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3.29 AVERAGE
3.29 AVERAGE
It is safe to say this is a weird one. I still think I like the second book the most, but I also have a feeling this one might have a good re-read value.
the weird thing is that my physical copy had a different text from my audio copy. There was more chapters and longer chapters in my physical version.
the weird thing is that my physical copy had a different text from my audio copy. There was more chapters and longer chapters in my physical version.
dark
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A deteriorating Mervyn Peake writes one of the weirdest books ever. Much of it is tedious, incomprehensible and un-readable, but the moments of intense meaning and clarity (especially at the end) stand out so strongly, the book has a one of a kind atmosphere, and when read as part of the trilogy the world it describes appears all the more tragic
I think one day I’ll love this title as much as the other two. I think I will, if nothing else Stockholm will set in at some point, I’m sure.
The uncomfortable reality of this one is that I think quite a lot of the magic is lost when the character who wants to flee... leaves... The tension and drama dries up the moment he gets away. After that he becomes Titus Alone... in every sense. Just adrift and with that comes an imprecision that isn't familiar to the reader from the exactness of the previous two books. And I’m still in so many minds as to whether that works or doesn’t.
I think I feel that reading this is like reading fanfiction, in a sense. The character that purports to be authentic but feels artificial in some way. Boy in Darkness both is and isn’t Titus. It is him, but there is an added veil outside the setting. But here Titus is very clearly presented and I find it hard to recognise him. And I feel horrible saying all this because it still has so much skill to the writing, pared back from the flamboyance used in the first two novels. More streamlined. It has pace and motion. A certain lack of clarity in places like motion blur. There is an undeniable presence of Peake within it, but he also feels so much more distant here.
And there’s a sexual element that is entirely natural for a 20-year-old Titus. But it seems like an awkward gear shift.
Throughout the book there is this question of ‘certainty’ at work. The fear of madness is, in a sense, a fear of being wrong about the world in some simple and obvious way. He holds on to what he is, where he is from. Totemic in the shard of flint. But then action removes the question and he just cruises on.
This is powerful to me. I have my own issues with mental health and I struggle, keenly aware that I too will follow that path towards an eventual miserable disorientation. It keeps me stocked with nightmares.
I guess the message is very much one of ‘we are only a thing which acts upon the world be it the action of ritual or the spontaneous reaction to events’. Trying to theorise yourself wastes time.
Here concludes a journey, the path of which was never finished. Gormenghast is better for Titus leaving, because it cements it as a place of madness. Peake really gave a priceless gift to us and I will reread it until my own end.
The uncomfortable reality of this one is that I think quite a lot of the magic is lost when the character who wants to flee... leaves... The tension and drama dries up the moment he gets away. After that he becomes Titus Alone... in every sense. Just adrift and with that comes an imprecision that isn't familiar to the reader from the exactness of the previous two books. And I’m still in so many minds as to whether that works or doesn’t.
I think I feel that reading this is like reading fanfiction, in a sense. The character that purports to be authentic but feels artificial in some way. Boy in Darkness both is and isn’t Titus. It is him, but there is an added veil outside the setting. But here Titus is very clearly presented and I find it hard to recognise him. And I feel horrible saying all this because it still has so much skill to the writing, pared back from the flamboyance used in the first two novels. More streamlined. It has pace and motion. A certain lack of clarity in places like motion blur. There is an undeniable presence of Peake within it, but he also feels so much more distant here.
And there’s a sexual element that is entirely natural for a 20-year-old Titus. But it seems like an awkward gear shift.
Throughout the book there is this question of ‘certainty’ at work. The fear of madness is, in a sense, a fear of being wrong about the world in some simple and obvious way. He holds on to what he is, where he is from. Totemic in the shard of flint. But then action removes the question and he just cruises on.
This is powerful to me. I have my own issues with mental health and I struggle, keenly aware that I too will follow that path towards an eventual miserable disorientation. It keeps me stocked with nightmares.
I guess the message is very much one of ‘we are only a thing which acts upon the world be it the action of ritual or the spontaneous reaction to events’. Trying to theorise yourself wastes time.
Here concludes a journey, the path of which was never finished. Gormenghast is better for Titus leaving, because it cements it as a place of madness. Peake really gave a priceless gift to us and I will reread it until my own end.
adventurous
dark
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
sad
muzzlehatch 💕
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content warnings: violence against animals (many animals), blood, gore, depression, grief, death by drowning, blood, PTSD
Titus Alone is such a misnomer of a title. Yes, he left his birthright and everyone he's ever known behind. The central conflicts and plot progression, however, stem from the fact that Titus is anything but. In fact, he's chased by a mysterious pair, gets picked up by the lovelorn Muzzlehatch, has several girlfriends, and navigates political systems more organic than the myriad and nebulous rituals he cast off like a cloak. There's other strangeness too, both from the perspective of Titus's lived experience and the fact that there are technologies contemporary to the fifties, more than the vague medieval setting that is Gormenghast. In fact, so many of the new players have never heard of the castle, despite its enormity, despite its heritage.
The setting is at once far simpler and more dynamic than the castle had ever been. There's far more movement between different spaces, and a greater variety of characters to interact with. Titus has only ever known people to bow before him or escape to ritual. He hangs on the lowest rung of the political ladder, to the point that people think he's a delusional fraud. No proof, no friends, he stumbles from interaction to interaction, even witnessing fantasy fare like his first bona fide duel and murder. The way he shifts from having no agency because of his age to having no agency because of his lack of political and social sway in the new environment. The lack of decorum and lack of sophistication, especially in the way it echoes Steerpike's ascension but he doesn't have the same tenacity for survival or clear sense of purpose. The parallels are uncanny, and the inverse ways they navigate their new surroundings are fascinating. One might argue it ends better for Titus, but as the book ends with a new pursuit of independence, there's no way to tell.
Throughout Gormenghast the trilogy, the women have in general been my favorite part. I am still haunted by Fuchsia and Nanny Slag, but the new women in Titus's life are at whole new levels of agency. Juno and Cheeta are diametrically opposed, where Juno wants something quieter from Titus, Cheeta seeks to further her status by making sure this castle Titus claims to have a title to actually exists. The adolescent way they approach their relationship is also fun to see because otherwise, Titus navigates as this amorphous blob of a former ruler and a boy who's never had a true childhood. The level of characterization he gets in this book from his point of view absolutely contributes to why I love it so much. The gothic veil gets lifted a bit, but the transgressions of being out of time and place persist.
The introduction talks about how the decline in Peake's mental health and faculties to dementia might have contributed to the divorced strangeness of this second entry. It's far more efficient than the previous ones, but because Titus is the main character and the rest of the cast is either dead or left behind, there's a stronger sense of focus on his development, both as a character and as a young man. Did I expect there to be sexual content in this series? No, but it makes so much with his journey, and it is a shame that it all ends with him alone, once again.
This third book of the Gormenghast trilogy is in many ways a weaker book than the first two, Titus Groan and Gormenghast. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that Titus Alone was unfinished when Peake died, and that it was written as he was succumbing to the Parkinson's disease that was eventually to kill him. It's very rough and unpolished, feeling in places more like a series of interconnected (and even at times unconnected) sketches than an actual novel. This feeling isn't helped by the fact that Titus Alone is only a third to a quarter of the length of the other two books in the series. There are a number of scenes that are not only choppy because of their short length, they are downright cryptic - even though Peake retained to the last the beautiful style that makes him such a joy to read. A lot of these problems could probably have been resolved if only he had had more time to write.
However, there are a couple of things that I think would have detracted from the novel even if Peake had had time in which to finish it. Most of these things are caused by the shift of setting from the crumbling grounds of Gormenghast to the City and the Factory of the Country where Titus finds himself, from the insular quasi-medievalism of the first two books to the expansive modernity of the third. It's more than a little jarring. As far as the first two books are concerned, they had always seemed to emphasise the closed-off nature of Gormenghast, an airless, breathless little world where nothing ever changed, no one new ever arrived, nothing ever left. The picture I had in my head was of a world that seemed a lot like an old watercolour, or engraving in a book - a strongly etched castle in the centre, defined against the massive bulk of Gormenghast Mountain; but with the image slowly petering out to indistintness and nothingness the further away you move from the building at the centre. Having something exist in the world away from that castle - something so close to our own world, too - seems off kilter and out of place.
The satire is still as biting and droll and dark and weird as ever. If you are a completist, or if you just want to drown yourself a little more in the way Peake uses language ("Under a light to strangle infants by, the great and horrible flower opened its bulbous petals one by one..."), then I'd say read it. If you're not, then you might very well want to give this a miss.
However, there are a couple of things that I think would have detracted from the novel even if Peake had had time in which to finish it. Most of these things are caused by the shift of setting from the crumbling grounds of Gormenghast to the City and the Factory of the Country where Titus finds himself, from the insular quasi-medievalism of the first two books to the expansive modernity of the third. It's more than a little jarring. As far as the first two books are concerned, they had always seemed to emphasise the closed-off nature of Gormenghast, an airless, breathless little world where nothing ever changed, no one new ever arrived, nothing ever left. The picture I had in my head was of a world that seemed a lot like an old watercolour, or engraving in a book - a strongly etched castle in the centre, defined against the massive bulk of Gormenghast Mountain; but with the image slowly petering out to indistintness and nothingness the further away you move from the building at the centre. Having something exist in the world away from that castle - something so close to our own world, too - seems off kilter and out of place.
The satire is still as biting and droll and dark and weird as ever. If you are a completist, or if you just want to drown yourself a little more in the way Peake uses language ("Under a light to strangle infants by, the great and horrible flower opened its bulbous petals one by one..."), then I'd say read it. If you're not, then you might very well want to give this a miss.
adventurous
dark
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Don't be discouraged from reading this "incomplete" and "errant" last installment of the trilogy. It's just as good as the others---it simply is so in its own way. It's a satisfying end to the series.
I stopped, shortly before halfway through. It was better than I thought it might be in one sense (I was fully expecting jotted-down notes from someone half-insane, but it read like a novel, albeit an odd one), but unlike its predecessors, I found little to love.
Now, I must admit, it was hard to get into Titus Groan (I think I had five kicks at that can before it finally took) ... the opening was so slow, with dusty grey people and their dreary sculpture contest, never to be seen again ... whereas Titus Alone was too quick, whisking our incredibly passive protagonist into his situations with alarming alacrity.
But worst of all, no Gormenghast, and supposedly the hint that Titus may just be crazed and Gormenghast only a fantasy. That's one of my strongest pet peeves (almost a bete noire), when a creator turns their back so completely on what their audience loved about the original. The new characters are not as interesting as the old characters, the new setting is not as interesting as the old setting, and the plot equally pales in comparison.
There are some beautiful sentences. Had Peake turned out a late-in-life book of poems, I might have enjoyed that more. As it is, I stopped, because it was clouding my memory of the other works, two of my favourites.
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve!
Now, I must admit, it was hard to get into Titus Groan (I think I had five kicks at that can before it finally took) ... the opening was so slow, with dusty grey people and their dreary sculpture contest, never to be seen again ... whereas Titus Alone was too quick, whisking our incredibly passive protagonist into his situations with alarming alacrity.
But worst of all, no Gormenghast, and supposedly the hint that Titus may just be crazed and Gormenghast only a fantasy. That's one of my strongest pet peeves (almost a bete noire), when a creator turns their back so completely on what their audience loved about the original. The new characters are not as interesting as the old characters, the new setting is not as interesting as the old setting, and the plot equally pales in comparison.
There are some beautiful sentences. Had Peake turned out a late-in-life book of poems, I might have enjoyed that more. As it is, I stopped, because it was clouding my memory of the other works, two of my favourites.
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve!