Word: gormenghast
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With a career encompassing 25 years that included five novels, a handful of plays and thousands of drawings, paintings and sketches, why isn't Mervyn Peake a more celebrated English literary and artistic hero? A cult figure today, Peake is best known for Gormenghast, his bleak but compelling gothic fantasy trilogy published in the 1940s and '50s about the hierarchy of a fictional castle, Gormenghast, and the Machiavellian machinations of its inhabitants. But he was also an accomplished illustrator, painter and war artist. "If somebody's good at everything, then they're never taken seriously, are they?" muses Chris Beetles...
...liberated concentration camp at Belsen, Germany. Most of the former prisoners he saw there were too sick to be evacuated. The stark poems and drawings he made about these victims literally dying before his eyes are nearly too harrowing to bear. Returning to Britain, he finished the first Gormenghast book in 1946 and spent the next 20 years as a writer and illustrator, contributing art to the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde...
...like all good metaphors, Gormenghast's works on other levels. To the tired bloodline of PBS-endorsed British programming, BBC America's appealing, often lacerating new-wave series are a Steerpike-like intruder. And for the delicate, powdered neck of proper Anglophile telly, the long knives...
...channel's biggest splash, though, may be Gormenghast, a four-part, $10 million adaptation of Mervyn Peake's lyrical fantasy trilogy (Saturdays, various times, beginning June 10). The lavish mini-series follows Steerpike (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a charismatic kitchen boy who insinuates and murders his way to power within the tired, decaying House of Groan. Unlike many American fantasy minis, it's neither a ponderous classics lesson nor a sugarcoated trifle, but a grotesquely funny, vulgar and penetrating tale of class and demagogy with pointed meaning for Britons. "In Gormenghast, you have this rusty royal family--well...
These characters were not new with Lucas, of course; they spanned epic literature from Ulysses and King Arthur to the Lord of the Rings and Gormenghast trilogies. But Star Wars gave a high-tech polish to the rustic hardware, a kick to the old eldritch machinery. Alas, a decade later, everything new in Lucas' films seems old again. There is a shroud of inevitability, of why-bother, about Willow's chase through the forest (done better in Return of the Jedi), the impromptu ride down a mountain on a warrior's shield (done better in The Living Daylights...