Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast is classed as fantasy without containing any magic
Gormenghast has no wizards, dragons or spells in its first two books, yet it is ranked among the twentieth century's great fantasies. Mervyn Peake's crumbling castle, ruled by endless forgotten rituals, won over Harold Bloom, who preferred it to the fantasy writing of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.
Peake imagined one continuous novel following the heir Titus Groan through his whole life. What he completed were Titus Groan in 1946, Gormenghast in 1950 and Titus Alone in 1959, plus a 1956 novella, Boy in Darkness, about a brief escapade by the young Titus that never names the castle. Parkinson's disease cut the project short; he died at 57 in 1968, leaving only a few hundred words toward further volumes, including just three coherent pages of Titus Awakes.
The setting is a remote earldom ringed by marshes, quicksand, a tideless sea and endless rock, with the claw-shaped Gormenghast Mountain to the west. At its centre sits a vast, mostly deserted castle, likened to a stone island, topped by the owl-infested Tower of Flints. Its residents devote their days to elaborate ceremonies whose meaning has long been lost. The first book opens with Titus's birth and ends a little over a year later when, after his father Sepulchrave dies, the infant is installed as the seventy-seventh Earl. The real engine of the plot is Steerpike, an ambitious kitchen boy who schemes his way upward. In the second book Titus grows from seven to seventeen, dreading his ritual-bound future until a feral girl known as The Thing shows him what freedom looks like. Titus Alone then drops him into an industrious, technological city.
The saga did not quite end with its author. In the 1970s his widow, Maeve Gilmore, wrote her own continuation, called Search Without End. The family found it in 2010, and in 2011, for the centenary of Peake's birth, it appeared as Titus Awakes: The Lost Book of Gormenghast.
Critics often call the series the first fantasy of manners, and it has been translated into more than twenty languages. Bloom named it in The Western Canon among twentieth-century works likely to endure.
Source: Gormenghast (series)
