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These profound and moving accounts of life with Mervyn Peake provide poignant and revealing insights into the art, personality and friendships of the author of" Titus Groan," "Gormenghast" and "Titus Alone."
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The works of Mervyn Peake have fascinated readers for sixty years. His Gormenghast sequence of novels – recently serialized to great acclaim by the BBC – stands as one of the great imaginative accomplishments of twentieth-century literature. In The Voice of the Heart, G. Peter Winnington, the world’s foremost expert on Peake, sets his subject’s fiction in context with the poetry, plays and book illustrations which are less well known. He traces recurrent motifs through Peake’s works (islands, animals, and loneliness, for example) and explores in detail Peake’s long-neglected play, The Wit to Woo. Through close readings of all these elements of Peake’s oeuvre, Winnington is ultimately able to offer unparalleled insight into one of British literature’s most vibrant imaginations.
'Gormenghast is, to my mind and to my taste, a perfect creation' Neil Gaiman Welcome to the world of Gormenghast, the classic fantasy series from the imagination of Mervyn Peake As the first novel opens, Titus, heir to Lord Sepulchrave, has just been born: he stands to inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that stand for Gormenghast Castle. Inside, all events are predetermined by a complex ritual, lost in history, understood only by Sourdust, Lord of the Library. There are tears and strange laughter; fierce births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings; dreams and violence and disenchantment contained within a labyrinth of stone. 'A gorgeous volcanic eruption... A work of extraordinary imagination' New Yorker
One of the greatest imaginative feats of the twentieth century: Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which Earl Titus Groan is lord and heir. Titus must contend with treachery, manipulation and murder as well as his own longing for a life beyond the castle walls.
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. LewisEnter 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.
It is forty years since the death of Mervyn Peake (1911-68), the author of the much-loved Gormenghast novels. To mark the anniversary this first comprehensive edition of Peake's poetry is published. It includes every black-and-white illustration he made for his verse, together with many previously unpublished drawings. Of the more than 230 poems in the collection, over 80 are printed for the first time. Robert Maslen's detailed work on the manuscripts reveals the poems as a dazzling link between the fantasy world of Gormenghast and the narrative of Peake's own life and of the turbulent times he lived in. Peake emerges as a compelling poet, with an acute sense of his responsibilities as an artist, passionately engaged with current events, from unemployment in the 1930s to the horrors of the London Blitz and the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. He is also a fine love-poet and a sensitive observer of the human form. Readers who love the world of Peake's novels, and those who are new to his work, will discover here one of the great originals of the twentieth century.
THE FINAL PART OF THE MIGHTY GORMENGHAST TRILOGY 'I would not for anything have missed Gormenghast' C S Lewis In this final part of the trilogy, we follow Titus, now almost twenty, as he escapes from the Castle, flees its oppressive Ritual, and becomes lost in a sandstorm. Helped by the owner of a travelling zoo, Muzzlehatch, and his ex-lover Juno, Titus ends up stranded in a big, bustling city. No one there having heard of Gormenghast, the general consensus is that the boy is deranged, and with no papers, he's soon arrested for vagrancy. But there are a few people who believe in his story, or at least who are intrigued by it, and they try to help him. And now Titus, the deserter, the traitor, longs for his home, and looks for it all the time to prove, if only to himself, that Gormenghast is truly real. '[The Gormenghast Trilogy] is one of the most important works of the imagination to come out of the age that also produced The Four Quartets, The Unquiet Grave, Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One, Animal Farm and 1984.' Anthony Burgess
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