LATEST SALES & OFFERS: PROMOTIONS
Two different views of the author of Gormenghast, written by his widow and his elder son. Of the two books, Maeve Gilmore is perhaps the more affecting, published soon after her husband's death in 1968. Her writing is fresh and evocative on their courtship and the early years of their marriage, increasingly bitter as she describes the twists of fate which rendered them permanently penniless. Her final account of the progress of the nervous disease which left Peake a prisoner in his own body, prematurely aged and unable to write or draw, is almost too painful to read. Years later, their son Sebastian describes himself as a directionless 'emotional misfit'. It's difficult to understand why his otherwise solicitous parents did not remove him from the Catholic boarding school at which he experienced such sadism, sad to witness his fruitless adult attempts to escape the shadow of his tragic but glamorous family. 'On leaving home I aimed like the successful salmon to leap the highest rapids but I was dragged back by the underflow and pull of the sea, so that like the unsuccessful salmon, I languished in the shallows,' he confesses. (Kirkus UK)
