I started re-reading this after watching the mini-series, but then became distracted and have been preoccupied lately, and I think the moment has passed for now. But I wrote the below a while back, between said mini-series and the beginning of the re-read:
* * *
I don't know if it's quite accurate to say that the Gormenghast trilogy, taken collectively, was a personal watershed, but I can't doubt how deeply the series has marked me. I think that I must have come to it in the later years of high school - I remember picking it up in Box Hill library on spec, knowing nothing of its putative status as a classic of imaginative literature, and tumbling headlong into its dark, convoluted, endless ramifying visions. The reverberations spread. For years, the online alias I favoured was 'Fuchsia'; my email address incorporated 'Steerpike'. I wrote the passages in which Fuchsia and Keda met their ends by falling on my bedroom wall - the one because it so perfectly encapsulated and crystallised the tragedy of its subject and the other because its lyricism left me astonished - and indeed, the idea of writing directly on my walls was probably born of the books themselves. The books spoke to me.
