"Unimaginative himself, he could recognize imagination in her: he had come upon one whose whole nature was the contradiction of his own. he knew that behind her simplicity was something he could never have. something he despised as impractical. something which would never carry her to power nor riches, but would retard her progress and keep her apart in a world of her own make believe."
Titus groan
by Mervyn Peake
(via spray-can-fire)
"There are times when the air that floats between mortals becomes, in its stillness and silence, as cruel as the edge of a scythe."
Mervyn Peake, Titus Alone (via transgressiveinsomnia)
Steerpike of Mervyn Peake’s ‘Gormenghast’ Trilogy
This character is probably one of my favorites and one of the best written transformative arcs I’ve read. He gets put through the (literary) wringer and is forced to evaluate himself, his surroundings and his desires at every turn, while still staying true to his sense of self and ultimate motives. Even though he’s written as a psychopath, his depth of character is so intense and his personality so ultimately charming (even though you quickly learn that he’s not a very nice fella) that when the final book comes up with him not in it, your desire to finish the trilogy is so weakened by the lack of his character that you almost hurl it through the window.
Do yourself a favor, and like my wife said to me so many years ago, “You have to read this book, if just for this one character!”
Linger now with me, thou Beauty,
On the sharp archaic shore.
Surely ‘tis a wastrel’s duty
And the gods could ask no more.
If thou lingerest when I linger,
If thou tread’st the stones I tread,
Thou wilt stay my spirit’s hunger
And dispel the dreams I dread.Come thou, love, my own, my only,
"Within an hour the morning classes were under way. At an ink-stained desk, with his chin cupped in his hands, Titus was contemplating, as in a dream, the chalk-marks on the blackboard. They represented a sum in short division, but might as well have been some hieroglyphic message from a moonstruck prophet to his lost tribe a thousand years ago. His mind, and the minds of his small companions in that leather-walled schoolroom, was far away, but in a world, not of prophets, but of swopped marbles, birds’ eggs, wooden daggers, secrets and catapults, midnight feasts, heroes, deadly rivalries and desperate friendships."
From quite possibly the most remarkable book in my little library, Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake (via rafaelishuman)
Top Five Fictional Characters (in no particular order):
Steerpike, from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy.The thing about Steerpike is that he’s honestly and truly the bad guy. He leaves old women to starve in attics, drives people to suicide and drives them mad, plays them off against each other, poisons doting grandmother-figures and sets the secretary on fire. He’s a kitchen boy that comes from nowhere and ends up running the castle, and all because he’s so wonderfully clever and everybody else is so dull. He’s an elitist with a mind like a machine and like Shakespeare’s Iago, claws his way to the top and never looks behind him; taking such joy in the carnage he causes that we’re rooting for him from the minute he crawls out of Swelter’s kitchen. Steerpike is a study in just how bad a character can be, and he’s so compelling that this time we’re rooting for the bad guy: when he finally meets his end at the end of Gormenghast, we feel like we’ve lost the hero instead of the villain.
(Source: fuckyeahfionashaw)
"In the evening the bats, those fabulous winged mice, veered, tacked and slid through the hot gloom."
Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (via gabrielgraetz)
"Titus the seventy-seventh. Heir to a crumbling summit: to a sea of nettles: to an empire of red rust: to rituals’ footprints ankle deep in stone."
Gormeghast - Mervyn Peake (via jamesaharding)
