Two landscapes formed Mervyn Peake’s singular imagination. Born in China, to English missionary parents, Peake spent his formative years overlooking the Yangzi river. Although the family returned to England when Peake was 11, the Far East had already left an indelible impression. The walled in fictional castle at the centre of Peake’s ‘Gormenghast Trilogy’ clearly owes something to the mysterious Oriental world of the Forbidden City.
The second was the tiny island of Sark, in the English Channel. Peake, now married with a family, moved there in 1946. In a different sense, this too was an intensely isolated and enclosed community. The wildness of its sea battered coastline, both beautiful and ferocious in its untamed wildness.
Wildly imaginative, as both a writer, artist and illustrator, Peake was gifted with a similarly untamed creativity… The dark side to such a gift? Numerous mental breakdowns presaging a total mental collapse – his angels were also his demons.
After his early death, Peake’s work has reached cult status in England. His idiosyncratic illustration of our childhood classics, ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, are still as fresh and unsettling as the day they were printed. His books are read and reread, adapted into film and reinterpreted in song. As here, by ‘The Cure’. Directly referencing Fuchsia’s death (a key character in the Gormenghast Trilogy) they perfectly reimagine Peake’s original vision with more than a touch of their own Gothic darkness.
