Watching this bbc production has inspired me to re-read the series, so comments on the significance of the books to me will be saved for another time; for now, suffice to say that, taken individually and collectively, Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone are three of my very favourite books, and definitely my favourite examples of the imaginative literature genre.
So I was holding this adaptation up against a high standard, which it unsurprisingly fails to reach (indeed, when it was screened on free to air a few years back, I watched the first couple of episodes but didn't bother to tune in for the second two, so disappointed was I by what I'd seen). Wisely, the makers of the series elected to film only the first two of Peake's books, those which take place within and immediately around the confines of Gormenghast itself, but even so it feels quite choppy, especially at the beginning, as we leap from one character and event to another. Partly in consequence, the adaptation never comes near to capturing the sense of grandeur or scale of the books, and nor does it really evoke the rich, stifling sense of decay, or the inescapable, funereal air of suffocation and heaviness, or the shadowy endless architectural ponderousness (the phrase owing a debt to both Peake himself and Anthony Burgess's up-taking of it in writing about the books), or the creeping, all-encompassing sense of nightmare and horror which is woven through the novels (although at least it approaches a suitable grotesquerie)...
For all that, though, I still enjoyed watching it plenty, just to see all of these characters and scenes which have so richly thronged my mind for so long given an external expression, even if that expression fell short of the dramas which play out in my own mind's eye...
