The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [3]
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.
‘And darkness’, Peake says a few lines on from his reintroduction of Titus, ‘winds between the characters’. It does, and it winds into each of them, and winds them together, too. One might say the same about the work of any black-nib-wielding illustrator. But the point is not only that Peake drew his own imaginings so brilliantly, it is that there is something specific about that brilliance. It is the manner in which, in his art, he captures intricacy and austerity, vividness and entropy. It is this that makes the claim of an elective affinity between his words and his images more than a tendentious fancy.
There was nothing like The Gormenghast Trilogy before it came. And despite the gratifyingly growing number of readers for whom it is indispensable, and the concomitant spread of descendant texts, such cuttings are all at a remove. Cousins, nieces, nephews, yes; but The Gormenghast Trilogy has no book-children. It and only it does what it does.
Each time the arid succulence of the prose brings us up short, each time our eyes widen at the illustrations, at Gormenghast itself emergent out of scribble and scrawl – and never more so than when at the combination, at the perfect