The US/British co­production of Gormenghast, adapting the first two books of Mervyn Peake's fantasy trilogy, recently aired here in the States. It looked pretty good: the budget limitations were visible on screen, true, but the cheesy BBC chroma­key work that makes old episodes of Doctor Who so laughable was kept at an acceptable minimum, and the costuming was wonderful.

But in the end there was something disappointingly literal about the film. That locations and props, the bright carvings, the titular castle of Gormenghast itself — all had heft and presence, but were largely without menace. I'd always imagined Peake's Gormenghast as something less solidly Euclidean, an attenuated nightmare­scape somewhere between Chris Weston's vision of The Invisibles' Outer Church and Max Ernst's painting Europe After the Rain: instead, the film gave us Christopher Wren on steroids.

And where Peake's ornate, bastard­child­of­Jane Austen­and­H.P. Lovecraft prose conveyed an eerie stillness, the film could only translate his style as a sort of Gothic Upstairs, Downstairs: having assembled these Fine Thespians, the scriptwriters then had to fill their mouths with words, words that Peake got around by description and implication. The cast gamely bellows and flails, as the odour of ripe ham rises: only Christopher Lee as Flay has the proper silent, watchful quality, despite his absurd hair extensions.

For all its thickfisted commotion, though, the film accurately translated Peake's larger concerns and the sociological themes underpinning the work. For all its subplots, which have as many blind alleys as the twisty corridors of Gormenghast itself, the story is fundamentally about change versus stasis. The castle is ruled by tradition, by ritual. Real power, such as it is, lies not with the Earl (who is a prisoner of his ceremonial duties), but with the Secretary, who plans and coordinates the endless ceremonies that mark the coming and going of the days. This is shown in a sequence in the second book, where the young Earl (Titus) has ignored his ceremonial duty and briefly flees the castle: the secretary Barquentine, furious, plucks an anonymous schoolboy from the crowd and has him perform the ritual in Titus' place. The message is clear: the ritual itself is more important than the man, who is merely the public face of these ancient traditions.

This inflexibility shows itself again in the rigid social hierarchy at play in Gormenghast, in the expectation that everyone will keep his or her place and know his or her duty. This effects and permeates every character: even the few likable characters are profoundly limited by their adherence to tradition. Flay's defining characteristics, his nobility and loyalty, spring from his monomaniacal devotion to duty. Doctor Prunesquallor, though witty and essentially goodhearted, remains throughout an incurable snob. And poor, affection­starved Fuschia rejects Steerpike's offer of love when he forgets himself and dares address her by name, rather than as "Lady".

As for Steerpike himself, the ambitious kitchen boy who nearly destroys Gormenghast as he climbs through the social ranks, he stands as an object lesson: his attempts at change, his failure to "know his place," bring chaos into this well­ordered world. Steerpike's relentless social climbing inspires others to step out of their assigned roles—either directly, as with the weird sisters Cora and Clarice (who, tellingly, are so accustomed to one another that they speak and move as one), or obliquely, as with Prunesquallor's sister Irma, whose increasingly frantic hunt for a husband (and thus an escape from her destiny) forms a black­comic subplot to Book Two—and the results range from the pathetically ineffectual to devastating.

Though Steerpike's singleminded determination is nearly heroic, he is ultimately thwarted by the same lack of imagination that afflicts the rest of the castle's inhabitants—he cannot imagine a world beyond Gormenghast, and so focuses all his efforts on improving his standing within that circle. That is why, in the end, it is Titus Groan, and not Steerpike, who is the hero of the story.

Petulant, self­absorbed weakling that he is (and despite, in the television film, both a distracting resemblance to the Waterboys' Mike Scott and a script that requires him to sneer "I hate Gormenghast" rather too many times), only Titus understands the true growth is impossible within the confines of the castle, and so escapes the role to which he was born as Steerpike never truly does, by turning his back on Gormenghast and seeking his destiny in the larger world.

And so it is significant that the film adaptation does not include the third book of the series, Titus Alone, which finds the erstwhile Earl of Gormenghast overwhelmed and ultimately destroyed by a modern world beyond his comprehension, but ends instead on a note of ambiguous triumph, with his initial departure from the grotesque castle that has, to that point, been his whole world—for, whatever Titus' eventual fate, he has at least won some small measure of freedom by abandoning the system that has nurtured him.

Jack Fear

Links:
• Official movie site
• IMDb Entry
• Buy the DVD
• Mervyn Peake

Discuss this article: Underground: Film & TV