How to do justice to the short life and abundant creative work of Mervyn Peake, writer, illustrator, artist, and poet? It is his centenary year. (His career was cut short by early onset of Parkinson's Disease; he died in 1968.) Tolkien could almost be dismissed as but a popularizer of Norse and Germanic tales that he merely impressively reworked into stilted Edwardian English--a caboose behind the Wagnerian engine, too--compared to the originality of Peake's fantasy, his three Gormenghast books, chronicling in lush English the life and times of Titus Groan, 77th Earl of Gormenghast.*
They are a fantasy work--of which there were to be more than three books, and which Peake thought of as the Titus books, not the Gormenghast books--in which magical spells aren't needed because the magic's in the telling, the humanity, the threads of Dickensian grotesquery--characters (like Steerpike, Swelter, Chief Chef of Gormenghast, and Gertrude, Countess of Groan) and incidents improbable but somehow just shy of impossible--woven throughout and beaded with flecks of subtle humor and fantastic imagery, such as Fuchia's attic, the Tower of Flints, and Gormenghast itself.
Peake was much more than his Gormenghast creation. He was the child of missionaries and born in China; he was a war artist, a portrait painter, a poet, a father and husband, a proud resident of Sark island.
Tribute is paid to Peake in The Guardian by British writers, Michael Moorcock, A.L. Kennedy, Hilary Spurling, CBE, FRSL, and China Miéville (who I am a great admirer of).
The BBC produced a television adaptation of Gormenghast in 2000, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Steerpike, the tale's anti-hero; it was broadcast by PBS in the US, and PBS's Gormenghast webpages has a good bio and bibliography page, "Who Was Mervyn Peake?"
There is an exhibition of Peake illustrations at the British Library through mid-September 2011, and an exhibition at the Christ Beetles gallery through mid-August 2011.
Some centenary year items via MervynPeake.org and the Peake blog:
The first part of the new six-part radio adaptation by Brian Sibley, The History of Titus Groan, is available on BBC Radio 4.... More here, on Jeremy Mortimer's blog.
Fergus Fleming in the Literary Review.
The Guardian has a collection of blogs. Join the debate online.
David Blackburn writes in The Spectator.
The Irish Times.
A Sark-related comment by Matthew Bell in The Independent.
Under a Canvas Sky in Zaman.
*To be fair to Tolkien, he was, as was Peake, more than a writer of fantastical fiction: he was a philologist and scholar in his own right; and a Peake-Tolkein comparison is a forced one, as Peake was not inspired by philology or mythology at all. And it might be noted that Tolkein was less an imitator of Wagner as an opponent of Wagner's interpretations of the Germanic myths. But Tolkien looms large, and comparisons are made frequently to him relative to nearly any writer of nearly anything reviewers place in the increasingly unhelpfully broad category of "fantasy"--a term so nearly useless as to include the sea of "Tol-clone" imitations of Tolkien--of which Peake certainly was not--but also the writing of China Miéville and Michael Moorcock or even H. P. Lovecraft.
The Hindenburg disaster took place on Thursday, May 6, 1937, as the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, which is located adjacent to the borough of Lakehurst, New Jersey. Of the 97 people on board (36 passengers, 61 crew), there were 36 fatalities, including one death among the ground crew.
