Brimming with good cheer, Mr Pye decides to bring peace and love to Sark's 289 eccentric inhabitants. This is a charming fable about the battle bewteen good and evil.
Mervyn Peake was born in 1911. He is perhaps most famous for the 'Gormenghast' trilogy which were published between 1946 and 1959 - Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. He has also written a book for children, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor and several volumes of poetry. He was also a gifted book illustrator. He died in 1968.
The novel gives a clear sense of Sark as somewhere both remarkable
and beautiful.
*The Guardian*
I am delighted to meet you,' trills Mr Pye to a fisherman. 'Are
you, eh, you fat little porker,' the thug replies. 'B- you.
*-*
Peake has been praised, but he has also been mistrusted," observed
Anthony Burgess in his introduction to Titus Groan . "His prose
works are not easily classifiable: they are unique as, say, the
books of Peacock or Lovecraft are unique . . . It is difficult, in
postwar English writing, to get away with big rhetorical gestures.
Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means
diffuseness; there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of
his descriptions; he is always exact.
*Anthony Burgess*
The fable is cleverly and gracefully resolved and the final scenes
are a joy to read. Peake's illustrations complement the novel very
well and these, too, are examples of his charm, of his enormous
illustrative range.
*Washington Post*
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