fiefoe

I chanced upon this line on Amazon, 'For me, a person who does not liked to be bogged down with heavy writing, difficult words, and poetically graphic sentences,' and immediately thought of this book. Progress is slow as I'm constantly being mesmerized by Mervyn Peake's breathtakingly precise imageries.

(Of the eighteen Grey Scrubbers:)
In all, counting the ears, which on occasion may be monstrously expressive, the one hundred and eight features were unable, at the best of times, to muster between them, individually or taken en masse, the faintest shadow of anything that might hint at the workings of what lay beneath.
... (They) were lying side by side upon the flagstones beneath a great table, dead drunk to a man. They had done honour to the occasion and were out of the picture, having been rolled under the table one by one like so many barrels of ale, and indeed they were.
... the inert and foreshortened bodies
... Beneath the table a shadow had roosted, and the rest of their bodies, receding in parallel lines, were soon devoured in the darkness.
The long beams of sunlight, which were reflected from the moist walls in a shimmering haze, had pranked the chef's body with blotches of ghost-light. ... as he did so the patches of light shifted across the degraded whiteness of the stretched uniform he wore. ... Upon (his head) the tall cap of office rose coldly, a vague topsail half lost in a fitful sky. In the total effect there was indeed something of the galleon. <> One of the blotches of reflected sunlight swayed to and fro across the paunch. This particular pool of light moving in a mesmeric manner backwards and forwards picked out from time to time a long red island of spilt wine. It seemed to leap forward from the mottled cloth when the light fastened upon it in startling contrast to the chiaroscuro and to defy the laws of tone.
His black suite... fitted him badly but belonged to him as inevitably as the head of a tortoise emerging from its shell.
A carpet filled the floor with blue pasture. Thereon were seated in a hundred decorative attitudes, or stood immobile like carvings, or walked superbly across their sapphire setting, inter-weaving with each other like a living arabesque, a swarm of snow-white cats.