Book 0179

I was 15 when I first escaped into the labyrinthine stone empire of Gormenghast Castle, with its ivy-clad Tower of Flints rising ‘like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously to Heaven.’ It’s a place of hierarchy and ritual and pomp, peopled with freaks, rogues, ghosts, demons, frauds, lovers, fantasists and eccentrics. I have revered Peake’s imagination ever since. It is forty years since I first entered Gormenghast. I am not sure I ever really left.