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A review by korrick
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
4.0
3.5/5
There's something about the self-absorbed style of composition that will either suck you into a window of written word or put you off entirely. Peake's writing is one of constant connections, associations, adulterations, and discombobulations, superimposition upon superimposition upon what is often the barest, grimmest aspects of a portrayed reality: a craggy peak, a boney tree, an ancient ritual, a calcified patriarch. It's not necessary that you vibe with every choice of syntactical accretion, but it does help to not care so much about action compared to the experience of seeing, contemplating, analyzing, committing to the sort of gaze that never glances without classifying, witnesses without correlating, engages without judging. I've been the contemplative type, voluntarily and otherwise, long enough to have amassed the sensibility required for not only enduring, but also enjoying such a breed of narrative build and character thrust. So, while the pages were broad and the font size compacted, I found that, even after a hard day's work, this would flow, even when the trilogy-in-one-edition grew too weighty for my arms and I had to lie alongside the open book to sustain my reading for more than a few pages. A feast for the senses, but only a very specific, highly Eurocentric set of senses, and much as I could have easily continued on to 'Gormenghast' upon finishing the first work, it doesn't do my reading pursuits any good to follow staid old trajectories for too long, especially when they feed more into narratological complacency than into exploration. So, if you know yourself to have tastes tending towards this sort of thing, go for it. Just don't pretend that you're any better for having said tastes.
When I started composing this review, it was September 23, 2022, and I had just finished this, my last read planned for this year's challenge reads. It wasn't the best, but neither it was the worst or even the middling, and to be satisfied that at least one dead white guy isn't entirely held up by the yellowbellied onanism of many a critic, armchair or otherwise, is an uncommon pleasure in its own right. Indeed, I can even see the glimmers of the crossroads that this particular work exists at the corner of, but that doesn't mean this piece deserves having its entire cast of characters listed out on Wikipedia whilst many entire continents of writing go with barely five to fifty pages to their collectively acknowledged existence. So, shove off Burgess and Crisp with your convoluted mutterings and insular proclamations, and welcome the rest of the world whose phantasmagorical underpinnings found mainstream trellises in Peake's prose but whose origins lie far beyond anything ever conceptualized by those who worship at the altar of Shakespeare and co. Buildings breathe, the dead walk, and the horror of this work lies not in its portrayals of madness and intimations of the grotesque, but that it so tritely attempts alongside the multitudes of its ilk to couple anarchism with the end of all things. These days are played to the tune of the queen is dead, long live the king, but how much would it really take to change it to the queen is dead, long live the people? It's the sort of conceptualization that forms a complete antithesis to this work and its sequels, but how else is one to test whether monarchy is something that actually works in practice, rather than solely on paper?
And what voluptuary ever lolled with half the languor of that boneless thing!GR data (what little Amazon has left to us) tells me that I added this book either during the month of or during the month preceding that in which I dropped out of college. I was at a low point, to put it mildly, and GR at that time was what I used to fortify myself with little to no thought of the wider context that all these books I was committing to operated within. In other words, I was swelling my shelves with old/dead white dudes with veritable abandon, and when the time inevitably came when I saw that this wasn't sustainable, it was difficult to determine what was worth keeping around and what could be safely (even healthily, to be quite honest) jettisoned, especially when the same coterie praised the majority of the works to the skies to the to the tune of same status quo shit, different day. My solution was to let the works sit in their metaphorical vault for a time and give the natural flow of events and information a chance to do some weeding for me, and this work, embedded as it was in a trilogy, is a prime example of something that I'd do well to wait on until I could judge it in a less blinkered fashion. Now that I've finished, I have to say what many have said already: Peake can certainly write, and there's a certain staging of setting and atmosphere that takes the definition of "gothic" to new, grotesquely sensual heights in every page of this piece. Displacing Tolkien, though? I'm afraid Peake would have had to have been a tad less self indulgent in his solipsistic bent and a tad more embedded in the sort of compassionate logic born of a wider historical world community: a little less Steerpike and a tad more Fuschia, if you will. All in all, I certainly liked it a great deal more than I thought I would, but I don't regret taking the rest of the trilogy off my TBR. The sequel may find its way back, but only once it's earned it.
There's something about the self-absorbed style of composition that will either suck you into a window of written word or put you off entirely. Peake's writing is one of constant connections, associations, adulterations, and discombobulations, superimposition upon superimposition upon what is often the barest, grimmest aspects of a portrayed reality: a craggy peak, a boney tree, an ancient ritual, a calcified patriarch. It's not necessary that you vibe with every choice of syntactical accretion, but it does help to not care so much about action compared to the experience of seeing, contemplating, analyzing, committing to the sort of gaze that never glances without classifying, witnesses without correlating, engages without judging. I've been the contemplative type, voluntarily and otherwise, long enough to have amassed the sensibility required for not only enduring, but also enjoying such a breed of narrative build and character thrust. So, while the pages were broad and the font size compacted, I found that, even after a hard day's work, this would flow, even when the trilogy-in-one-edition grew too weighty for my arms and I had to lie alongside the open book to sustain my reading for more than a few pages. A feast for the senses, but only a very specific, highly Eurocentric set of senses, and much as I could have easily continued on to 'Gormenghast' upon finishing the first work, it doesn't do my reading pursuits any good to follow staid old trajectories for too long, especially when they feed more into narratological complacency than into exploration. So, if you know yourself to have tastes tending towards this sort of thing, go for it. Just don't pretend that you're any better for having said tastes.
When I started composing this review, it was September 23, 2022, and I had just finished this, my last read planned for this year's challenge reads. It wasn't the best, but neither it was the worst or even the middling, and to be satisfied that at least one dead white guy isn't entirely held up by the yellowbellied onanism of many a critic, armchair or otherwise, is an uncommon pleasure in its own right. Indeed, I can even see the glimmers of the crossroads that this particular work exists at the corner of, but that doesn't mean this piece deserves having its entire cast of characters listed out on Wikipedia whilst many entire continents of writing go with barely five to fifty pages to their collectively acknowledged existence. So, shove off Burgess and Crisp with your convoluted mutterings and insular proclamations, and welcome the rest of the world whose phantasmagorical underpinnings found mainstream trellises in Peake's prose but whose origins lie far beyond anything ever conceptualized by those who worship at the altar of Shakespeare and co. Buildings breathe, the dead walk, and the horror of this work lies not in its portrayals of madness and intimations of the grotesque, but that it so tritely attempts alongside the multitudes of its ilk to couple anarchism with the end of all things. These days are played to the tune of the queen is dead, long live the king, but how much would it really take to change it to the queen is dead, long live the people? It's the sort of conceptualization that forms a complete antithesis to this work and its sequels, but how else is one to test whether monarchy is something that actually works in practice, rather than solely on paper?
I have always been fascinated by those who want to work, ha, ha. Most absorbing to observe them. Ha, ha, ha! most absorbing and uncanny.By the way, that first quote describes a just-sliced-off ear swinging from an arc of spiderweb. It's at instances like those where I have to give Peake credit where credit is due.