The South Wing

Gormenghast: A castle without end, encompassing all and leaving nothing behind. It is a horrible place, confining and claustrophobic for all its expanse and dusty grandeur. The Earl of Groan rules Gormenghast, though layers of tradition and the weight of unbroken centuries of rule weigh him, and the castle, down.

At the beginning of British author Mervyn Peake’s fantasy trilogy Gormenghast

, Titus Groan, the seventy-seventh Earl of Groan, is born, finally, promising change but no-change. He is to be a new Earl but his movements, his meal times, his marriage, his words, his decrees and very nearly his thoughts, are to be determined by everything that has come before. Peake, an author and an artist quite skilled at capturing the grotesque, has written a horrid, dark, bleak, miserable trilogy, one bent double from the weight of squalor and indifference, from dust and dreary, endless obligation.

The Gormenghast Trilogy–comprising Titus Groan download wimbledon divx

(1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959)–was designed as a bildungsroman of sorts, though Peake planned more novels than the three he managed to write; alas, the education of Titus was never properly completed. The first two novels were written closely together and adhere strongly to the intricacies and mordancy of the castle, while the third breaks new territory, becoming something both greater and smaller than its predecessors.

Titus Groan

and Gormenghast concern Titus’ birth and education, respectively. Trapped within the belly of the castle, unable by birth to do anything but follow his duty and the tradition of the Groans, Titus nonetheless shows a certain spark of independence. He wants a life greater than that which Gormenghast can offer. His mirror is Steerpike, a young man who rises up the social hierarchy of Gormenghast through flattery, insinuation, deceit and murder. Steerpike, too, dislikes the rigid permanence of Gormenghast and its inhabitants’ strict obeisance to the rule of law. Steerpike views Titus as his enemy, as the embodiment of what is wrong with Gormenghast and its Groans–endless tyranny, duty without end, tradition without meaning, and the unchanging expanse of class-based governance.

Peake’s primary goal with the Gormenghast novels–or at least the trilogy that he managed to complete before dying, prematurely, of Parkinson’s–is the excoriation of order and tradition for no sake other than it already exists. He was a firm opponent of the class-based muck England too often finds itself in, where blood excels simply because it is blue, and merit, no matter how remarkable, is ignored in the face of that which has come before. Peake portrays the Groans and their coterie of servants as despicable, contemptible, nasty, foul and ignorant, but most of all they are pathetic. The grime of a thousand years of repetition cling to their skin and clothes, and coats the walls of the castle. The Groans themselves possess the peculiar physical and mental deformations of generations of close interbreeding (incest, to call it by its proper name) and the dullness and lack of independent thought that comes from a system that allows for no deviation.

Castle Gormenghast is an embodiment of the grotesque, a richly drawn, deeply imagined place where drudgery and misery rules supreme. Peake uses the fantasy genre as a tool for shearing away the superfluous to focus on his criticism of the malaise at the heart of the British soul. Monarchies, congenital roles, the rule of tradition over merit, and the encroaching decadence that comes from a reliance on these methods, are shown to be an anathema to creativity, to honesty, to friendly relations, and to truth. Vast areas of the Castle are abandoned, and have been abandoned for so long that nobody knows their original use, or remembers a time when they were occupied. Children, even the smallest and most innocent, are by and large slightly less grimy versions of their parents. Sunlight and happiness are rare, and dust is everywhere.

Peake as a writer was fond of the dirty and the dark. Gormenghast is filled with lovingly detailed descriptions of sores and dirt, of misery and dankness. Nobody smiles unless it be at the expense of another, and even Titus, the hero and arguably ‘best’ character in the series, is not particularly noble or admirable. Peake excels at describing this sort of misery, using his talents to extend the conceits and negativities of a class-based society to its most extreme.

Titus Alone, which remained incomplete at the time of the writer’s death, offers a remarkable shift in direction for the trilogy. Peake left a number of notebooks filled with chapters, notes, and ideas for the third novel, but it was only after the diligent effort of Langdon Jones was a coherent work formed. Here, Titus has abandoned Gormenghast, traveling far from his homeland. So far, in fact, that Gormenghast is not known, and there are indications throughout that perhaps it doesn’t actually exist. Gormenghast, a castle mired somewhere within the medieval period of technology, seems a strange anachronism as Titus encounters screens, rudimentary computers, factories, helicopters, and bombs. Grotesqueries abound, yes, but they are hinted as being the effluent of the factories, and not “magical” creatures. Peake’s vision for the third novel is never really achieved, though the work offers tantalising glimpses of where his thought and criticism was headed.

The Gormenghast trilogy, at its heart, carries a strong warning against the individual trapped within the machinery of society. Creativity, sensitivity, love, happiness and achievement–none of these, in Peake’s view, are possible within a system that encourages nothing more than being born to the right parents, and possessing wealth and land. Yet when Titus escapes his suffocating environment, he is still not free. Freedom, it logically follows, is not a flimsy coat to be worn, or not, as appropriate. It is a concept to be fought for, to kill for and to die for, and it does not come easy.

Gormenghast is a rich, horrible, miserable tapestry. Peake’s writing is often inventive and subversive, going to such lengths as describing a scene through the mirror of a droplet of water, say, or showing a dinner through the stream-of-conscious impressions of each member, one after the other, or describing large chunks of action through impressionistic writing. Gormenghast is fantasy in the way Orwell’s 1984 is science fiction, which is to say Peake found the best method for his thoughts came from a fantastic setting, and not every day reality. Gormenghast is a horrible trilogy, dismal to a depth few works achieve, and it often makes for uncomfortable reading. But the criticism inherent in the work, and the warnings to intellect and creativity, are clear and relevant.