Mr. Pye

Mr. Pye is a 1953 novel by Mervyn Peake, a poet, author, and artist most famously known for his grotesquely fantastic Gormenghast books. In contrast to the gigantic crumbling castle/world of that series, Mr. Pye takes place on the quite real British island of Sark, a little place where Peake and his family lived and worked for many years.

          Into this microcosm comes Mr. Pye, a small round sprightly gentleman who has a vision of turning the rocky island full of thorny people into a little Eden, from which to launch his crusade to reform the entire world. For a while it seems to be working (he reconciles his landlady and her haughty neighbor, among other good works) but it seems God (whom he smugly refers to as ‘the Great Pal’) does not entirely approve of Mr. Pye’s attitude. This is indicated by a providential occurrence that ruins the little man’s staged (if sincere) miracle of martyrdom.

Afterwards, as if the further the point, Mr. Pye starts to sprout a pair of wings, like a parody of an angel; appendages Mr. Pye considers are turning him into a sideshow mockery. To counterbalance their growth, he figures he must commit some evil acts. He does, and to his relief the wings start to shrink, only to have (to his horror) horns start to grow on his head.

With the help of one of his would-be disciples, the earthy Tintigieu (a local good-time girl), he decides that to regain his humanity he must confess and reveal his horns to the islanders, who take him for a devil and chase him, hunting all over Sark, except for in the jail where Tintagieu hides him.

With his act of humility, he loses his horns, and once more sprouts a splendid set of wings. The islanders discover him but find his wings as unnatural as his horns. They chase him to the end of the island, where Mr. Pye tumbles over the cliff. To everyone’s surprise (including the little man’s) his wings spread, and he takes off into the blue and is never seen again.

In English schoolroom parlance, to call someone ‘pi’ meant they were annoyingly pious, and I wonder if that is what went into Mr. Pye’s naming. It is surely his overweening piety, lacking human love or charity, that is his characteristic flaw which is chastised and leads to his apotheosis.

The story contains a delightful array of the lovingly grotesque characters that people Peake’s work. The skinny chain-smoking Miss Dredger and the fat, purple-busbied (who mysteriously never removes her hat) Mrs. George might well be the female equivalents of Mr. Flay and Mr. Swelter from Titus Groan. The local artist Thorpe is perhaps a parody of Peake, who illustrated the book himself in his own inimitable style.

Personally, I found the novel somewhat reminiscent of T. H. White’s The Elephant and the Kangaroo, with its supernatural element, its ‘foreign’ protagonist, and its suspicious, stubborn, and intolerant ‘natives’.   The ‘hero’ is made an alien not by his language or culture or race but by his point of view. In both books the hero only achieves his character growth when he stops trying to control his surroundings. There are no other great parallels or similarities, but there is that.

Mr. Pye is otherwise a quite unique work with its own indescribable flavor, and a poetic adventure that must be undertaken to begin to know its true character, beyond the bare description given above. It is not, maybe, a dish for every palate, but I found Mr. Pye quite tasty.