The GORMENGHAST Saga

By: Andrew Osmond
Date: Wednesday, June 14, 2000

Titus Groan, the first Gormenghast novel, was published in 1946. Its sequel Gormenghast appeared in 1950. Both names are arbitrary; arguably, the first book is more about Gormenghast and the second more on Titus. Titus Alone, the third book, followed in 1959, though it was later revised (see below). The reputation of the saga mainly rests on the first two books, which form one great story, the tale of the giant castle Gormenghast, its strange rulers and denizens, its eternal, insane rituals, its young heir Titus Groan and his nemesis, the anarchic, ruthless Steerpike, an upwardly mobile kitchen-boy who turns everything on its head.

Yet fantasy film-maker Terry Gilliam once said the trouble with adapting the saga is that there isn't enough story. It seems a surprising claim. After all, the three novels have a combined length approaching Lord of the Rings. They feature grandiose, fantastical settings and are replete with murders, seductions and revolution. Surely a most film-friendly property? But as Gilliam points out, the Gormenghast novels are not plot-driven, by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, they rely on characters, atmosphere, and on Peake's ornate, musical prose; indeed, the prose style is a character in its own right. Peake was not just a novelist, but a poet, illustrator and artist. As such, his writing is concerned with space as much as time, drawing out settings, moods and tableaux in extensive detail, with little concern for advancing narrative.

This has two consequences for the BBC dramatization. On the one hand, the production manages to compress the first two novels into 240 minutes(plus commercials) while keeping most of the main incidents and set-pieces in coherent form. There are none of the story leaps or info-dumps that hamstring the film versions of Dune or Lord of the Rings (Bakshi). However, the series faces a different problem, that of conveying Peake's extreme, bizarre characters on screen when they were designed to live in his signature prose.

In The Art of Gormenghast book, BBC director Andy Wilson puts the problem in the following way. 'The characters that Peake creates are iconic; they are archetypes. There is the hero, the boy, the nanny, the mad king, the queen, the disaffected princess. But saying they are iconic does not mean they are two-dimensional. It is the most difficult thing in the world to create an iconic character - much more difficult than creating a naturalistic one, because you have to be certain of your ground.' In television terms, Wilson concludes, Gormenghast is 'Doctor Who acting. You have to create the fantasy by being committed to it.'


It's a tough call, and the acting - some would say obscene overacting - was one of the most criticised aspects of the BBC mini-series. (For the record, this writer enjoyed the performances enormously.) Yet while some book scenes were 'played up' in the dramatisation, the main problem is simply that, as Wilson says, Peake's characters are 'broad,' exaggerated, coming alive far easier on page than on screen. For example, consider the way Peake draws us into the mind-set of spoiled, self-absorbed Princess Fuschia, at play in her attic:

'As Fuschia climbed into the winding darkness her body was impregnated and made faint by a qualm as of green April. Her heart beat painfully. 'This is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.'

It's hard for an actress to compete with that, though Neve McIntosh -Fuschia in the BBC version - pouts enthusiastically enough. The prose (and the above is heavily abridged!) is representative Peake. This is, after all, a man who devotes several thousand words to the school daydreams of bored Titus, and dozens of pages to a few minutes' courting between two support characters (Bellgrove and Irma Prunesquallor). But Peake is as interested in place as in character. Take this early description as Steerpike gazes over the roofs of Gormenghast:

'He had seen, growing from three-quarters the way up a sheer, windowless face of otherwise arid wall, a tree that curved out and upwards, dividing and subdividing until a labyrinth of twigs gave to its contour a blur of sunlit smoke. The tree was dead, but having grown from the south side of the wall it was shielded from the violence of the winds and, judging by the harmonious fanlike beauty of its shape, it had not suffered the loss of a single sapless limb. Brittle and dry, and so old that its first tendril must surely have begun to thrust itself forth before the wall itself had been completed, yet this tree had the grace of a young girl.'

And, just to show Peake can do melodrama with the best of them, here's the scene when twins Cora and Clarice have a fearful visitation:

'In their room the aunts sat holding each other by the empty grate. They had been waiting so long for the handle of their door to turn. This is now what it began to do. The twins had their eyes on it. They had been watching it for over an hour - the room ill lit - their brass clock ticking. And then, suddenly, through the gradually yawning fissure of the door the Thing entered, its head scraping the lintel - its head grinning and frozen, was the head of a skull.'

The passage is one of the most gothic and supernatural in Peake's saga, yet it's also fraud. The 'Thing,' as Peake quickly reveals, is merely Steerpike in disguise, frightening the sisters into silence lest they reveal his schemes. Indeed, there's not much overt fantasy in the main two novels. True, many fairy-tale elements are there; a castle, a mad king, a boy protagonist moving to adulthood, an adversary he must face. Yet there's little of the genre furniture that became institutionalised after Tolkien: no quests, monsters or wizards. There is, however, a palpable sense of destiny, bound up with the mysterious wet-nurse Keda and her feral child. This builds to a tremendous resolution in the second book, sadly garbled in the BBC version.

Gormenghast is sometimes called a gothic rather than a fantasy novel, but even that's debatable. True, the saga revolves round an ancient castle and family, and the tragedy befalling them, but again it lacks many of the genre staples. For comparisons, academics seek further afield. There's clearly some Dickens in Peake's writing, with particular similarities to the elaborate third-person narration in Bleak House. Note to owners of the books: check out the start of the 'Over the Roofscape' chapter in Titus Groan, which looks suspiciously like Peake's own homage.

In the Encyclopaedia of Fantasy, John Clute argues much of the ethos of Gormenghast, particularly its morose elder ruler Lord Sepulchrave (played in the BBC version by Ian Richardson), fit into a tradition of what might be called disillusionment fantasy. The emphasis on melancholy outlooks, spurious rituals and empty values owes much to the figure of Don Quixote, and Clute sees Sepulchrave as a prime example of the 'Knight of the Doleful Countenace,' a fantasy type directly descended from Cervantes' character.

As to whether Gormenghast counts as serious literature, that depends on which critic you ask. Anthony Burgess pointed out that '(Peake) does not seek to probe topical themes like race, class and homosexuality... his books nourish the private imagination.' Burgess rated Gormenghast as a 'uniquely brilliant' modern classic, a view shared by admirers from CS Lewis to Orson Welles. On the other side were those like Kingsley Amis who derided Peake as a bad fantasy writer, a bubble-bath escapist and artistically worthless. Today, some stores stock Gormenghast at 'mainstream' literature, some as fantasy, with Peake fans surreptitiously shifting the books back and forth depending on whether they see fantasy as art or trash.

Peake's own, self-deprecating comment was that '[Gormenghast] was really a question of self-indulgence... I enjoy the fantastic.' Some clues to his creation come from his own life. Gormenghast and its surroundings are often taken as combining elements of China - Peake spent his childhood in a missionary compound - and the tiny island of Sark, his artistic retreat for many years. The central theme of a crumbling, moribund old order, ripe for overthrow, can be taken as a broad allegory for the decline of the British Empire, along with the turbulence Peake saw in China. Famously, Peake also witnessed the horrors of Belsen concentration camp, travelling there as a war artist soon after its liberation. Some critics see Gormenghast as an escape from such nightmares; others read its dark scenes as reflecting real-world atrocities.

Titus Alone, the third Gormenghast book, is often taken this way, with its emphasis on destruction and the malign use of science. Very different from its predecessors, it's a disjointed, dreamlike journey through an alien land of marble cities and violent underworlds, with plenty of sketches of high and low society and gorgeous flights of fantasy. However, it works better as a stand-alone work than as a sequel to Gormenghast. Historical note: The book was originally published in 1959, when Peake was already succumbing to his final illness. Later, it was 'restored' by Langdon Jones, one-time co-editor of New Worlds magazine (with Michael Moorcock), who incorporated Peake's corrections and other lost material.

One more Gormenghast-related item is the short story 'Boy in Darkness' (1956), now published as a stand-alone book. An 'apocryphal' addition to the saga - the hero appears to be a young Titus, but is not named - it's an evocative, fantastical fable, but rather slight.

Peake's creation has appeared in other media. The author himself wrote a radio version in 1950, followed by a more recent audio adaptation starring Sting as Steerpike, with David Warner and Freddie Jones. In 1998, there was even an opera, performed in Germany in English and described by one paper as an 'intriguing fusion of contemporary classical compositions, popular musical and avant-garde rock.' Nonetheless, the BBC mini-series will probably stay the de facto 'official' adaptation for some time to come. One only hopes it'll draw viewers to the books.