You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.

Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

Each review lists the medium of the review’s subject: #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Works of fiction will have one or more genres listed: #cyberpunk #dystopia #fantasy #literature #SF #solarpunk #speculative #superheroes

Works of non-fiction, and some works of fiction, will include a topic: #culture #ecology #economics #feminism #history #politics #socialism #tech #unions

Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:

• #boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
• #protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.

A long time ago, I had a blog of political polemics. Then life happened and I stopped writing.

Yet the desire to write never went away, and so this blog was born. Of polemics we already have a sufficiency, however. One only has to read a news site. Instead, I am trying my hand at reflections on the cultural artefacts I ‘consume’: books, games, movies, and so forth.

The name of this blog expresses my capacity as an ordinary consumer, and hence merely a ‘casual’ critic. I cannot boast of a degree in art history, cultural studies or English (or any other) language. Nor am I a paid reviewer. I do believe though that most authors create an artefact because they want their audience to actively engage with it, rather than merely consume it passively. Writing reviews is my way of entering into dialogue with a text, as well as an opportunity to be creatively active myself. If people enjoy reading the end product, then so much the better.

About the blog

The function of this blog strongly informed its form. I ended up on Write.as because of the minimalist aesthetic and the deliberate absence of social media plug-ins, Fediverse integrations excepted. There is no SEO, and no trackers. It does mean that the blog lacks some features that readers will have come to expect, most notably the ability to comment and a navigation menu or archive.

To help find your way around, Write.as uses hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page listing all the posts with the same hashtag. I do my best to label all reviews, and my most common hashtags are at the end of this page.

Posts will be cross-posted to my Mastodon feed, so feel free to leave a comment there. Any feedback or response is much appreciated. You can also subscribe to receive future blogs via email using the ‘Subscribe’ button at the bottom of the homepage, or by adding this blog to an RSS feed.

How to navigate

Every post has one or more tags (‘#’) associated with it to help categorise it. Instead of using menus, you can click on a tag to retrieve all posts with the same tag. You can do this from within any blog post, or you can use the list below.

Mediums #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Type #fiction #nonfiction

Fiction genres #fantasy #literature #SF #speculative #cyberpunk #solarpunk #superheroes

Non-fiction categories #history #politics #tech #culture #unions #socialism

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” s_aid Karl Marx. And while he had the proletariat in mind rather than the aristocracy, the words might have been the motto of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. Published between 1946 and 1959, Gormenghast gets classed as prototypical fantasy. Nowadays, it might have been labelled magical realism, suffused as the entire series is with the logic of dreams, where time, space and fate all bend in service of the story.

All three books follow Titus Groan, Seventy-Seventh Earl, first as child, then as youth and finally as a young man. Yet the main character of the novel is not Titus, but the eponymous castle of Gormenghast. Gormenghast is the ur-castle of our European collective imagination: so vast, complex and ruinous that even its lifelong inhabitants cannot fathom it. It is miles of crumbling ramparts and towers, battlements and courtyards, corridors and chambers, arrested in a permanent state of slow decay. Think the castle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, except if it was 20 times larger and designed by M.C. Escher. It would eat Hogwarts for breakfast.

As labyrinthine as the castle are the rituals of the House of Groan. They are the sediment of contingent decisions and events of generations of Groans, ossified into strictures that lock the castle’s inhabitants down in time in the same way the physical castle contains them in space. It is the rituals and the castle together that hold the essence of the House of Groan. Any living members of the line are incidental. As a metaphor for any old, impoverished, anachronistic aristocratic English family, stuck on a decrepit estate surrounded by mouldering artifacts of a glorious past, it could not do any better.

The novel’s imaginative force is buttressed by the exquisite quality of the writing. Fusing form with substance, Peake’s writing is as ornate, meandering and overabundant as Gormenghast itself. His characters are archetypes in the Dickensian mould: hyper-real cyphers for roles that we all recognise (the Professor, the Nursemaid, the Servant), but written with enough depth and pathos to make them come alive as individuals. The narrative meanders like a river delta, with manifold branches that have no bearing on the plot. At one point there is a 60 odd page diversion about a party, which is as brilliant as it is pointless. Gormenghast is a gothic cathedral of words, not meant to be read as a story, but to be experienced aesthetically as the literary equivalent of stained glass and gargoyles.

Gormenghast does of course have a story, or stories, but it is Titus Groan’s coming-of-age and his quest to self-actualise as an individual, free from the oppressive heritage of Castle and Line, that is the thread through the trilogy. Abstracted from the gothic grandeur of its setting, this is a standard narrative: boy grows up, discovers love, does violence against his enemies, wrestles with the strictures of his parents, and sets out to find himself. Titus is not a traditional hero: he is often passive, irresolute or irrational, especially when contrasted to the self-sufficient Muzzlehatch or the ruthlessly calculating Steerpike. This does not much vary the traditional pattern of a coming-of-age narrative, as the universe helpfully makes up for Titus’ deficiencies by ensuring the necessary characters are in the right place at the right time.

This device works within the setting of a Castle, where it creates the sense of Gormenghast acting as a character in the story. It works considerably less well once Titus escapes the Castle at the end of the second book. The third novel is built on the same dream logic as the first two, but without the presence of the Castle as a focal point, both the plot and the story seriously tax the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. The areas Titus explores are equally isolated from a wider world as Gormenghast is, yet without any obvious reason for this. Characters reportedly move hundreds of miles, yet by cosmic coincidence arrive at the right place at the right time. Unlike Gormenghast, these locations do not function or exist in their own right, they are there simply as canvas for the plot. The same applies to most of the characters in the third book, and in particular the women. The novels clearly show their age here, with the female characters being defined by their relationship to Titus and the function they fulfill as part of his development. And while male characters manage to exhibit a range of virtues and flaws, the women are almost exclusively either vain, insecure, or both. Among these, Titus’ sister Fuschia has the most developed and interesting narrative arc, which makes its premature termination in book two all the more disappointing.

Despite these signs of age, and the narrative sprawl of book three, Gormenghast is a totally absorbing read. The work it requires on the part of the reader to navigate its labyrinthine narratives and linguistic crenelations are what make it a rewarding, if not exactly easy, experience. As the Countess warns Titus before his escape: once you are of the Castle, it will stay with you forever.

#books #fiction #speculative

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