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Robert Macfarlane: Glimpsing Gormenghast

In the latest issue of Intelligent LifeRobert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot and co-author of Holloway, considers Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast:

Gormenghast is a vast “labyrinth of stone”, in Peake’s phrase—except that it has no centre, for there is always another chamber to reach or further annex to access. In this respect it is less a castle, more a city—and an infinite city at that. I grew up at the end of a country lane in the English Midlands, and it was in Peake’s writing that I first sensed (fearfully, fascinatedly) what a city might feel like to inhabit.

Cities are, like Gormenghast, excessive and connective. They spawn, proliferate, self-generate: and they are sites of encounter and overlap. For every story you overhear in a city, every conversation you catch, myriad more are in the making at that moment. This is the affront that cities offer to reason, and the excitement they provoke in the mind: that they surpass all possible record. They are places of—to borrow again from Peake—intense “circumfusion”.