Mervyn Peake


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I have added a whole new section to the website (under Non-fiction) devoted to the works of Mervyn Peake – an obsession about which I shall be saying more and more as time passes. Immediately, it is an opportunity to re-publish an article I wrote in 1999 for The Mervyn Peake Review (now shamefully unavailable!): ‘Titus Alone and the Art of the Improbable’. Revisiting it, I discover that the article is not just an analysis of Peake’s craft in Titus Alone but also a kind of personal manifesto about the art of writing. To make full sense of it you’ll need to have read all three of the Gormenghast books – but surely you’ve done that?