Subject: (urth) Gormenghast: Beyond the Trilogy

From: William Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 23:23:09 +0000

At 8:01 AM -0700 6/28/01, Michael Andre-Driussi wrote:
>bee wrote:
>>I hadn't imagined that my negative opinion of the show would be as
>>controversial as it turned out to be. Here's another of my opinions. I don't
>>think it's controversial, but here goes: Titus Groan and Gormenghast (i.e.
>>the books on which the show is based), are classics and everyone on this
>>list would enjoy them immensely.

I did enjoy the Gormenghast books immensely. Well, the first two, but 
I even enjoyed _Titus Alone_, just not as much. (That ending!)

For all the rest of you who did enjoy the Gormenghast trilogy, there 
is a novella about Titus as a young boy called "Boy in Darkness" 
which is, in my opinion, as good as the best bits of the novels. It 
actually takes place away from Gormenghast, for the most part. It can 
be found in the book, _Peake's Progress_ which is a huge (576 pages) 
collection of Peake's other writings and drawings, which is still in 
print. It was also published in a collection of three novellas called 
_Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination (Envoy Extraordinary; 
Consider Her Ways; Boy in Darkness)_ by William Golding, John Wyndham 
and Mervyn Peake and by itself as _Boy in Darkness_. Both of these 
latter books seem to be out of print.

>And alga, she found the show Ghastly, unwatchable.
>
>Ha-ha!  I found the book unreadable twelve years ago, abandoning it soon
>after the library fire; yet I found the tv show (first half, so far) quite
>entertaining, at times I laughed out loud.

I haven't seen the program yet; I am taping the second half now and 
will watch it all (or enough to satisfy myself of its unwatchablity) 
this weekend.

>I was hesitant to watch it at all, since I didn't like the book, but I also
>remembered how I didn't like the most-recent, live-action ALICE IN
>WONDERLAND (with Martin Short as Mad Hatter) when it first ran on tv, yet I
>liked it when I saw the thing on video . . . which made me suspect that the
>commercial interruptions were what was really bothering me the most.

I disliked that recent _Alice_ medley (why do they always insist on 
mixing events from both books together?) quite a bit when I saw it on 
tv. Perhaps I should give it another chance. Perhaps.

>Different people, different tastes--as usual.

Indeed.

-- 
William Ansley

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