It's about half of the size of the first two books, and I have it on good authority it's even weirder! So, now on to Titus Alone, the last part of the trilogy. And he and Titus were interesting foils for each other. He'd be admirable were he not so evil-brilliant, cunning, brave, athletic and ambitious-he makes Rowling's Lord Voldemort look like a crude amateur. In fact, I'd say I liked this book a tad more than the first volume.Īnd I have to say, while I wouldn't precisely say I was fond of him, I increasingly found Steerpike one of the most fascinating villains in fantasy literature. And well, by the time we get to the scene with Titus playing marbles with the elderly headmaster and Dr Prune, I was once again enthralled. Then there was this moment with Titus and his sister Lady Fuchsia bonding. well, it produced a rather macabre giggle. It was amusingly Hogwartesque, especially as we get in one chapter a game with boys flying in the air (sans magic) with the star player sporting black hair and a birthmark on his forehead. Titus was barely over a year old at the end of the first book-at the start of this book he's now he's seven-years-old-a schoolboy-and we get to meet his professors. Instead a whole new cast of characters appeared. I didn't find that to be the case, I think because the very characters I was most attached to weren't featured much in the first 100 pages-one of them didn't appear until well after that mark. So, having been won over to the style and gained favorites among the characters, I expected to fall right into the sequel. It's the kind of narrative for which you have to have patience, but is rewarding because the imagery is so vivid. He was a visual artist and at times you can practically feel the detailed brush work in his word pictures that use a rich, sometimes abstruse vocabulary. Show More is beyond leisurely-Peake takes his time. This is as good as it gets." â?Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Reviews … ( more) You'll finish it with a small spike of regret stabbing at your heart, and a desire to start again at page one the moment the back cover is closed. " Gormenghast is must-read fiction, that's all. The Gormenghast Trilogy ranks as one of the twentieth century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing. Gormenghast is the second volume in Mervyn Peake's widely acclaimed trilogy, but it is much more than a sequel to Titus Groanâ?it is an enrichment and deepening of that book. Steerpike, who began his climb across the roofs when Titus was born, is now ascending the spiral staircase to the heart of the castle, and in his wake lie imprisonment, manipulation, and murder. A gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, and death. Titus Groan is seven years old, lord and heir to the crumbling castle Gormenghast. A young earl's future in a sprawling castle could be changed by a feral girl and a cunning servant in this acclaimed gothic fantasy trilogy's second entry.
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