if only to meet the professors and the prunesquallors. truly a great work of imaginative fiction. some with a harry patter tummy ache might find medicine here. nothing against hp, of course. ( )

This is a unique coming of age story, with Peake's Dickenslike characters and the brooding castle the overshadows everything. The plot itself unfolds slowly, both in pages and in years, but this was not a detriment as the reader knows what the expect in the second novel of the trilogy. In many ways it is even more bizarre than the first book, but that is part of the appeal. ( )

Reviewed Feb 2005

In this second novel by Peake the author becomes more detailed and numbers his chapters instead of titling as he did in his last novel. The story closely follows the movie it end with the Death of Steerpike and Titus leaving on horseback to seek his destiny. Oddly there is another novel "Titus Alone" I am curious to see what happens to him, but am almost afraid to read it as it probably deals with him just riding around - living off the land and finally coming back home ready to rule. I found the death of Fucia unnecessary and anticlimactic. As well as the character, "the Thing" what was that all about. Surly Titus could have learned about freedom some other way. As far as the story being believable it really reached to imagine that the valley and the castle could be flooded so quickly with little rain. The countess states to Titus that there is nowhere but Gormenghast, there must be other countries. Why is there no trade. where does the countess come from, what is her history? Were is Titus and Fucia supposed to find mates? He details the surroundings but never answers the basic questions.

6-2005 ( )

It's taken me a long time to get through this, the second volume of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. It's not because this is a particularly dull book - though the prose style that he uses often means that the plot is slow to unravel, and the writing is often dense and compacted - but because I made myself read it in chunks of fifty pages at a time so that I could savour it for longer.

I'm always at a loss as to how exactly he did it, but even with a style as Gothic as his was, Peake alway...more It's taken me a long time to get through this, the second volume of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. It's not because this is a particularly dull book - though the prose style that he uses often means that the plot is slow to unravel, and the writing is often dense and compacted - but because I made myself read it in chunks of fifty pages at a time so that I could savour it for longer.

I'm always at a loss as to how exactly he did it, but even with a style as Gothic as his was, Peake always managed to stay above the level of writing purple prose. Instead, he created a kind of writing that is beautiful and morbid and dark and funny and enjoyable and and extravagant and fantastic all at once.

The characters that he sketches are gorgeous things of murk and shadows and madness - Lady Gertrude, Titus, Fuschia, and above all, Steerpike - who inhabit a world which is seemingly so different from our own, but which always seems to share our modern preoccupations with delineations and values and the past, and always, always, the desire for freedom. It's often blackly funny in its observations on human behaviour, and wryly cynical to boot. Think of Terry Pratchett, and then skew the Discworld books to a place darker and weirder than anything Pterry ever conceived, and that is where the Gormenghast books dwell.

This is a large book in and of itself - over 500 pages in my paperback edition - and the trilogy itself sprawls to encompass many hundreds of pages more. But it's still a hugely rewarding work to read, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

There should be no rich, no poor, no strong, no weak,' said Steerpike, methodically pulling the legs off the stag beetle, one by one as he spoke. 'Equality is the great thing, equality is everything.' ( )

One of the best books ever written! ( )