Book of a Lifetime: The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake

From The Independent archive: Liz Jensen on one of the most vividly imagined universes in literature

Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the 2000 TV adaptation (BBC Two)

At the age of 15, I had an epiphany. I was halfway through the first book of the Gormenghast trilogy when it hit me, like a benign thunderbolt: writers can do anything they like. Peake wrote of the “sheer excitement of having a sheet of white paper and a pen in my hand and no dictator on earth can say what I put down”. In entering Gormenghast, one of the most vividly imagined and bizarre universes in literature, I sensed the truth of this. And with it came the ambition to one day do for others something similar to what this remarkable oeuvre was doing for me.

I had always wanted to write. But I knew in that moment – and still recognise today – that Mervyn Peake had handed me the key to the castle. It was my father who first alerted me and my siblings to the seethingly dysfunctional Groan dynasty. Perhaps it was because we were a dysfunctional clan ourselves (though on a far less operatic scale) that Peake’s lavish trilogy struck a chord with us. I remember spending most of a summer holiday in a Dormobile campervan on the Isle of Skye reading, with the rain pouring outside. Our eyes streamed from the cigar-smoke our father used to defy the midges; we were attacked by a herd of cows; our parents bickered endlessly.

Paperback edition of volume one from 1973 (Ballantine)