Neil Gaiman in talks to adapt Gormenghast for cinema <p>Author tweets that he is in discussions with studios about a big-screen version of Mervyn Peake’s classic fantasy </p><p>The crumbling towers of Gormenghast and the evil machinations of Steerpike could be set to head to the big screen after Neil Gaiman revealed he was in talks with studios about a film adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s gothic fantasy novels.</p><p>Adapted for television by the BBC in 2000 as a miniseries starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the scheming Steerpike, Peake’s series of three novels tracing the life of Titus, 77th Earl of Groan, “heir to a crumbling summit: to a sea of nettles: to an empire of red rust: to rituals’ footprints ankle-deep in stone”, have also been adapted <a draggable="true" href="">for radio</a> and <a draggable="true" href="">theatre</a>.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Mervyn Peake Baddies in books: Steerpike, the great manipulator <p

>Mervyn Peake’s calculating and ghoulish shape-shifter fascinates readers and drives the plot of the Gormenghast series</p><p>When the lonely Fuchsia Groan finds Steerpike in her attic, he tells her: “I come for sanctuary.

I am a rebel. I am at your service as a dreamer and a man of action.” He has just clambered into her room after scaling the Gormenghast rooftops to escape imprisonment. He is certainly a man of action, but the chivalry is a guise. The only person he is out to serve is himself.</p><p>Steerpike, the anti-hero of Mervyn Peake’s Titus books, is a classic baddie. He is an ugly social climber who resembles a young Richard III; Peake tells us that “his body gave the appearance of being malformed, but it would be difficult to say exactly what gave it this gibbous quality”. Steerpike’s high shoulders, large forehead, and close-set red eyes are mentioned frequently. Over the course of Titus Groan and Gormenghast, he commits a string of murders that lead him to positions of ever greater influence within Gormenghast’s hierarchy. His pale, mask-like face is eerily inscrutable, the keynote of his evil. He constantly assumes new shapes in order to manipulate the elite, and could fit any number of villainous categories.

Is he a malformed Machiavel, a cold-hearted psychopath or a false revolutionary?</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Baddies in books: Uriah Heep, the smarmiest creep in Dickens</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Baddies in books: Lady Montdore, antisocial aristocrat</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Mervyn Peake Which is your favourite classic book? <p>As we approach a million followers on <a href="">Twitter</a>, we’re celebrating with a series on our favourite books. Yesterday we revelled in our <a href="">earliest reading memories</a>, so today we’ve moved on to classics: is F Scott Fitzgerald your man, or do you prefer Jane Austen?

Let us know in the comments or on the hashtag <a href="">#booksamillion</a></p><ul><li><a href="">Follow the #booksamillion conversation on Twitter, with new topics every day</a></li></ul><p>We’re in a party mood on Guardian Books: <a href="">our Twitter account</a> is approaching one million followers, after four years of fascinating conversations with an engaged and passionate community. To mark the occasion, we’ll be exchanging literary tips, memories and anecdotes on the social network. After a nostalgia-fest of childhood reading, naming the <a href="">first reads we could remember</a>, today we talked all-time classic literature. Here is a selection of our readers’ favourite classic books – add your own, either in the comments below, or on <a href="">#booksamillion</a>.</p><p>.<a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> well-thumbed, well-loved, with marginalia that increases with every reading. <a href="">#booksamillion</a> <a href="">pic.twitter.com/3TOMGpePUl</a></p><p>Alice in Wonderland, one shelf of many!

Specially for you <a href="">@guardianbooks</a> <a href="">@wordsbydan</a> <a href="">#booksamillion</a> <a href="">#classics</a> <a href="">pic.twitter.com/5Q013vMlaL</a></p><p>RT <a href="">@davidallen129</a>: <a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> Easy winner – love this book. <a href="">pic.twitter.com/Ay6dd5W0XO</a> <a href="">#booksamillion</a></p><p>.<a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> my favorite classic has its own shelf <a href="">#booksamillion</a> <a href="">pic.twitter.com/euaidabliw</a></p><p>.<a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> my favourite classic is this joy of a book. What's yours? <a href="">#booksamillion</a> <a href="">pic.twitter.com/NWSY9jH0iG</a></p><p>.

<a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> - I discovered this classic aged about 14, loved it then and love it now! <a href="">#booksamillion</a> <a href="">pic.twitter.com/WvQExKpy5q</a></p><p>.<a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> My favourite classic, could get lost in this again and again... <a href="">#booksamillion</a> <a href="">pic.twitter.com/lgDj0NkbfU</a></p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> I, Claudius. It's just ridiculously good. <a href="">#booksamillion</a> <a href="">pic.twitter.com/qTct8RMqd4</a></p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> Is this a classic?

If so, then this: <a href="">#booksamillion</a> <a href="">pic.twitter.com/xkK4HfTj5H</a></p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> John Stembeck's 'Of Mice and Men.' Something amazingly tender about it.</p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> The Catcher in the Rye! favourite book of all time, also learnt a lot from Holden <a href="">#booksamillion</a> <a href="">pic.twitter.com/kjXxYKGiyM</a></p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> Treasure Island. I read it every two or three years since I was 14. It always shows something new.</p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> my favourite classic is '100 Years of Solitude'.

It took me by surprise and is such a brilliant read</p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> The Strode Venturer by Hammond Innes, esp enjoyed it for the <a href="">#Maldives</a> connection <a href="">pic.twitter.com/jy9WL9zpIY</a></p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> The Great Gatsby is the most well loved book on my shelf. (That and Harry Potter - not quite a classic yet!) <a href="">#booksamillion</a></p><p><a href="">@wandsworthlibs</a> <a href="">@martabausells</a> <a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> and, to be topical, To Kill a Mockingbird.</p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> The classic example of weird and wonderful: At-Swim-Two-Birds. Closely followed by The Master and Margarita.

<a href="">#booksamillion</a></p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> Really cliche but Pride &amp; Prejudice is one of my all-time favorites; but so is War of the Worlds (go scifi!) <a href="">#booksamillion</a></p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> Nothing resonates as deep as <a href="">#Frankenstein</a>. Both Victor &amp; his creature break my heart. <a href="">#booksamillion</a> <a href="">pic.twitter.com/1e8sugJOgp</a></p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> <a href="">@martabausells</a> My favourite classic is 'Wuthering Heights': <a href="">pic.twitter.com/RY6BstLLy0</a></p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> <a href="">@PenguinUKBooks</a> I love Les Miserables so much my husband used a copy to propose.

<a href="">#booksamillion</a> <a href="">pic.twitter.com/AOfXi89L3X</a></p><p><a href="">@GuardianBooks</a> <a href="">#booksamillion</a> Favourite classic Virginia Woolf's "Flush" short, cute &amp; fluffy - the dog that is! <a href="">pic.twitter.com/JJiu9ZoXv3</a></p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Books From Gatsby to Darcy: the top 10 liars in fiction <p>Nick Lake, author of <a href="">There Will be Lies</a>, selects his favourite fictional tricksters and tellers of untruths in books</p><p>Fiction is full of lies. Fiction is lies, in some sense anyway. Of course it’s not as simple as that, but the lines are blurred: authors of fiction are, fundamentally, making stuff up. Fiction is full of liars too. There are the unreliable narrators, and the lies as engines of plot – dissembling is a useful device for propelling a story, creating layers of awareness that rub against each other like tectonic plates.

The reader knowing things that the characters don’t know. Characters knowing things other characters don’t know. Characters knowing things the reader doesn’t know. You could write a PhD thesis on it, but that sounds like a lot of work!</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Jennifer Niven's top 10 teen books to save your life</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Children and teenagers What makes Gormenghast a masterpiece? | Marcus Sedgwick Mervyn Peake's gothic fantasy has never matched the success of JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Maybe it's just too good<br /><br /><a href="">• Why The Hunger Games' Katniss Everdeen is a great female role model</a><p>When I was 15, years before they'd even thought of having a book festival in <a href="" title="">Hay-on-Wye</a>, I was hunting around the secondhand bookshops of that town for first editions of my new hero, Mervyn Peake.

I was lucky enough to be helped by Richard Booth (the "<a href="" title="">King of Hay</a>" himself), who remarked sadly that he didn't have any of the books in stock; that it was, in fact, the off-Peake season. The trouble is, it's always been the off-Peake season.</p><p>Why is it that the three books usually (and according to experts incorrectly) named the <a href="" title="">Gormenghast trilogy</a> never achieved the level of success of that notable fantasy behemoth, The Lord of the Rings? I am not suggesting that the two works should be viewed as counterparts, and yet in very different ways they are two cornerstones of fantasy writing in the second half of the 20th century.

One is universally known by anyone who's ever become a reader; I'm lucky if I find one person who has even heard of the other in any given audience of two hundred or more.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Edinburgh international book festival Philip Hensher: The importance of place in fiction It's often the setting of a novel that comes to mind for Philip Hensher rather than plot or character<p>Every novelist finds it difficult to write about spatial arrangements. I don't know why. It's often unbelievably hard to get a character to go from one room to another, and novelists have been driven mad by the challenge – the 19th-century Austrian novelist Adalbert Stifter fills pages with insane, over-specific accounts of walking forward and opening doors.</p><p>I've sometimes wondered whether the operation of the verbal half of the brain prohibits the full development of the spatial-awareness half. Astronauts are very good at parking in three dimensions; none, so far, has been any good at writing. A surprising number of writers, including me, can't drive.

"Never, ever get in a car which a poet is&nbsp;proposing to park," a friend once told me, shuddering from the nightmare experience.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Books John Mullan's ten of the best: owls From Ovid to Rowling, from Wordsworth to Highsmith, the owl is never far away<p><a href="" title=""><strong><em>Metamorphoses</em></strong></a><strong> by Ovid</strong></p><p>When Proserpine is taken down to the underworld by Hades, her mother is told by Jove she can return if she has eaten no food. But she has eaten the seeds of a pomegranate and Ascalaphus,&nbsp;the son of Darkness, has seen her.

He tells on her, and as a punishment is turned by Proserpine into a screech owl.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Books Charlie Higson's top 10 fantasy books for children From the Greek myths to Mervyn Peake, the writer and comedian picks stories which open doors on different realities<p>Alongside his work as a writer and actor in TV comedies like The Fast Show, Charlie Higson is also the bestselling author of the Young Bond series of novels, as well as adult crime novels including King of the Ants. In 2009, he began writing horror fiction for teenagers with The Enemy, a tale of teenagers defending themselves against a zombified adult world.

The Dead followed last year, and this week sees publication of the third volume of his zombie series, The Fear.</p><p><a href="" title="">Buy The Fear at the Guardian bookshop</a></p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Children and teenagers Radio head: Classic Serial – The History of Titus Groan This terrific new adaptation captured every brilliant thing about Mervyn Peake's novels<p>In 1985, Brian Sibley adapted Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan and Gormenghast for Radio 4. I had only recently discovered both Peake and Radio 4, but I wasn't sure I wanted them to meet. <a href="" title="Gormenghast is the vast crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is Lord and heir.

Gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old ritual, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, manipulation and murder - a world suggested in a tour-de-force that ranks as one of this century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.">Peake's extraordinary writing</a>, it felt to me then, was all about a solitary, personal flight of imagination where the reader makes the pictures to match the soaring, peculiar prose. Someone else's version would surely feel like an intrusion.</p><p>In fact, it was brilliant, so much so that I quite got the jitters on hearing that Sibley was tackling Peake again. Instead of worrying about my images while reading Peake being replaced by radio ones, I was concerned about the two radio ones competing.

And it was a hugely ambitious project: Peake's three novels plus the concluding volume by Peake's wife, Maeve Gilmore, rediscovered last year, made into six hours of <strong>Classic Serial</strong>.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Radio Mervyn Peake's war paintings unveiled by National Archives Museum at Kew to display series showing victims of atrocities as the artist imagined Hitler might have drawn them<p>A series of war paintings is to go on display for the first time to mark the centenary of the artist, novelist and poet Mervyn Peake – more than 60 years after the government lost its nerve over his extraordinary attempt to help the war effort.</p><p>The rejected paintings were transferred to the National Archives from the Ministry of Information, but have never been displayed until now.

A selection will be shown in the archives' <a href="" title="museum at Kew">museum at Kew</a>, taking their place beside the Domesday Book and Magna Carta.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> National Archives Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake: master of the dark arts Peake was a true artist, who brought suggestiveness and shadow to his drawings as well as his words<p>There were no illustrations in the edition of <a href="" title="">Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy </a> that I read as a teenager, only the author's wispy drawings on the covers of the olive-coloured Penguin Modern Classics. Then again, it was not hard to imagine this fantastical author as an artist. His imaginary world – an enclosed, decadent, opaque society that burrowed and wormed amid a tottering gothic city-castle that was falling in ruins even as its rulers schemed – was an intensely visual creation. When I went from industrial Wrexham to visit Cambridge, I thought the medieval college I was berthed in looked just like Gormenghast.

But if Peake's imagination is visual, it is visual with a difference.</p><p>A<a href="" title=""> free exhibition of his works, currently at the British Library in central London, </a> reveals this unique spirit to be not just an artist but an extraordinary one. In mid 20th-century Britain the art of Mervyn Peake was both in and out of time. His fantastical inventions had more in common with <a href="" title="">Victorian illustrators</a> than with modernism.

Yet he drew devastating <a href="" title="">portraits of the dying at Belsen</a>.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Art and design Sue Arnold's audiobook choice - reviews Good Evening, Mrs Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes, Four Stories by Alan Bennett and Peake's Progress by Mervyn Peake<p><strong>Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes</strong>, read by Lucy Scott (4½hrs, Persephone download, £8)</p><p>From 1939-84 in a glorified garden shed she called her "writing hut", my neighbour Mrs Robinson, better known as Mollie Panter-Downes, wrote the Letter from London column for the New Yorker. What I didn't know was that in 1922, aged 16, she wrote a bestseller, <em>The Shoreless Sea</em>, and throughout the war sent semi-autobiographical stories about evacuees, the Home Guard and Red Cross sewing evenings to that same illustrious publication. Here they are splendidly read by Lucy Scott.

Sated as I am with a steady stream of blokey, schmaltzy or just plain bad second world war-related audios, I can only say that this funny, intelligent, deceptively low-key collection about the Home Counties under siege is long overdue. What Clovis is to Saki, Mrs Ramsay is to Mollie Panter-Downes. Behind her watchful eyes and bright hostess smile she suffers fools venomously. Fools such as the appalling Mrs Parmenter, an unlikely Knightsbridge evacuee who arrives at the Ramsays' country house in a Daimler bearing small granddaughter, nanny, parlour maid, two Pekineses and luggage.

Every morning Mrs Parmenter braves the elements to pick fresh flowers, remarking as she arranges snowdrops in a vase: "There – don't their brave little faces give you fresh hope?" I can imagine Clovis's response when Mrs Ramsay regales him with Parmenter anecdotes, as she undoubtedly will – they move in the same circles.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Audiobooks Michael Moorcock imagines tales of unseen Mervyn Peake pictures The Sunday Books, using pictures drawn by the Gormenghast author for his children, will be published to coincide with Peake's centenary<br /><p>It is a match made in fantasy heaven: legendary genre author Michael Moorcock has written a series of verses to go with illustrations drawn by the late Gormenghast creator Mervyn Peake to entertain his children.</p><p>Peake is known for his surreal, dark illustrations of Lewis Carroll's Alice books as well as his own fantasy classic, the Gormenghast trilogy, story of Titus, the 77th Earl of Groan.

But the author would also draw for his children: every Sunday in their home on the Isle of Sark, he would tell them stories about pirates, shipwrecks and the Wild West, illustrating the spontaneous tales with drawings of the characters.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Mervyn Peake Carlos Ruiz Zafón's top 10 20th-century gothic novels From Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, Carlos Ruiz Zafón chooses his favourite works in a fast-evolving genre<p>Carlos Ruiz Zafón was born in Barcelona and is the author of The Shadow of the Wind, the most successful novel in Spanish publishing history after Don Quixote. Translated into more than 35 languages, it has been read by over 12m readers worldwide.

The Prince of Mist, a children's book and the first work Ruiz Zafón published, is now available in English for the first time.</p><p>"Mention the gothic and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana.&nbsp;However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker,&nbsp;producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century – in literature, film and beyond. Ours is a time with a dark heart, ripe for the noir, the gothic and the baroque. A basic list of great 20th-century gothic novels could include at least 100 but, since space is limited, here are a few places to begin your explorations. As always, try to get out of your comfort zone and ignore conventional wisdom on what is good or bad.

'Free your mind, and the rest will follow ...'"</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Fiction How the devastation caused by war came to inspire an artist's dark images of Alice Private letters reveal the horror behind Mervyn Peake's surreal images of Wonderland and the Gormenghast trilogy<p>The dark turrets and chasms inside the mind of Mervyn Peake are familiar to readers of the Gormenghast trilogy and to fans of his surreal illustrations for Lewis Carroll's <em>Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</em>. But now previously unseen private letters, handed to the British Library, have revealed a crucial influence on the writer's troubled imagination: his travels through a devastated German landscape as a war correspondent at the end of the second world war.</p><p>The writer and draughtsman had been sent out on assignment for the <em>Leader </em>magazine in 1945 and the unsettling impact of the scenes he witnessed is clear from nine letters he sent home to his wife, Maeve Gilmore.

Peake reported from a series of deserted and bombed-out cities, as well as from the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen and from a war crimes trial, and he struggled to communicate the horror he experienced.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> British Library Random House to publish final Gormenghast book Titus Awakes, written by Mervyn Peake's widow based on notes left by the author to complete the sequence, set for publication in 2011<br /><p>Three weeks after it emerged that Mervyn Peake's wife <a href="" title="">had written a fourth book in her husband's acclaimed Gormenghast trilogy</a>, Random House has seen off stiff competition from other publishers to acquire rights in the novel.</p><p>Peake died from Parkinson's in 1968, leaving behind a page-and-a-half of notes about his plans for Titus Awakes, a fourth book in his classic fantasy series. His wife, Maeve Gilmore, wrote the novel, but it had been hidden in a south London attic since she died in 1983.

The couple's granddaughter, Christian, recently discovered it while the family was clearing out the loft.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Publishing Titus Groan rises again! Discovered – a fourth Gormenghast novel, written by Mervyn Peake's widow<p><em>A fourth novel that continues Mervyn Peake's classic fantasy series Gormenghast has been discovered. It was written by Peake's widow, the late Maeve Gilmore, and recounts the further adventures of Titus, the 77th Earl of Groan. Here their son Sebastian Peake tells the story of how it came about.</em></p><p>As a boy, I didn't want to read the Gormenghast novels. I first read them when I was 20 and found them shattering. I was mesmerised by having a father who was so eloquent and loquacious and descriptive, but at the same time frightened by it – I couldn't understand the world he described.

I read them again, at the age of 27, and he transported me - I fell for his descriptive powers.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Books Gormenghast Novels: Mervyn Peake: Trade Paperback: 9780879516284: Powell's Books Gormenghast Novels Ships in 1 to 3 days Qty Synopses & Reviews Publisher Comments The first complete paperback edition of the restored Gormenghast Novels, including twelve critical essays and Mervyn Peake's unfinished fourth novel, Titus Awakes. A doomed lord, an emergent hero, and a dazzling array of bizarre creatures inhabit the magical world of the Gormenghast novels which, along with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, reigns as one of the undisputed fantasy classics of all time. At the center of it all is the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, who stands to inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that form Gormenghast Castle and its kingdom, unless the conniving Steerpike, who is determined to rise above his menial position and control the House of Groan, has his way.

In these extraordinary novels, Peake has created a world where all is like a dream  lush, fantastical, and vivid. Accompanying the text are Peake's own drawings, illustrating the whole assembly of strange and marvelous creatures that inhabit Gormenghast. Introductory Essays by Anthony Burgess and Quentin Crisp Review "Many readers admire Tolkien's Lord of the Rings but fans of Mervyn Peake's Titus trilogy maintain that this extravagant epic about a labyrinthine castle populated with conniving Dickensian grotesques is the true fantasy classic of our time." The Washington Post Book World Review "Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It is a very, very great work...a classic of our age." Robertson Davies Review "[Peake's books] are 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." C. S. Lewis Review "Peake liberates and elevates as well as charms." R. G.

Davis, The New York Times About the Author Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) was a playwright, painter, poet, illustrator, short story writer, and designer of theatrical costumes, as well as a novelist. Among his many books are Mr. Pye and Peake's Progress. Table of Contents Introduction by Quentin Crisp ix Introduction by Anthony Burgess 1 Titus Groan 7 The SF Site Featured Review: Gormenghast A review by Georges T. Dodds Advertisement Gothic Fantasy is the term usually applied to the Gormenghast Trilogy, particularly the first two books Titus Groan and Gormenghast, which are the basis of the BBC production. Before you go off thinking that Gormenghast is yet another in the line of endless fantasy trilogies, let me point out that Gormenghast is only a trilogy because Mervyn Peake died of Parkinson's disease before he could write more, but fragments or outlines exist of Titus Awakes and Gormenghast Revisited, and Peake intended the series to chronicle the entire life of the title character.

As for it being Gothic, while it does have the trappings of the gloomy old castle, there are no supernatural occurrences; as for Fantasy, the characters are all human, there is no magic, and few of the trappings associated with the standard post-Tolkienian fantasy. Overall, Gormenghast, was most influenced by Peake witnessing the huge socio-economic disparity in early 20th century China, and by the horrors of WWII, particularly the Belsen concentration camp, which he saw first-hand in his role as war artist for the British Ministry of Information. Gormenghast is one of those unique works that defines great fantasy while avoiding most of the paradigms of the genre. Browsing the links, it is clear that the BBC production of Gormenghast has received largely positive reviews. Certainly the cast is stellar, Christopher Lee as Flay being my personal favourite. One can tell that several of these actors are veterans of Shakespearean theatre, and this style suits many of the characters very well. The attention to detail in terms of the characters' likeness to Peake's own sketches of them is also to be lauded.

The production also has wonderful multi-layered detail which prompts one to watch the series not just for the story, but to look at the detailing of everything from Lord Groan's library to his tablecloths. Certainly, for anyone who isn't a Gormenghast purist or scholar, the BBC's production gets the main plot elements and feel of Peake's work across. Some reviewers and fans have suggested that Steerpike's character in the books and TV series differ significantly in a number of ways, not all to the good. In particular, the casting of the young and attractive Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as the anti-hero Steerpike and the love for Fuchsia he represses are rather at odds with the somewhat unattractive and more callous loner-opportunist character in the books. While I thoroughly enjoyed the BBC production and recommend it to anyone as many notches above the usual TV drivel out there, and I understand that the production needs to be commercially viable, there are nevertheless a couple of things I might have modified. I first read the Gormenghast books some 20 years ago.

What remains with me most, now that many of the secondary plot elements are forgotten (before seeing the BBC production) is partly Peake's wonderfully evocative prose (which was used largely verbatim in the TV series), but most of all the dark, vast, yet labyrinthine castle that is Gormenghast. As much as there were scenes of various characters travelling around the castle in obscure dusty corridors, the BBC production didn't entirely capture, for me, the mood of Gormenghast. To me the mood of Gormenghast would have been best exemplified by the sort of film technique in Murnau's Nosferatu or in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Now I'm not suggesting that Gormenghast should have been made as a silent movie, but perhaps more shadow play and something to bring out the vast yet claustrophobic webwork of passages, abandoned wings and forgotten rooms draped in centuries of dust might have more closely mirrored the mood of the books. The DVDs come with additional materials on the making of Gormenghast, actor interviews, and material on the costuming and set design.

As the best fantasy on television that you're likely to see in many years, the Gormenghast DVDs are certainly an excellent investment in quality filmmaking. A Point Of View: Leaving Gormenghast - BBC News BBC News A Point Of View: Leaving Gormenghast 10 May 2013 Close share panel Image caption The cast of the 2000 BBC TV adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels are cult classics of 20th Century English literature. Writer and philosopher John Gray considers what they tell us about the nature of the modern world. (May contain spoilers.) "With every pace he drew away from Gormenghast Mountain, and from everything that belonged to his home." These are the closing words of Titus Alone, the last of three novels recounting the childhood and rebellion of Titus Groan, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, an enormous, crumbling castle that stands isolated and self-enclosed somewhere on the margins of the world.

Governed more by ritual than by the hereditary rulers who have immemorially reigned over it, the castle confines Titus in a life of empty ceremony. At the age of 17, having fought a life-and-death struggle with an enemy he held accountable for the death of his father and sister, Titus rides out of the castle to look for another way of living. Entering a world in many ways not unlike our own, he begins to doubt whether the castle ever existed. He travels back to Gormenghast Mountain where he hears a gun boom seven times - the dawn salvo sounding for him. Yet he doesn't return to the castle or even look at it, but instead turns on his heel and walks away, never to see his home again. Find out more A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays 08:50 BST John Gray is a political philosopher and author of False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism BBC Podcasts - A Point of View Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels - Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone - have been read in many ways.

For some of their readers, they re-state the essential message of romanticism - the assertion of the individual against conventional restraints. For others, the novels are a coming-of-age story - the story of how Titus ceases to be a child and becomes a man. Yet others interpret them as belonging to a tradition that includes Tolkien - the author of Lord of the Rings - and some later writers of science fiction. No doubt the novels are all of these, but perhaps they're something else as well. Too original to belong neatly in any genre, and too full of lovely indecipherable images to be read as anything like an allegory, they have no simple message to convey. Yet I think they may have something interesting and subversive to say about what it means to be modern. We like to imagine that the coming of modern times marks a fundamental alteration in human experience. Whenever it began - some say with the decline of medievalism, others with the rise of modern science - our world is shaped by the belief that it's different from anything that existed before. In some ways this is obviously right - we know more than we have ever done, we have more powerful technologies, we're richer and live longer than the majority of human beings have ever done.

We're different in another way: we expect much more of the future than anyone did in the past. Image caption Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Steerpike in the BBC TV adaptation of Gormenghast Until a few hundred years ago, most people believed human history was cyclical - a series of rising and falling civilizations in which what some generations gained, others lost. Today, nearly everyone thinks otherwise. The modern world is founded on the belief that it's possible for human beings to shape a future that's better than anything in the past. If the Gormenghast novels have any continuing theme, it's that this modern belief is an illusion. The trio wasn't meant to be a trilogy. Born in China in 1911 in the hill town of Kuling, where his father worked as a missionary doctor, Peake grew up in Tientsin, a city some 70 miles from Beijing. He lived in a great grey house in the hospital compound of the French concession, playing around the tennis court in what he described as "a world surrounded by a wall". It seems to have been a happy time for him. He loved the house, and it was then that he began to draw.

After the family returned to England in 1923 he began work as a painter and draughtsman, spending some idyllic years living in an artists' colony on the island of Sark. After the war he would become the finest illustrator of his time, producing drawings for classic texts such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Bleak House, Treasure Island and Alice in Wonderland. Along the way he produced arresting poetry, including nonsense verse and some moving poems of the Blitz. He planned a fourth novel, Titus Awakes, but advancing illness prevented him making progress with it. After his death in 1968 a version based on Peake's notes was written by his wife, the artist Maeve Gilmore, and published two years ago. The Gormenghast novels contain none of the hobbits or fairy folk dreamt up by writers who invent alternative worlds. The castle's inhabitants are people, situated - or trapped - in a version of the human world. Huddled in a small part of the ancient edifice, with the rest of the vast tenements a deserted labyrinth, they include the ruling family, several castes of servant, a school, a doctor and a poet.

Image caption Peake's notebook for Gormenghast, bearing his own illustrations On the outer walls, clinging like limpets, are the mud huts of the Bright Carvers - a caste skilled in wood-carving, who also provide a wet nurse for the ruling family. There is no church or priest, and aside from a pervasive reverence for the castle itself, no religion. Peake's Gormenghast novels... are creations of wit and fancy, and what they show is that it's the modern age that's based on fantasy Gormenghast is the scene of cataclysmic upheavals: the burning of the castle's library, a crime committed by the sisters of the ruling Earl and plotted by the destructively ambitious former kitchen boy Steerpike, the subsequent madness and suicide of the Earl, and a struggle between the Earl's devoted servant and the castle's chef that ends with the chef being killed by the servant, a great flood, and a fight to the finish between Steerpike and Titus. Despite these disruptions the life of the castle goes on. Whatever its inhabitants do, however much they may revolt against it, the castle doesn't change.

In the third book, Titus Alone, the world that the title character finds when he leaves the castle, is also a human world - one of incessant change. When the book was first published in 1959, the life it portrayed must have seemed impossibly futuristic. Though it was deeply altered by the war, Britain in the 1950s was a stolidly cohesive society based on old-fashioned industrialism. In sharp contrast, the world that Peake imagines is being continuously transformed by new inventions - little wandering spy globes, seemingly intelligent, follow Titus wherever he goes. It's a world littered with the casualties of unceasing innovation, some of whom take refuge in a subterranean realm beneath the city. Image caption Beijing 1910: Peake grew up in, and was inspired by, China It's often been noted that Peake may have drawn on his early years in China for his images of the castle. In a brilliantly realised BBC television series broadcast 13 years ago, the castle is imagined as resembling the Forbidden City in Beijing.

But Peake may have also drawn on childhood glimpses of life in Tientsin - a city in which a million Chinese contended with a mix of feudal poverty and brutal modernity - for his depiction of the world Titus enters when he leaves the castle. More about Mervyn Peake In 2011, to mark Mervyn Peake's centenary, BBC R4 recorded a programme with his son Sebastian (who died in 2012), revisiting the Channel Island of Sark, where the family lived, and where the Gormenghast books were written. Mervyn Peake official website Like JG Ballard, whose work is full of echoes of his early life in Shanghai, Peake delved into his childhood to produce a prescient vision of the way we live now. The dwellers in the castle may be mesmerised by tradition, but the modern world Titus enters when he leaves the castle is possessed by a dream of the future that's equally unreal. Yet it's the world beyond the castle in which Titus chooses to live, and it's worth asking why.

When he turns his back on the ritual-bound castle, it's not because he accepts the modern myth in which the future can be fashioned by human will or intellect. He knows that's as much a dream as the stability of the past, and ultimately as stifling. Peake's Gormenghast novels have been described as examples of fantastic literature. In fact they are creations of wit and fancy, and what they show is that it's the modern age that's based on fantasy. If we know anything, it's that our actions will produce a world that's quite different from anything we can presently foresee or imagine. Leaving Gormenghast means leaving behind childish dreams - whether of the past or the future. Titus knows he can't change the modern world any more than he could change life in the castle. But maybe he can find what life in the castle denied him - a home in the present. You can follow the Magazine on Twitter and on Facebook Gormenghast (TV Mini-Series 2000) - IMDb (Atwater, CA) – See all my reviews This BBC mini-series is actually a combination of the books Titus Groan and Gormenghast.

In 4 - 1 hour parts, being from the BBC they're really close to a whole hour as opposed to the usual 45 minute network episodes. Gormenghast is an ancient kingdom that must be located somewhere in Europe, since it is populated with Europeans. More specifically, it is populated with really odd Europeans, which sounds more like Great Britain. In fact it is a fictional location in which Mervyn Peake has created an extremely ossified culture, technologically stagnant, that indulges itself in numerous obscure rituals that cover almost all routine events, written down in huge books and applied as if their lives depended on it. The story centers around the Groans, who's male heirs rule as Earls. Titus is set to become the 77th Earl of Groan, and as he matures he sees it as his doom rather than his destiny, and comes to despise Gormenghast. At first, however, he's just a baby and the story centers on his father and the odd ducks that are his family and servants.

Into this mix is added Steerpike, a kitchen boy of huge ambition that finds ways to ingratiate, titillate and extort his way to a much higher position, hardly killing anyone at all to get there. The Groans and Gormenghast in general are so dense and caught up in the minutiae of their lives it takes them years to realize that there's a raccoon in the chicken house, so there's plenty of story to take up a 4 hour mini-series. I read these two books once upon a time and hardly remember them. I believe the BBC series plays Steerpike a bit more sympathetic than the books did. The trilogy has been compared to LOTR and the Thomas Covenant trilogy, both of which I liked more than Gormenghast. Gormenghast is fiction not fantasy, there are no dragons, orcs or hobbits. The kingdom appears to be mostly medieval with some touches of modernity here and there. The closest thing to monsters are the huge Death Owls. What makes the mini-series work is a very talented cast that bring their characters to life. They make it a pleasure to watch, if only once.

8/10 The 2 DVD set has a Making Of, Cast interviews, a few unrelated trailers. It is all shot in a peculiar not-quite 4:3 or 16:9 format, at least the way my hardware decoded it to the screen. Video and audio are strictly TV quality, with video colorful if a bit smeared and audio all upfront mono as far as I could tell. The DVDs get a 6/10 for getting it on my screen but not much else. 20 of 23 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes

Question: Which anti-hero features in the Mervyn Peake novels Titus Groan and Gormenghast?
Answer: Steerpike