At night the owls made of it an echoing throat by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. The first book contained an introduction by Anthony Burgess, who applied Mervyn Peake’s description of Gormenghast to the work: The term ‘a certain ponderous architectural quality’ exactly conveys what we are in for. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.
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