From Publishers Weekly
The life of author-illustrator Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) offers almost as many strange twists as his well-known novels, as Yorke demonstrates in this detailed biography. A childhood spent in a British missionary compound in China, stints in art schools, his marriage to a fellow artist and his career as an illustrator all make for entertaining, touching and often amusing reading. Yorke livens the story with odd anecdotes, such as when Peake finds an elephant housed below his apartment he "fed it sugar lumps and buns." Not surprisingly, Yorke focuses on inspirations for Peake's Titus Groan novels. But his research and the many illustrations included make it clear that Peake was also an accomplished and respected illustrator. Yorke also reveals Peake as a charming, sensitive man. He is on shakier ground, however, when he critiques Peake's creations. As an artist himself and biographer of British artists Keith Vaughan and Matthew Smith, Yorke knows his subject. Unfortunately, he indulges in excessive and questionable analyses, even though he admits that Peake himself would "have none of this fancy stuff." He criticizes his subject's lack of art theory, when Peake states "after all, there are no rules" in art. Yorke cannot accept the works simply as they are. Speaking of Peake's book Letters From a Lost Uncle, Yorke writes: "In an encounter with a huge white polar bear Uncle is unable to use his phallic [wooden] leg because it embraces him" a clumsy construction, besides being a stretch of analysis. Hopefully, this won't deter Peake's well-deserved new admirers from reading this otherwise informative book. 28 b&w photos, 94 b&w illus.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Often compared to J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, British author Mervyn Peake (1911-68) is not as well known beyond his circle of admirers; he was somewhat neglected during his lifetime but acquired a worldwide reputation after his death. Instinctive rather than intellectual, he enjoyed a mixed critical reception and became a cult figure best known for his "Gormenghast" trilogy. The novelist was also a painter, poet, dramatist, and illustrator (his drawings appear throughout this book). His fiction is generally considered Gothic fantasy, although many critics feel that he eludes labels. Some 30 years after his death, interest in Peake's works has been rekindled, in part by the recent BBC adaptation of the Gormenghast titles. Yorke (Beastly Tales) aims to provide a biography rather than a scholarly study; the documentation is adequate but not extensive. However, unlike G. Peter Winnington's Vast Alchemies, Yorke's work benefits from the family's full cooperation; sources include family papers as well as studies by Peake scholars. Readable and entertaining, this is recommended for libraries where there is an interest in fantasy literature. Denise J. Stankovics, Rockville P.L., Vernon, CTCopyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
After C. S. Lewis' Narnia books and J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, the most important twentieth-century British fantasy may be a trilogy about Gormenghast, an isolated, imaginary earldom that is more like the lands of Kafka and Beckett than like Middle Earth. Its creator, Mervyn Peake (1911-68), lived a marginal, bohemian life because, one gathers from Yorke's engaging, copiously illustrated, but factually spotty biography, he couldn't live any other way. Born in China, the artistically precocious Peake was fascinated from childhood by his medical-missionary father's deformed patients and the cruelty of ordinary Chinese life; subsequently, grotesquery filled his art, and violence his writing, especially after summer 1945, when he saw the Belsen death camp. He left China at 11, never to return, but never to fit in England. Happiest on Sark, the Channel Isle where he moved his young family after World War II, he struggled along with his art and writing and died after 10 years of Parkinson's disease, just as the trilogy was first reprinted. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
Famously witty, eccentric, widely popular, and attractive to women, Peake was also sturdily independent of the literary and artistic movements of his day and achieved cult status even before his early death in 1968. Malcolm Yorke brings us the first objective biography of this brilliant figure, written with the Peake family's full cooperation. With access to letters, photographs, and drawings never previously published, Yorke charts a life often shadowed by mental turmoil and worry yet always, until its tragic end, relieved by Peake's quirky humor and ceaseless creativity.

Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in revolutionary China, where his parents were missionaries. He later drew on his exotic childhood and its often savage images in his adult creations. Throughout his life, he was a bohemian: as a student and then, later, in an artists' colony on the island of Sark, a place to which he often returned when city life became too stressful or expensive. Teaching in London, he fell in love with one of his students, Maeve Gilmore, and the two married despite her family's opposition. It turned out to be a close and lasting relationship, lived among a circle of friends that included Graham Greene, Augustus John, Dylan Thomas, and Walter de la Mare. Peake proved to be a miserable and incompetent soldier during World War II, and it was during this unhappy period that he began to write Titus Groan, the first book of the Gormenghast trilogy. In 1945 he was sent by a magazine to Germany, where he visited the Bergen Belsen concentration camp immediately after its liberation-an experience that would profoundly affect his subsequent work.

About the Author
Malcolm Yorke has written biographies of Keith Vaughan, Eric Gill, and Matthew Smith. He is also a painter, a wood and stone carver, and the author of more than twenty children's books.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Mervyn Peake, creator of the extraordinary Gormenghast novels, was a painter, poet, illustrator, and dramatist, as well as a writer. He was also famously witty, eccentric, widely popular, and sturdily independent of the literary and artistic movements of his day - and he achieved cult status even before his early death in 1968." In My Eyes Mint Gold - the eponymous line is from a poem entitled "If I Could See Not Surfaces" - Malcolm Yorke brings us the objective biography of this brilliant figure, written with the Peake family's full cooperation. With access to letters, photographs, and drawings never previously published, Yorke charts a life often shadowed by mental turmoil and anxiety yet always, until its tragic end, relieved by Peake's quirky humor and ceaseless creativity.

SYNOPSIS

Yorke engages in many of the same endeavors as British novelist, story writer, playwright, poet, book illustrator, and painter Peake (1911-68), but is also a biographer. In all his genres, he says, Peake either predated or postdated the fashion—for example his fantasy novels later became popular, but his representational paintings maintain their obscurity. Annotation c. Book News, Inc.,Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Often compared to J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, British author Mervyn Peake (1911-68) is not as well known beyond his circle of admirers; he was somewhat neglected during his lifetime but acquired a worldwide reputation after his death. Instinctive rather than intellectual, he enjoyed a mixed critical reception and became a cult figure best known for his "Gormenghast" trilogy. The novelist was also a painter, poet, dramatist, and illustrator (his drawings appear throughout this book). His fiction is generally considered Gothic fantasy, although many critics feel that he eludes labels. Some 30 years after his death, interest in Peake's works has been rekindled, in part by the recent BBC adaptation of the Gormenghast titles. Yorke (Beastly Tales) aims to provide a biography rather than a scholarly study; the documentation is adequate but not extensive. However, unlike G. Peter Winnington's Vast Alchemies, Yorke's work benefits from the family's full cooperation; sources include family papers as well as studies by Peake scholars. Readable and entertaining, this is recommended for libraries where there is an interest in fantasy literature. Denise J. Stankovics, Rockville P.L., Vernon, CT Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Often compared to J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, British author Mervyn Peake (1911-68) is not as well known beyond his circle of admirers; he was somewhat neglected during his lifetime but acquired a worldwide reputation after his death. Instinctive rather than intellectual, he enjoyed a mixed critical reception and became a cult figure best known for his "Gormenghast" trilogy. The novelist was also a painter, poet, dramatist, and illustrator (his drawings appear throughout this book). His fiction is generally considered Gothic fantasy, although many critics feel that he eludes labels. Some 30 years after his death, interest in Peake's works has been rekindled, in part by the recent BBC adaptation of the Gormenghast titles. Yorke (Beastly Tales) aims to provide a biography rather than a scholarly study; the documentation is adequate but not extensive. However, unlike G. Peter Winnington's Vast Alchemies, Yorke's work benefits from the family's full cooperation; sources include family papers as well as studies by Peake scholars. Readable and entertaining, this is recommended for libraries where there is an interest in fantasy literature. Denise J. Stankovics, Rockville P.L., Vernon, CT Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews