MERVYN PEAKE

An absorbing portrait of the dystopian, sometimes dyspeptic English author and illustrator.

Mervyn Peake (1911–68) is best known for his Gormenghast novels, the basis for a recent BBC television series. He is less known for his superb drawings and paintings, examples of which appear throughout this well-written biography. According to Yorke, who has written similar studies of other relatively obscure English artists, Peake led an almost stereotypically Edwardian childhood. Born in China to missionary parents, he endured public school (“He played for the Chalmers House first cricket XI between 1925 and 1928, but, according to the school magazine, ‘at the present is much too careless’ ”) and came of age in the depths of the Depression. After a bohemian period that included time in an artists’ colony on the island of Sark, Peake found work as an art teacher in London, where he fell in love with one of his students. Though Maeve Gilmore’s family opposed the union, the couple married and enjoyed a happy life together. Peake continued to work as an artist, securing commissions to illustrate children’s books and classics while working throughout the early 1940s on a novel called Titus Groan, which would become the first installment of the Gormenghast series. (Fans will appreciate learning that the novel does not take its name, as is often supposed, from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: “People forget that one of Peake’s favorite artists was Rembrandt, whose only son was called Titus.”) Discharged from the army on grounds of ill-health during WWII, Peake was sent to document the liberated Bergen-Belsen, where he made a haunting study of a girl dying of consumption. Afterward, Yorke writes, a gloom settled over Peake’s writings and drawings—but not necessarily the artist himself—that lasted until his death from Parkinson’s disease 20 years later.

A useful addition to the growing body of critical studies of Peake.