Gormenghast

[blissblogger]

I'm having a break after the first one. With all the intricate visual description, it's quite a rich read, so it's bit like eating a whole Christmas pudding. You have to take a breather. But I am determined to return in the New Year and finish the complete set. If I manage it, that'll be the only trilogy I've read apart from Lord of the Rings.

Currently reading China Mieville's The City and the City.

 

[okzharp]

Yes. This is it.

re his sense of space/architecture. I always liked this bit on the castle... so much that I had it copied into a googledoc of cool bits.

"Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven."

His sentences often feel gutsy and ornate and rich and delicious and a little decrepit. Steak tartare served on cracked bone china.

...slate roofs hunching like shoulders... buttresses...

Mieville riffing on Peakean architecture (?) in Perdido Street Station.

He doesn't have the luxurious suspension of Peake though, perhaps Mieville wants you to feel the pot-holes.

 

[Corpsey]

I'm having a break after the first one. With all the intricate visual description, it's quite a rich read, so it's bit like eating a whole Christmas pudding. You have to take a breather. But I am determined to return in the New Year and finish the complete set. If I manage it, that'll be the only trilogy I've read apart from Lord of the Rings.

Currently reading China Mieville's The City and the City.

Did you then?

 

[blissblogger]

Yes I did. Took me over a year!

The second is almost as good as the first but it's getting into over-ripeness, stylistically. His incredibly intensely visual detailed descriptions have an odd effect - such that a fight scene that would take a minute reality and be action-packed, is to blow-by-blow detailed it stretches over several pages, such that the retinal hypertrophy kind of detracts from the kinetic action and violent impact.

The third one is completely different and quite barmy - the whole worldbuilding thing of the first is semi-dismantled - suddenly there's motor cars in this world. It's well worth reading for brilliant bits of imagining and some pungent characterisation. But then towards the end it falls apart, as Peake's own health and mental acuity deteriorates. It's a bit like those actors - or sportsmen - who carry on performing until they suddenly it all falls apart in front of an audience. The narrative arc doesn't come to any kind of satisfying conclusion.