The gothic beauty of Mervyn Peake’s Castle Groan, one of the most vivid and detailed settings in the fantasy genre, may finally make it to the silver screen, with none other than fantasy heavyweight Neil Gaiman at the helm.
Gaiman made the announcement on his Twitter feed.
The Gormenghast Trilogy has long been a favorite of many authors, including C.S. Lewis, Michael Moorcock, and Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange). Titus Groan, the first novel in the series, was published in 1950, the same year as Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and four years before The Lord of the Rings.
Although Peake’s novel never achieved the same acclaim among readers as Lewis or Tolkien, it may have proven to be more influential — as a precursor to modern “grimdark” fantasy, the dark and gritty, morally gray counterpoint to Tolkien’s simplistic good-versus-evil dynamic. Think Joe Abercrombie, R. Scott Baker, Michael Moorcock, China Miéville, and George R.R. Martin, to name a few.
Lewis offers high praise for the Gormenghast Trilogy, calling the books “actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.”
I for one am beyond excited to read this classic (actually, I have already begun. Review forthcoming!). The prose absolutely pulsates with strange beauty. Here is a magnificent passage describing lightning at midnight:
And then it came. A light more brilliant than the sun’s — a light like razors. It not only showed to the least minutiae the anatomy of masonry, pillars and towers, trees, grass-blades and pebbles, it conjured these things, it constructed them from nothing. They were not there before — only the void, the abactinal absences of all things — and then a creation reigned in a blinding and ghastly glory as a torrent of electric fire coursed across heaven.
Wow. In some classics the writing is stuffy and boring, but not here. Have any of you read Peake’s classic? Let me know what you think.
The Aberrant Rag 