Gormenghast Castle is hidden. When Titus Groan, the Earl of Gormenghast, finally escapes, he is shocked to find that no one has ever heard of it. The walls of his ancestral home that stretch for miles; the jagged towers and crumbling courtyards, the endless corridors, staircases, and attics, the weirdos and cutthroats who live there—it all goes unseen by the outside world. Whatever happens there happens in shadow and obscurity.
But all that might soon change. The Gormenghast books, in this moment of dragon queens and sword swingers, seem poised for a long overdue resurgence. November 17th marked the fiftieth anniversary of author Mervyn Peake’s death. That means his dark fantasy trilogy (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone) is headed into the public domain this year, while a potential TV adaptation is swirling about, with Neil Gaiman and other notables attached.
Gormenghast is violent, creepy, escapist fantasy. There are burning libraries, hordes of feral cats, insane people locked away in long-forgotten wings, tall towers and dark dungeons. The story is a grisly yet whimsical affair: a power struggle unleashed by the machinations of a surly kitchen-boy. With its bleak moral outlook and macabre humor, the books are a brilliant match for contemporary appetites.
But anyone setting out to bring Gormenghast to TV ought to be wary… It was tried once before. A cheesy BBC effort from 2000 showed the potential difficulties of filming a Gormenghast that captures the feeling of Peake’s books, whose dense, poetical writing and cutting social satire is nearly the opposite of George R.R. Martin’s no-nonsense prose. Peake is a maximalist, given to long fits of description—there are shadows and sunbeams in Gormenghast that have more personality than some of Peake’s characters.
It isn’t surprising that a 1984 radio play written by Brian Gibley was more artistically successful, with Sting in the role of Steerpike. (Sting, with a horse, a dog, and one of his children named after characters in Gormenghast, is almost certainly the world’s most famous Peake fan.) At the height of his fame, Sting owned the film rights to the books and claimed to have written a movie script that never appeared, for better or worse.
Since then, the fantasy genre has only grown. Much like Christianity, it’s matured from a backwater cult into a full-blown cultural phenomenon, with tribes and nations all its own. The Guardian’s review of the 2000 BBC miniseries declared “this should be the perfect time to televise Gormenghast.” And The New York Times agreed: Peake fever was imminent. At long last, fantasy was fully part of the mainstream. And yet Gormenghast eluded fame then, and continues to occupy a marginal space even among fantasy buffs—despite the intermittent efforts of enthralled bloggers. Gormenghast’s coronation in the pop-culture pantheon is long overdue.
But Peake’s whimsical prose has always been a major hurdle for potential readers. Like Poe on acid, Peake will set a scene with torrents of gothic description—a four-page devotional to a minor character’s coughing fit or someone’s bout of drunkenness—and then shift in the very next scene to a tone of arch-irony worthy of Austen. Similarly, the thread of Gormenghast’s plot, while lush in some places, is hopelessly threadbare in others. Like Moby-Dick it is built largely from its digressions. It is not a story overly obsessed with action. There are no dragons roaming its halls. There are no spell-books, no heroes, and no magic. There are no zombies to slice and dice.
The story’s main preoccuptation is the castle itself: its society brittled by age, its highest offices becoming ever more remote from life, governing only themselves, torturing themselves with needless rites. Gormenghast is gripped tight by self-imposed strictures—by a social confinement so complete that the people in the castle are convinced that the outside world is literally nonexistent. Complete obedience to arbitrary values, internalized self-loathing, absolute power wielded to no particular end at all, a deterministic universe that refuses to acknowledge the individual psyche: compelling stuff! But, as Westworld has showed its viewers all too frequently, the grand problems of ontology are sometimes better left offscreen.
Making a good soup from the stock of Gormenghast will be a delicate process. The BBC adaptation chose to lean heavily on costumes and comic elements. But on the page, Peake’s outrageous sense of humor is always double-edged, paired with grotesquerie, pity, or spite. That is hard to film. And contemporary audiences may not take kindly to the books’ jabs at the amusing speech patterns of the lower class, or the way a person limps. Peake has a keen social imagination but he is a raconteur, not a moralist. Even his most generous readers can’t help but wince at the portrayal of the noble savages who live in the Outer Dwellings clinging to the castle walls, who are never allowed to be anything but proud and naively primitive.
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Still, if Gormenghast is treated with too much gravity, it will look ridiculous. So much of the power of the books comes from Peake’s brutal irony and his refusal to take the plight of his characters too seriously.
One area in which Gormenghast is much stronger than the competition, however, is its brilliant antihero. Steerpike is a charismatic, ruthless schemer—a Macbeth untroubled by his bloody hands, talented like Tom Ripley and grimly competent in the manner of Deadwood’s Al Swearengen. The dramatic center of the castle, Steerpike has none of the vacuous evil of a Ramsay Bolton or a Joffrey Baratheon, none of the remoteness of Sauron. Steerpike is full of evil urges, and manipulation is as natural to him as breathing. But his crimes are tempered by his oily charm and righteous class resentment.
Born to a life of kitchen service, he acts boldly to cheat the system from within, gaining access to its highest ranks through sheer pluck, excellent timing, and some sturdy climbing rope. Steerpike sees his own advancement as a restoration of moral order, and he is only a villain because he isn’t particularly troubled with the means by which he restores it. He sees the injustice of his society, and that further obedience to its arbitrary moral facts will only hamper him. In a world of thoughtless obedience his greatest crime is that he dares to imagine equality of opportunity. He is a homegrown antagonist, raised in the castle’s ossified culture but ambitious enough to escape it. Why should he play by the rules of a world that sees him only and always as a servant—that refuses to acknowledge his capacities and his potential? He schemes to transcend the social confinement to which the heroes are thoughtlessly chained, but we are doomed to root against him. Peake, brilliant and cruel, shows us that we would rather preserve a rotten system than topple it.
In a way, Peake’s focus on structural injustice and moral luck might hamper a transition to TV. Westeros may well be a land lost to cynicism and ignorance, but Game of Thrones is obsessed with old-fashioned moral conduct, the quest to figure out right from wrong in a place overcome by casual evildoing. In the midst of senseless and exuberant violence, an endless winter of barbarity, there remains a dream of spring. The Starks will be avenged. The war will someday end. The ice zombies will be vanquished.
There is no comparable struggle for the future of Gormenghast Castle. The battle for the heart of Gormenghast is over. Apathy and decadence won, ages and ages ago. Peake’s interest in the future of Gormenghast extends only as far as Titus, the reluctant heir, and his desire to escape. But before Titus is allowed to leave, he must defend the broken system from which he so desperately longs to escape.
No elves come to save Gormenghast in its darkest hour, no desperate alliances are formed. It isn’t a place where shiny swords get forged to fight evil. It is a place where cowards sharpen kitchen knives in the dark, and the heroes are oblivious until the last moment. Titus is only moved to fight against Steerpike’s evil when it presents a credible threat to his social status. And in the end, the person who hates Gormenghast the most must restore it to order and strength—an unflinchingly cruel narrative choice, with such potential for excellent drama.
Gormenghast’s magic is ultimately only as potent as the imagination of its fans. If a new adaptation succeeds it will do so by staying faithful to its bleak outlook, florid language and bizarre mise-en-scene. We might soon be ready for Peake’s unapologetic weirdness. For now, though, Gormenghast castle is still obscure, unknown by a world determined to ignore it.
Ethan Davison is a graduate of Columbia University’s fiction MFA. Recently he wrote about the critic Martin Seymour-Smith at The Millions. You can follow him on Twitter @eadavison.
George RR Martin is himself a bit of a Gormenghast fan; so far he has written about Lord Gormon Peake, head of House Peake of Starpike, and his descendant Lord Titus Peake.
I read the first twenty years ago and read the second around four years ago – ie, my memories of the second are considerably fresher, but (just as you say) the tone struck me as wildly uneven. Peake is great at creating a sense of place – there’s a lengthy but brilliant sequence describing Steerpike’s race across the roofs of Gormenghast in the second book. And many of the characters are very well drawn. However, the books are invariably undermined by Peake’s attempts at ‘humour’ – the headmaster’s proposal to Miss Prunesquallor in book II being a case in point. Not only is it nowhere near as funny as Peake seems to think; it goes on for pages.
The TV series was supposedly inspired by Peake’s exotic childhood, but the bright colour scheme was completely at odds with the prevailing visual feel of the books: think grey; grey and dusty, grey and rainy, grey, grey.
Anybody who hasn’t read Peake before but is wary of tackling the books, should check out the story ‘Boy in Darkness’ a fantastical allegory about the illness which eventually destroyed him. It is part of the same world (the ‘boy’ of the title is Titus Groan) but you don’t need to be familiar with the other books in order to enjoy it. It’s pretty bleak, though.
I liked the BBC adaptation well enough — I rewatched it recently and think it was as good as we were likely to get at the time and under the circumstances, and it had some phenomenal casting. And they really made the right call by stopping at the end of book 2.
I’m very much looking forward to the new adaptation, when and if, and also thinking it might be time to revisit the books one of these years.
What’s next: Showtime does an adaptation of Eddison’s Zimiamvia trilogy?
I’ve never read the third book and never will. By all accounts Peake was starting to lose it big time by then.
You could make an SF adaption: turn the castle into a generation ship! A lot of its features add up perfectly…
I seriously doubt it. Not a lot of mainstream appeal for those books –in other words, not enough violence or sex.
Not a lot of mainstream appeal for those books –in other words, not enough violence or sex.
Absolutely not true. Just off the top of my head, the following major characters suffer violent or otherwise unpleasant deaths over the course of the books, including almost the whole Groan family:
Sepulchrave
Fuchsia
Flay
Swelter
Keda
The Thing
Steerpike
Cora
Clarice
Sourdust
Barquentine
That’s a pretty high body count.
The answer is “No” for a very obvious reason: the first two Gormenghast books, which form a cohesive narrative, take about 4 episodes, max, to relate on TV (as the BBC version showed). It’s a mini-series, not an eight-season epic, and there is absolutely not enough material to turn it into one.
I’m also note sure how the existing BBC version can be adapted except from somewhat better tracking shots of the castle. Beyond that, the sets were excellent, the script was decent and the cast was absolutely unbeatable (try finding a better Flay than Christopher Lee or a better Swelter than Richard Griffiths).
I read gormenghast 20 years ago and enjoyed it. There were parts that made me cry, parts i loved, parts i couldn’t put the book down including some of the most beautiful poetry I’ve ever read and a frighteningly surreal third volume.
The problem? I’ve never managed to reread it.
The book is a beautiful artwork, but that is essentially it. You don’t really sit and ponder about character, indeed the above comment about some of the shadows having more personality than some of the cast is quite exact. There are moments when the characters are deeply touching, Titus’ rebellion, Steerpike’s manipulation of fuchsia which is yet at the same time about the best fun she’s ever had. Indeed, I sometimes reread the chapter where Titus is sitting in class looking at marbles and imagining different worlds inside them.
And yet, the problem is that the plot is so damn slow. So much is lost or exists with such progression that there is absolutely no narrative flow at all.
The first ever scene is rotcod (a character missing even from the bbc), who pretty much just sits and watches and has no part in the action. There is a massive plotline around Vida and the thing which then ends with literally a lightning strike, while steerpike is actively heroic at parts, down right petty at others.
It has beautiful moments, I personally enjoyed the antics of the masters and Belgrove (though part of that is that I now always imagine him as Stephen fry), however moments is generally all they are.
That’s why Gormenghast isn’t really series material and why the bbc fell flat, since the narrative drive of the plot is so weak.
Also, if I can please put a word of love in for Titus alone.
No, it is not like the other books, and Titus change of status to a wandering outcast was completely different, however I loved it.
Characters like muzzlehatch and Juno (I love the romance between Juno and Titus), the shockingly nasty section with the black rose and some awful allusions about concentration camps. Indeed, ironically the third book probably is closer to a real narrative structure albeit a deeply surreal one with random adventures, especially when you get into the plotline around the manipulative cheta.
I personally thought the third book was a wonderful coder to the series and ironically probably found it easier going than the others, or at least I have always been a sucker for a journey narrative. Maybe one day with more patience I will reread the entire trilogy, I would like to.
As a series though? probably not, or at least not without substantial and hidiously ironic changes that would be deeply upsetting to all concerned.
Now, if people are looking for a book which has some of Peake’s writing quality, and! a shockingly good narrative, China Nievill’s perdido street station, indeed for game of thrones fans who are looking for a series with driving landscapes and completely relatable characters, plus a stylistic poetry not unlike Peake’s (mievill dedicates his writing to peake), there is something worth checking out.
The two sequels, The Scar and The Iron council are good too, albeit neither imho quite up to the book.
Now, if people are looking for a book which has some of Peake’s writing quality, and! a shockingly good narrative, China Nievill’s perdido street station
If you have ever been locked in a small windowless room and forced to play first-edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons for seventy-two hours straight with a precocious seventeen year old autodidact Dungeon Master who is the sort of person who backs you into the corner at parties and talks interminably about Henry Kissinger and fiat currency, then you need not read Perdido Street Station.
If you haven’t, but would like (god knows why) to emulate that experience in a conveniently portable form, then you should read Perdido Street Station.
It may help you to get through it – and indeed through its sequels – if you look out for all the bits where Mieville has inadvertently lifted characters and plot elements from the Wallace and Gromit films.
If I recall from the old Ballantine editions, edited by Lin Carter, Mr. Peake was dying of a brain tumor and it was a rush for his to finish the third book. I think this is probably why it was stylistically different and so much harder to read that the two preceding volumes.
@7: Most if not all of those deaths are on the unpleasant side (burnt alive, drowned, killed by lightning, and so forth), not what we would call violence. There are no flashy fights, and no sex.
I discovered Gormenghast via the wonderful BBC adaptation, and then read the books. (The magnificent Fiona Shaw will forever be Irma Prunesquallor to me. She could make you cry and die laughing at the same time.) But alas, there is the sad fact that neither has what we would call mass appeal.
@10: Neither have I played Dungeons and Dragons, nor have I seen any of the Wallace and Gromit films –but I see your point (I think).
I admire Mieville as a writer, but his books have a not-fully-realized quality that’s hard to pinpoint. The emotional side of things is just not there. There’s Punch and Judy and even Grand Guignol in there, but, but…
Books are brilliant but unfinished. Peake was a rewriter, and the final volume of the trilogy shows the impact of his early death, much less the bits and pieces of what would have been a fourth volume.
It will be the next Game of Thrones simply because I believe, at his current declining rate of production, and time wasting side projects, Martin is unlikely to complete his epic either.
@14 I find that Gormenghast lacks the right ingredients for popular appeal –which is not in itself a critique on Gormenghast, but of what, sadly, constitutes popular appeal.
But I do agree with you: I highly doubt Martin will ever finish ASOIAF. And even if he did, against all odds, it won’t be what it could have been. The last published book was a mess, and it introduced too many new characters and subplots –even a new Targaryen, for heaven’s sake.