Continuing our series of posts marking Mervyn Peake’s
centenary, here is a piece written by Peake’s friend, Rodney Ackland, after the former’s untimely death in November 1968.
Thit and thefuther by Rodney Ackland, The Spectator, 20th December 1968
Any reader who has once been lost to the world in the stone fields and labyrinths of Gormenghast lies all around us, silent and invisible, yet casting sometimes, from its other dimension, shadows – refractions of darkness and Gormenghast light – which, effecting subtle changes in the shapes, the colours of all familiar things, enhance them with that quality of strangeness lacking which, beauty, as Walter Pater once hinted, is strictly for professors of maths. Familiar faces, too, one finds are not immune from gormenghasting, which, lengthening here a nose and tweaking it, serpenting there are neck and crossing an eye, jutting a jaw, beetling a brow, dragging down to pendulousness a sagging lower lip, reveals the wild grotesquerie of an average human visage, makes startling revelation of the clown, the weasel, the fatcat, or the cormorant which presses angrily beneath the skin.
Times was, also, when something of Gormenghast itself – in one or other of its aspects – might suddenly intrude itself into our dimension.
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