the castle, but Gormenghast, absent presence, could hardly be more there than it is in those pages.

  It is a cliché of course to insist that this or that work ‘evades classification’, is ‘sui generis’, or so on. Caution is indicated. But the sheer strangeness of Gormenghast is very real. The work is irreducible to the sum of any of the influences we can find in it. Given its brilliance and the devotion in which it has always been held, one might be surprised at how relatively restrained its overt influence has been. Of course it has always had partisans and those grateful for its shadow, but it seems rather astonishing that it has not been a taproot text, a genre-starter, spawning generations of post-, and, inevitably, sub-Gormenghast fantasies.

  The particular flavour of its oddness helps explain this somewhat subterranean history. What faces us is not a radical and violent estrangement so much as a sustained sense of almost-familiarity, of not-quite-familiarity, a strong but wrong recognition. Reading The Gormenghast Trilogy can be like the moment the friend we greet turns and is not our friend at all, but an only vaguely similar stranger.

  Some of the themes, for example, are hardly unprecedented: most famously the tension between tradition and change, between the antique rules of Gormenghast and the insurrectionary force of Steerpike, at whose hand so much is shattered. Even here, however, while the problematic may be relatively clear, the sides, the moral axis, are anything but. When Steerpike tugs limbs from a beetle as he says, ‘Equality is the great thing, equality is everything’, the conjunction of sadism and radicalism might read as fairly heavy-handed reactionary slander, and his ongoing sociopathic Machiavellianism might seem to underline this view. But is this really the argument? Given the remorseless ludicrousness of the rituals to which Gormenghast and Groan life are subjected and by which they are trapped, the practices’ pointlessness and powerlessness to improve anything for anybody, the panicky subservience of those in their thrall, the idea that fidelity to ‘tradition’ or ‘history’ is celebrated is utterly hollow. There is something at least as bracing as it is horrifying in the transformations Steerpike wreaks. We both take and untake sides.

  It is in the names above all, perhaps, that Peake’s strategy of simultaneous familiarising and defamiliarising us is at its zenith; Rottcodd, Muzzlehatch, Sourdust, Crabcalf, Gormenghast itself. Such strange and unlikely composites clearly echo Trollope and above all Dickens. But where for them the nomenclaturic agenda worked, often moralistically, to semaphore salient aspects of the named, for Peake no such readings are feasible. This is hardly beca
use he tones down the absurdism. On the contrary, what is merely camp in Dickens becomes grotesquerie in Peake, and splendid for it. But such names are so overburdened with semiotic freight, stagger under such a profusion of meanings, that they end up as opaque as if they had none. ‘Prunesquallor’ is a glorious and giddying synthesis, and one that sprays images – but their portent remains unclear. The doctor’s character does not help us. He is vivid, comedic, decent, but neither particularly squalid nor overtly fructine. Our minds are perpetual hermeneutic engines, and they do not stop attempting to decode, but their gears cannot get traction.

  Not all the names are invented or crossbred, and where they are not, it is their context that makes them strange. Flay, Lord Groan’s taciturn manservant, and his nemesis, the murderous cook Swelter, are both named with a verb, proper-nouned. In each case the symbolic suitability is arguable, but is neither self-evident, nor, in fact, argued. Swelter has a first name: Abiatha. Its Hebrew meaning, bountiful father, is a discomforting joke, to which Swelter himself draws attention. ‘I am the father of excellence and plenty,’ he says, and makes the name a chant. Abiatha, he sings, hypnotically. Nomen est omen, but an omen of what, who can quite say?

  Paradoxes like this one, of surplus yet shy meanings, abound. Gormenghast feels both claustrophobic and vast. The language is lush and dusty, organic and desiccated.

  At the start of the middle volume, Peake introduces us to a boy we’ve so far known only known as a baby. These opening pages are, uniquely for the series, in the present tense; no matter, then, what other ages Titus passes through, he is also, always, seven – a child needing succour. We open with three three-word clauses. A troika of troikas. ‘Titus is seven’. And? ‘His confines, Gormenghast’. Gormenghast, again and always. Here ‘confines’, noun and verb, underscores the oppression of all that stone. And how does Titus live? How has he been raised?

  ‘Suckled on shadows’.

  It is an astounding phrase. A vivid Gormenghastian paradox, an impossible dialectic of nurture and imprisonment, of sustenance out of emptiness, out of darkness.

  Here Peake the writer meets Peake the artist. As this new edition makes so clear, these two aspects of the man’s work were always intimately related, and it is an inextricable aspect of The Gormenghast Trilogy that these are illustrated books. For many of his admirers (and I am one) it is in Peake’s pen-and-ink work that his most remarkable talents show. In his vivid and loose working sketches; his sparse outline drawings, that render in blank space as much as in the lines themselves; in the lightly washed Gormenghast of shade-contrast, elegant brushwork and space; and above all in his astonishing cross-hatching. Scribbles and overlaid lines become vectors of shade and solidity. Through only two values – ink and not-ink, black and white, lines of the former overlapping on the latter – Peake’s figures and landscapes emerge in three dimensions. It is through this monochrome alchemy of crosshatching that all the vivid varieties of presence, all the humanely-rendered, exaggerated but never parodic features of his Gormenghastians, and of the city inhabitants with whom Titus walks in self-exile, are made. Plenitude out of nothing, substance out of shade.