He completed three and a half years before leaving to help his former Eltham art teacher establish an artists' colony on the Channel Island of Sark.
Mervyn was a poor student, and often unruly, but he did have an exceptional talent – drawing – which was noted by an art teacher who proved to be his saviour.Īfter a few weeks at Croydon School of Art, Peake was accepted for a five-year course at the Royal Academy Schools, in Piccadilly.
Mervyn went to school at Eltham College, in Kent, where most of the pupils were the sons of missionaries. Peake senior opened a medical practice in Surrey. But his mother, who suffered from heart disease, became seriously ill, and the Peakes never returned to China. Peake arrived in England at the age of 11, when his father took leave. But as for the rites and rituals that take place in the castle at the heart of Peake’s great yarn, they were as inspired by childhood visits to Beijing’s Forbidden City, and the experience of observing the ancient traditions and rigid customs that shaped Chinese life, as they were by his interest in English Gothic. Tolkien's work is very English Peake's is more European.Įchoes of Stevenson’s vision, plus the grotesque humour of Lewis Carroll, are there to be seen in Gormenghast, as is the stylistic presence of a giant, Charles Dickens. Gormenghastis concerned with the static faced with change, with passivity confronted by action and ultimately, in young Titus, an unlikely hero who simply wants to flee his world, as he does at the end of the second book. Lord of the Rings, a cohesive narrative spanning three volumes constructed around a quest with a difference, the disposal of a dangerous ring, Gormenghast the text lives on in the mind because of its extraordinary images, the physicality of long, gloomy stone passageways and characters that live off the page, particularly the scheming Steerpike, the boy who fights his way out of the castle's kitchens and grasps control through a series of cunning moves. Themes of power, duty and freedom dominate the self- contained set pieces, and the reader is caught up in a visual maze that is grotesque, often funny and desperately profound. The same could be said of the strange, Gothic Gormenghast trilogy written by the artist and poet Mervyn Laurence Peake, who was born in China 100 years ago tomorrow. GORMENGHAST: IT is a castle, vast and forbidding, not an easy place in which to live, tied as it is to impossible rituals, but even more difficult to escape, as the 77th earl, Titus Groan, lord and heir to it all, discovers. He lives on still in his surreal masterpiece of comedy, gloom and grotesque A hundred years ago tomorrow, Mervyn Laurence Peake, the author of the ‘Gormenghast’ trilogy, was born.
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