This cache is one in a series of three, just like the Gormenghast
trilogy it was named after. No longer is this series a set of
puzzles but now you can go and look for it without having to bother
getting hold of the book.
Inside each cache is a copy of the trilogy for you to take if
you wish, but if you are first to all three please don't take more
than one, that would be just too greedy.
I do hope you take the time to read the books, I was given them
as a present in my teens, it took me about four years to eventually
work my way through chapter one, I hated it, once I put my mind to
it and completed that first chapter I couldn't put it down, it
really is well worth persevering with. Good luck!
While in the army in 1940, bored by petty discipline and
frustrated by the monotony of daily life, Mervyn Peake started
writing Titus Groan, the first of the three novels which would come
to be known as the Gormenghast Trilogy. Peake often wrote in blank
books called "publisher's dummies," and he filled the pages of his
manuscripts with sketches and drawings of the characters and scenes
of his story. Each chapter was sent home to his wife, artist Maeve
Gilmore, to read and safeguard. Titus Groan was published in 1946
to ecstatic reviews. Groan is a dark and singular reverie on a
grand scale. Its spectacular milieu of imagination and nightmare is
extremely detailed, surreal, and visually precise. Peake wrote with
the eye of a painter. Gormenghast was published in 1950 and won the
1950 Royal Society of Literature award (and the 1951 Heinemann
Award for Literature along with Peake's collection of poetry, The
Glassblowers).,. Titus Alone, written during Peake's struggle with
terminal illness, was published in 1959. Although the books made a
profound impression on a number of eminent writers and artists,
they did not reach a vast public or greatly improve his often
precarious financial status. But from the beginning, Peake's books
attracted a loyal following which continues to grow. The books are
an curious amalgam of fantasy, comedy, and horror, but they don't
fit easily into any known genre. No other work rivals the elaborate
phantasmagoria of these British classics which novelist Anthony
Burgess called "uniquely brilliant" and Punch described as "the
finest imaginary feat in the English novel since Ulysses.... The
books must be appreciated on their own terms outside the normal
categories of fiction as a gigantic feat of sustained invention, a
vicarious dream of extraordinary vividness, (and) a triumph of
visual writing." "The Gormenghast trilogy is about Titus Groan and
his ascent toward manhood," wrote Robert Ostermann in the National
Observer. "But to speak of these novels as being 'about' anything
is as inadequate as saying The Odyssey is about a man trying to get
home to his wife. Such fiction is first and foremost about
itself.... These novels are not an echo or an imitation of life.
Their life is their own -- a bizarre, often awe-full life. And it
imposes itself with obsessive force on the reader." Peake did not
originally set out to create a trilogy. If he had remained healthy,
he would likely have tracked Titus into old age with a fourth and
fifth book. But in the three books he did produce, he created a
strange yet substantial kingdom of nightmare and fairy tale, filled
with bizarre characters, curiosities, and distortions. It was only
after his death in 1968 when the Gormenghast novels were reissued
by Penguin that Peake began to achieve the success and recognition
he had been unable to attain in his lifetime. Today, a sense of
myth surrounds the books which has given them the status of modern
classics.