Deeper into Mervyn Peake

The first two volumes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy were published in 1946 and 1950, but by 1954, when I was first alerted to them by a school-friend, Peake had entered what his first biographer John Watney called ‘a doldrum period’. Overtaken by a wave of younger writers — Kingsley Amis, John Osborne et al — with more obvious contemporary relevance, Peake was beginning to suffer the first symptoms of the Parkinson’s disease that killed him in 1968 at the age of 47. Titus Alone, the third volume of the trilogy, appeared in 1959, but its comparative brevity, the scrappiness of its construction and the unsteadiness of Peake’s grasp of the new world beyond Gormenghast he was trying to depict made it a disappointing sequel even for his admirers. By the mid-Sixties this once debonair, romantically handsome artist, the brilliantly original illustrator of some 40 books, notably Treasure Island, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Alice in Wonderland, and author of one of the most extraordinary sagas in the English language, looked like a tired old man and was a full-time resident of the Priory, Roehampton.