And, so, finally, for me at least, the world of Gormenghast. The great gothic fantasy of Dickensian characters, vast engines of ritual and excitable melodrama and amazing names. The first thing is the writing. Words upon words upon words like brick upon brick. Sentences wringing imagery out of language, constructing the inconceivable, brooding edifice, the endless twisting warrens and halls and rooms, the towers and battlements and crenelations. Painting huges canvases of coloured landscapes and twisted psychology. Sketching visions of characters and poses and attitudes and physical features animate and inanimate. Digging deeper and deeper into the constructions of stone and mind and habit and tradition and loyalty and rebellion and madness. Because there is a story here, oh yes, scurrying between the piling thunderheads of paragraphs looming through the pages are the tiny figures, the little mechanisms that are part of the living machinery in the great dead thing that rules them. Steerpike, the upstart boy who flees the kitchen on the day of the birth of the next Earl of Gormenghast, who, through physical effort and starvation grasps at every slender advantage and uses it to haul himself up and up through the ossified social strata. He's no sympathetic lower-class rebel though, overthrowing tyranny, but a brutal, manipulative sociopath who wishes to rule. So he plots and plans and arranges his calamities and shakes the deeply insular world to its foundations, and so, climbs higher and higher.

What an incredible achievement. What a vision. Executed with a kind of sprawling, passionate precision. There is the enormity of the castle, and the tiny, banal, domestic lives, but each life is sculpted in features at least odd and often bizarre, from the depressed Earl and the somnolent Duchess and the emotionally incontinent daughter and the the tittering Doctor and the angular retainer. But the Earl's depression is kept at bay by ossified ritual, not caused by them. The distracted Duchess conceals one of the most powerful and formidable characters in the whole trilogy. The daughter's heart is true and good, if confused and starved of parental affection. the Doctor's mind is fine and decent. Melodrama rages through their lives. Comic and satirical; deadly and brutal; strange and heartbreaking, from our first visit to the Hall of bright Carvings in Titus Groan to the astonishing climactic flood of Gormenghast, their lives are small but enacted on a stage that dwarfs opera.

Then there is the third book, that orphan, that outcast, that shredded thing of intermittent brilliance. Half-formed, half-baked, a series of sketches and interludes and abrupt transitions in search of coherence, with a hero whose only heroic quality is his insistence of his lineage and the existence of his home, utterly unknown in the city, where he drifts into haphazard adventure, where he is saved and rescued over and over again by others, never himself, where he is haunted and tormented by Gormenghast at first psychologically and at the end literally in a cruel theatre of revenge for motives that are underdeveloped like so much else in the book. It would have been a difficult book to write at the height of the author's powers - to either find a unity or make proper thematic use of the disunity. Sadly, Peake was not at that height. One senses that it conveys a particularly callow and chaotic stage of Titus' development, and wonders what he would have grown into given the chance.

The first two books are works of genius. The third is that of a genius in decline, but still capable of moments of brilliance. Perhaps we should express dissatisfaction at this, or perhaps we should forgive. I do not think people who read the first two should neglect the third. What it lacks as a novel, it makes up for in the poignancy of its failure.