PEAKE, Mervyn (Laurence)

(1911-1968)

   UK writer and artist, born in China, where he lived until he was 12 in a missionary compound, embedded into a land as strange as the country surrounding Gormenghast. He was initially better regarded as an artist than as a writer and, although he had written some poetry before the end of WWII, the publication of Titus Groan (1946) showed an unexpected side to his genius. Gormenghast (1950) is closely linked to that first volume, but it is clear that MP never intended to compose a trilogy per se; Titus Alone (cut 1959; reconstructed from manuscript by Langdon JONES 1970) - a text the author was unable to take beyond draftform due to the onset of the disease which killed him - ends at a point that MP did not intend as a definitive terminus. This sense of the shape of the sequence is confirmed by the 1991 critical edition of the 3 novels, in which Titus Alone (as coll 1991 US) ed G. Peter Winnington includes the surviving pages of "Titus Awakes", the incomplete 4th volume of the sequence. But, although the existing trilogy-variously identified as the Gormenghast or Titus Groan sequence, and on one occasion assembled as TheTitus Books (omni 1983; vt The Gormenghast Trilogy 1991 US) - was never in its author's mind a complete entity, it remains a series of texts whose power is remarkable, and the definition of which in generic terms is loaded with difficulties. Although couched in a language which might point towards FANTASY, it contains no fantasy elements; though redolent of a dying-Earth (FAR FUTURE) venue in its sense of belatedness and in the person of Titus's father - a fidgety, crotchet-ridden, ENTROPY-exuding manic-depressive aristocrat whose like has haunted the dying-Earth habitats of writers from M. John HARRISON to Richard GRANT - the first 2 volumes cannot be thought of as sf. The sequence is perhaps best thought of as being sui generis.Told in an elaborated, densely pictorial language, the story of Titus's birth and childhood in Gormenghast Castle is fundamentally the story of a coming-of-age: it is a genuine Bildungsroman, the story of the growth of a soul. At the same time, great stretches of the sequence ignore the priggish, bland young Titus entirely to concentrate upon the vividly realized cast of grotesques which surrounds him. In Titus Groan itself, one of the most intensely painterly books ever crafted, the infant protagonist is surrounded by a dwelling so intricate and dense (MP derived something of its scale from Sark, in the Channel Islands) that he never becomes more than an occasional raised figurine inthe Gormenghast geography. Gormenghast is essentially devoted to the Realpolitik rise and inevitable fall of the modern-minded Steerpike. OnlyTitus Alone concentrates on the hero, now self-exiled from his childhood and his great demesne, as he hurtles through a futuristic, jaggedly conceived DYSTOPIAN world; at the end, about to return home, he turns his back on all his memories, and the sequence stops short, dangling. Throughout, the wealth of detail of the work makes Gormenghast one of themost richly realized ALTERNATE WORLDS in all the literature of fantasy or sf.MP contributed to Sometime, Never (anth 1956) a short story about Titus, Boy in Darkness (1956; 1976 chap). Mr Pye (1953) is an excellentwhimsical fantasy, set largely on Sark, about a man whose goodness is so profound that he sprouts angel's wings, and about his desperate attempts to get rid of them. But the huge fragments of Titus Groan remain central.

   JC

   Other works: Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1939 chap), for children; Letters from a Lost Uncle (1948), for children; Mervyn Peake: Writings and Drawings (anth 1974) ed Maeve Gilmore, MP's widow, andShelagh Johnson.

   About the author: A World Away: A Memoir (1970) by Maeve Gilmore; Mervyn Peake (1974) by John Batchelor; Mervyn Peake (1976) by John Watney; Peake's Progress (coll 1978; rev 1981) ed Maeve Gilmore. A journal, Peake Studies, ed G. Peter Winnington, was instituted in 1988 and continues.