I'm not sure if there are any Mervyn Peake fans attending this forum, but I for one love his work and see some parallels with CAS.

Any way there's this interesting bit of news: [www.guardian.co.uk]


Not sure how I feel about it, but I will be buying it.

Loved Gormenghast, happy to admit that it was via the bbc mini-series that I first became aware of it. The book quality was uneven the first was far superior. Book 4 will be worth a look, maybe I'll wait till the local library gets it.

No parallels with CAS, so far as I am concerned. Peake's fiction was far more grotesque than weird, and his DIckensan social obsessions are at the antipodes of CAS;s concerns. I say, give it a miss.

Absquatch Wrote:
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> No parallels with CAS, so far as I am concerned.
> Peake's fiction was far more grotesque than weird,
> and his DIckensan social obsessions are at the
> antipodes of CAS;s concerns. I say, give it a
> miss.

I was speaking more about their shared use of baroque language complex prose rather than making a conceptual comparison - but I do take your point and certainly 'parallels' was probably not the word I was looking for in my haste to post a link. Yes, Peake's fiction touches upon social realism, surrealism, the comic and the absurd, areas - as you said - of little interest to CAS who is far less eclectic. Also, obviously, Peake's prose also embraces more modernist devices than CAS would ever go near, but still, while they are far from being the same, I hold that there is some similarities in their appeal...