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A review by siria
Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake
2.0
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.