Rating: 
Summary: Great Imagery about Nothing Interesting.
Review: I have heard almost all of Titus Goan on an audio tape and its by far the worst book written by someone that likely could have written a great book I have ever seen. Some of the Reviews compare it to Tolkein, which is an insult to one of the greatest writers in the English Language to even make the comparison. Character development and imagery are important supports to the purpose of a novel, which is to tell a story. The story in Titus Groan is so weak that it is embarassing. The Characters are more jokes than realistic, well fleshed out perhaps, but highly uninventive. The same is true of the imagery, it is detailed to be sure, but Mr. Peake's imagination is sadly lacking as is the emotional content of his imagery. Mr. Peake dumped out a lot of words for no purpose whatsoever. The people that praised this novel sure need to re-read Tolkien and the other great writers.
Rating: 
Summary: Peake kills Tolkien.
Review: These books are my very favorites, and well worth the buying, I promise. There's no appalling allegory. There's no good-vs-evil silliness. You don't get cardboard cuttouts, you get "true" characters (as true as any in fiction). And please don't listen to those who tell you to stop at "Titus Alone"---it isn't any worse than the first two, it isn't any less worthwhile a read. Peake was at least a little more original than Tolkien and took a good look at a few things Tolkien could not bring himself to look at.The startling physicality of Gormenghast!: While Tolkien's noble characters 'Alas!' their way through everything, Steerpike invades Fuchsia's attic and assumes the guise of an artist, trying to win himself a place in her world, so that from there he can win a place in the hierarchy of the castle... He *breathes*, he *moves*, he *performs*, and you can see it right in front of you. It is so simple and so *embarrassingly physical*----it is so weird and so *elastic* a scene, it gets your heart pounding like mad (well, it got mine). I can find nothing like this in Tolkien---I can find nothing like this *anywhere else*. Peake not only gives you a personal view of the characters, he gives you a vast canvas, a world that is a bubble cut off from the rest of existence, so you don't need various languages and histories and 'Los!' and 'Alases!' to pull you in. I cannot do justice to the books here, and I'm really sorry---hope I have not failed too miserably! Anyway, let me end with another reason Peake is better than Tolkien: his fans always remember how to spell his name! ;-)
Rating:
Summary: Peake is a Painter; Gormenghast is a masterpiece
Review: We are swept along from scene to scene better than the best cinematographer could imagine. Each room of the huge castle is painted in all its beauty or horror, each dusty corridor is as real as can be imagined. Peake's gift for words creates not just images, but we follow the thoughts of his characters and feel loathesome or melancholy or exuberant in all the textures that Steerpike and Sepulchrave and Fuschia do. These are some of the strangest books I have read. They are heavier and darker than Tolkien's works, against which they are often compared. They are finely focused to the smallest details on the castle, and they have a scope that is both compressed and alarmingly huge. There is a sense of immersion into the world of Gormanghast that is not present in any other book I have experienced. I could almost feel the heaviness of the air on the day Titus was born, and from then on the books drowned me and exalted me and left me breathless from one moment to the next. It is obviously difficult to describe the way one feels for reading Gormenghast. The best that can be said is that Peake has created literature of the highest order. He may even have shattered every standard of literature with his strange creation. Whatever else I know of Gormenghast, I know it belongs on my bookshelf.
Rating: 
Summary: original
Review: There's nothing else in all of literature quite like the Gormenghast trilogy. A weird, totally original blend of fantasy, gothic, and allegory, with characters out of Dickens by way of Hieronymous Bosch, and looming over it all the mammoth, decaying architecture of Gormenghast, the Groan family castle. The first two books in the series concern the newly born heir, Titus, 77th Earl of Groan, born into an aristocratic family which is completely bound by ancient and inane rules and ceremonies, and the efforts of one rebellious kitchen hand, Steerpike, who is determined to bring the whole artificial edifice, physical and cultural, crumbling to the ground. In the third volume, Titus leaves Gormenghast to seek his fortune in the outside world, a less claustrophobic, but still quite strange and intimidating landscape. Mervyn Peake was raised in China, where his father was a medical missionary. Coincidentally or not, he was born there in the year (and month) that the child emperor (recall Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Emperor) was overthrown. One can only imagine how bizarre a childhood he must have had, a Christian English boy growing up amidst the poverty of revolutionary China. He returned to England for college, where he studied art and adopted something of a bohemian persona. He joined an artists colony on the Island of Sark, the setting for his novel Mr. Pye. As he began to develop a reputation as an artist, Peake left Sark, in 1935, to become a teacher at Westminster School of Art, where he met his wife, Maeve. World War II broke out just as he began to come into his own, and though he volunteered with the understanding he could be a war artist, he was instead placed in a series of inappropriate jobs until he had a nervous breakdown. He did make it to Germany at the end of the War, arriving at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in time to do sketches of the wraith like survivors and to have the horrors of the place seared into his soul. He'd begun writing Titus Groan while he was in the army and it was published in 1946. Gormenghast followed in 1950 and both were critically acclaimed. He'd always had an aura of doom about him and was obviously not all that mentally sturdy, but the lingering psychological effects of what he saw in Germany (he returned after the War while the country was still devastated) and a combination of illnesses, including Parkinson's, made his later years quite awful. Titus Alone, the final volume of the trilogy, was published in 1959, his last major work, though he would linger for another ten years. The allegory of Gormenghast is fairly straightforward, and seems to parallel what Peake had himself witnessed. A once great society rots from within, beset by bureaucracy and senseless ceremony. A servant from the lowest ranks of the society rises up to challenge the established order, but turns out to be more evil than the existing regime. I note--though I doubt it's significant, since I saw it mentioned nowhere else--that you can transpose a few vowels to make the title read "German Ghost." At any rate, it is the case that Peake was in China as it's Empire crumbled, returned to Britain in time to watch it sink after the War, and saw the horrifying aftermath of Nazi Germany's Steerpikean nightmare. In a sense then, Gormenghast tells the story of the Century, of the fall of the upper classes of the old order and their replacement by the even more horrid workers. Though Titus manages to stop Steerpike, he nonetheless abandons Gormenghast to seek a brighter future. The greatness of Peake's work though does not lie in the story, it instead rests on his accomplishment as a visual storyteller. This is the most painterly form of literature imaginable. It helps that he did illustrations for the books himself, but even without his drawings, the books seem to move from set tableau to set tableau, more like a series of paintings than like a fluid narrative. This great strength of his work is also a significant weakness, because the tale is so two dimensional. With Tolkein, there's such depth to the story--not surprising considering that he created mythology, languages, history, etc. for each of the peoples in the trilogy--that the reader is always conscious of the sense that the teller of the tale could veer off onto any tangent for hundreds of pages without faltering. Gormenghast has more of the feel of a movie set; particular images are brilliantly imagined and realized, but there's nothing behind the image. You never really feel that Peake has given a moment's thought to either the 75th or the 78th Earl of Groan. This weakness becomes glaring in the third book of the trilogy, Titus Alone, as Peake sends his young hero out on a quest, the purpose of which is unfathomable. Though it does afford the author to end his tale with a nuclear-like holocaust and the admonition that Gormenghast's greatness persists in Titus Groan's mind, should he have the courage to recreate it. Some fans may find the suggestion to be blasphemous, but I think most readers will be well served by just reading the first two books. In fact, in the BBC's fine television production last year, they left out the third volume. Peake's writing is so original and so marvelous that you owe it to yourself to experience it, but the tale is not so compelling that you need pursue it to its very end. GRADE : B+
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: I have only just started reading this book, and it is great!
Rating:
Summary: Too many long descriptions
Review: If you enjoy a lot of dark prose and imagery then you will probably love this book. Peake spends a lot of time describing characters and environment with only minimal attention to story. If you are waiting for an exciting storyline then you will probably be disappointed like I was...I put it down after a about 250 pages and couldn't get myself to pick it up again....and what I did read just bored me.....
Rating:
Summary: Enter the world of Gormenghast...
Review: It is hard to find the key to Gormenghast: this is not the kind of story that will grab you from the very first paragraphs. But once you've got into the story, you are likely to get lost in it as easily as you may get lost in the labyrinthine corridors of the castle itself. You must be warned, however: the tour of Gormenghast is not easy, but it demands a good deal of patience. If you like fast-and-furious action this is definitely not for you. Pages and pages go by without much happening. But if you really get into it, the rewards are enormous. The language is pure poetry, and hardly a page goes by without at least one brilliantly beautiful sentence. The characters are oddly loveable, and I say "oddly" because on a superficial level there isn't much about them to like: they are mostly morose and self-absorbed to a hysterical degree. However, you eventually get to like them very much and you are truly sorry when something bad happens to them (and lots of bad things happen along the way). This happens even with the villain Steerpike, whose first actions in the book show such sheer courage, it is impossible not to feel a lingering liking for him, no matter how evil his actions are later on. The castle of Gormenghast and the community that grows inside and around it has been fossilized in a state of perpetual stagnation by the force of a tradition and a ritual that must be kept at all costs. This is about to change, however, with the birth of Titus, the seventy-seventh heir, who from babyhood demonstrates an unwelcome independence streak, and with the schemings of Steerpike, the upstart kitchen lad who will do anything to improve his appointed station in life, eventually resorting to crime. The first two books deal with Titus's childhood and Steerpike's ascent to the all-important post of Master of Ceremonies, and with the rivalry that will inevitably grow between them. In the third book, Titus leaves Gormenghast. The first two books are by far the best. Peake died before the third book was really finished, and this is very evident. This cannot be helped, of course, but after the grandeur of the first books, it is a pity that the whole saga should end with a disappointing note.
Rating:
Summary: No trumpery here
Review: To put it bluntly Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy is horribly neglected. I agree with someone who praised his fictional prose style of writing as like Gibbon's historical. Indeed, I think he is the only other author in English I have read who could rival Gibbon in beauty, precision, and lucidness of prose. Unfortunately, Peake was physically unable to bring Titus's story to completion as Parkinson's disease thwarted him, but a wonderful legacy remains. His vocabulary is immense and almost mind-boggling, but do not let that prevent you from exploring these novels.
Rating:
Summary: Poetry in the form of prose
Review: Mervyn Peake was a poet before he became a novelist. When you read the book you will surely notice that. It might look like a novel but it really is an enormous poem. Peake manages to create an impression of a stagnant rotting pool of water. The effect is impressive but I have to admit that I wasn't able to finish book. Nevertheless, I do not regret buying it.
Rating:
Summary: A Painterly Story
Review: The Gormenghast Trilogy is great. I don't know whether it's because it was written by an artist, but it is without a doubt the most painterly novel I've ever read. Peake's use of language is so beautiful and visual, I've never read anything like it. Steerpike becomes so malignantly evil in the book, at some points I could only read short bits at a time. And the operative word is "becomes". Peake draws Steerpike not merely as a one dimensional character, but allows you to see his mental and physical disintigration over time. In the movie you're led to believe that he does have some feeling for Fushia. Not in the book. He is the most calculating, Machiavellian character ever created. The movie was a very good recreation, but not entirely faithful to the book. I found myself so upset about what happens to Fushia, and so annoyed at Titus for, well, I don't want to give it away, you'd think these people existed. I sloughed my way through Titus Alone, base upon the strength of the prior novels, Titus Groan and Gormenghast. Peake still writes beautifully, but you almost have to say he does so in a vacuum, because the novel is so-so, to say the least. Titus can be such an annoying character and it's just not as tight plot-wise as the other two. There are good parts, but I found myself guiltily skimming for them, which is something I wouldn't dream of doing in the other two.
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