The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [4]
China Miéville, 2011
A Note on the Illustrations
This exciting edition brings together over one hundred drawings by Mervyn Peake; from visual aide memoires which were sketched in the margins of the original manuscripts, to stage designs for an opera based on Gormenghast. While some drawings were produced in ink and others in pencil, the medium chosen for the full page portraits was highly resolved water colour. During his time at the Central School of Art, my father would produce the occasional lithograph and monoprint of the characters. Even after the books were published he felt drawn to his castle and its denizens. He seemed particularly fond of Muzzlehatch who appears more regularly in his notebooks than any other character and he continued to depict Gormenghast’s inhabitants until illness blunted the sharpness of his vision.
As can be seen from the eclectic range within this edition, fine detail predominates in several of the illustrations, while in others a more perfunctory view of the figure is observed. Humorous, evocative, poignant, even cartoon-like in style, quite a few also display that special skill my father possessed, one in which a character is brought to life in a single line. Whether it be the obsequious, scheming duplicity of Steerpike or the frail confused nature of Fuchsia, my father’s protagonists emerge from the page exhibiting all their strengths and weaknesses. Quentin Blake said of my father’s work, ‘Not least among Mervyn Peake’s virtues was his ability to be serious while involved in grotesque humour, and to be idiosyncratic while being completely professional. And that drawing was the essential of all he did.’
Ronald Searle recalls reading Titus Groan for the first time and how the strikingly visual nature of the writing affected him, ‘I started reading it and did not stop. The images conjured up the most weird visions. Images that I had not encountered since absorbing my first introduction to the world of William Blake. It is a fantastic, almost surrealistic flow of vision.’
There have not been many writers who were also accomplished draughtsmen and I am delighted that this special edition allows readers to immerse themselves in a rare universe – one where the pen, the pencil and the brush, and above all the imagination, merge triumphantly into a world far beyond the quotidian.
Sebastian Peake, 2011
Dost thou love picking meat? Or woulds’t thou see
A man in the clouds, and have him speak to thee?
BUNYAN
THE HALL OF THE BRIGHT CARVINGS
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one halfway over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.
Very little communication passed between the denizens of these outer quarters and those who lived within the walls, save when, on the first June morning of each year, the entire population of the clay dwellings had sanction to enter the Grounds in order to display the wooden carvings on which they had been working during the year. These carvings, blazoned in strange colour, were generally of animals or figures and were treated