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A review by thelizabeth
Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake
3.0
This is what I think I'd call an "accomplishment read." On its own, Titus Alone doesn't work at all. I read it, though, as a completist, so that I could know about it for myself. However, the book's fate is made even sadder by the fact this third book in the Gormenghast trilogy doesn't work as part of its series, either.
This is pretty well-covered knowledge: Book One and Book Two take place in the same setting, with the same rules and people and purpose. At the end of Book Two, our hero Titus takes off for adventure, and thus Book Three is destined to be different. This isn't necessarily bad news for the series, as a new setting by itself isn't what makes the book fail.
The setting, though, is pretty surprising. Titus, somehow, has wandered and become lost in something rather closely approximating our own world. He doesn't know how to get home (if he wanted to) and nobody's ever heard of Gormenghast. Within the first couple of pages, someone drives up to Titus in a car, and you are like "Wait holy shit is that a car!!??" and then suddenly, there with Titus, you've got cars, and airplanes, and cities and factories and houses. (Previously, I've described Gormenghast's setting as quasi-Victorian, not that I'm a historian — but you've got candelabras, horses, etc. and the social order is some strange blend of pre-Industrial Revolution aristocracy and serfdom.) It is a culture shock, then, to end up here — although strangely, evidently not as much a shock to Titus as it is to us.
That's generally the irksome nature of this book. Questions you expect characters to ask, things you expect would surprise them, don't. They don't react to anything at all, and the book therefore can't make any sense of itself. It starts out strange, then, and just devolves further into strangeness of a comic proportion. It's incoherent and inconsistent, and hard to describe how odd and sudden the developments are — someone will show up and say, "I have been watching you, devoted to you for many years, hidden in your forest," and the lady will say, "Okay, let's go then!" and then they do and then he's just a guy who's with them, no big deal, for absolutely no reason. It almost, almost is convincing as an absurdist story, but it really doesn't work out.
Similarly, it is kind of playing with the building blocks of a good old bildungsroman, but the blocks are sort of dumb. Titus (who is roughly aged at around 20, here), in his exploration of this new world, meets a nice lady and gets a nice sexual awakening. But pretty much the only momentum of the story comes in the form of Titus's restlessness, and so, on he must wander, sowing oats. And so the primary plot points of his arc in this book pretty much = becoming entangled with a woman + soon he must leave her.
When we do get something resembling a real plot, near the end, it is because he has pissed off a girl he's rejected in this way. And unfortunately, I couldn't really read around how weird and screwed up Peake wrote Titus's put-downs of the girl, Cheeta (?! that's her name ok), whom Titus finds deplorable except that he wants to sleep with her. She's kinda rightfully insulted by his attitude. Then — because she is our villain? — in her fury she decides to crush him. We spend a while tensely anticipating the performance of her great scheme, a secret plan to ruin him, a colossally big event that welcomely feels similar to Steerpike's (much more fabulous) schemes in the previous novels. She decides — but I SWEAR TO GOD, I thought she was gonna try and marry him. That's the kind of story it is like. In the end, And that's the end of our trilogy.
Why three stars, then, if I consider the book a failure? Partly sentiment, yes, and a pitying respect, and context. Mostly, though: even though nothing in this book makes much sense at all, Mervyn Peake's writing remains glorious. And this is an eminently respectable accomplishment as Peake, famously, continued writing and plotting this series while his health was degraded by Parkinson's-related dementia (the first cited symptom of which is an "inability to plan"). This book was more or less his last writing. The author clearly suffered from cognitive failures that, undoubtedly, were far deeper and more painful than can be represented by a novel failing to make sense. I forgive him.
What's shocking to me is that even as Peake's mind degenerated, his language here is astonishingly weird and wonderful and deep and I needed a dictionary, just like the previous books. There are some passages of immense beauty — fewer, but they're here, and that makes the book invaluable. It couldn't be clearer that the author's skill is not to blame for this particular book's weakness as a novel. I expected that this would read as though it were a different mind entirely that had written it, but it wasn't. I recognize it, and it's the part of the experience of reading through Gormenghast that means the most. These books are a treasure in English, no matter what else.
I expect I have some final feelings about the whole shebang still to come, but as far as Book Three goes, I don't know what else to say. I'm sorry that it had to end this way, but still. Still, indeed.
This is pretty well-covered knowledge: Book One and Book Two take place in the same setting, with the same rules and people and purpose. At the end of Book Two, our hero Titus takes off for adventure, and thus Book Three is destined to be different. This isn't necessarily bad news for the series, as a new setting by itself isn't what makes the book fail.
The setting, though, is pretty surprising. Titus, somehow, has wandered and become lost in something rather closely approximating our own world. He doesn't know how to get home (if he wanted to) and nobody's ever heard of Gormenghast. Within the first couple of pages, someone drives up to Titus in a car, and you are like "Wait holy shit is that a car!!??" and then suddenly, there with Titus, you've got cars, and airplanes, and cities and factories and houses. (Previously, I've described Gormenghast's setting as quasi-Victorian, not that I'm a historian — but you've got candelabras, horses, etc. and the social order is some strange blend of pre-Industrial Revolution aristocracy and serfdom.) It is a culture shock, then, to end up here — although strangely, evidently not as much a shock to Titus as it is to us.
That's generally the irksome nature of this book. Questions you expect characters to ask, things you expect would surprise them, don't. They don't react to anything at all, and the book therefore can't make any sense of itself. It starts out strange, then, and just devolves further into strangeness of a comic proportion. It's incoherent and inconsistent, and hard to describe how odd and sudden the developments are — someone will show up and say, "I have been watching you, devoted to you for many years, hidden in your forest," and the lady will say, "Okay, let's go then!" and then they do and then he's just a guy who's with them, no big deal, for absolutely no reason. It almost, almost is convincing as an absurdist story, but it really doesn't work out.
Similarly, it is kind of playing with the building blocks of a good old bildungsroman, but the blocks are sort of dumb. Titus (who is roughly aged at around 20, here), in his exploration of this new world, meets a nice lady and gets a nice sexual awakening. But pretty much the only momentum of the story comes in the form of Titus's restlessness, and so, on he must wander, sowing oats. And so the primary plot points of his arc in this book pretty much = becoming entangled with a woman + soon he must leave her.
When we do get something resembling a real plot, near the end, it is because he has pissed off a girl he's rejected in this way. And unfortunately, I couldn't really read around how weird and screwed up Peake wrote Titus's put-downs of the girl, Cheeta (?! that's her name ok), whom Titus finds deplorable except that he wants to sleep with her. She's kinda rightfully insulted by his attitude. Then — because she is our villain? — in her fury she decides to crush him. We spend a while tensely anticipating the performance of her great scheme, a secret plan to ruin him, a colossally big event that welcomely feels similar to Steerpike's (much more fabulous) schemes in the previous novels. She decides
Spoiler
to put together an enormous replica of Gormenghast including life-size effigies of all Titus's family and friends, living and dead, in an effort to drive him mad. (Conveniently, she spent a long while nursing him out of a delirious fever in which he apparently described everyone and everything in accurate and coherent detail.)Spoiler
Titus abandons his friends again after they've rescued him from this horrid event (and one of them has died saving him) and he ends up back at Gormenghast… only to turn around again, and wander off a different way, as if he didn't return at all.Why three stars, then, if I consider the book a failure? Partly sentiment, yes, and a pitying respect, and context. Mostly, though: even though nothing in this book makes much sense at all, Mervyn Peake's writing remains glorious. And this is an eminently respectable accomplishment as Peake, famously, continued writing and plotting this series while his health was degraded by Parkinson's-related dementia (the first cited symptom of which is an "inability to plan"). This book was more or less his last writing. The author clearly suffered from cognitive failures that, undoubtedly, were far deeper and more painful than can be represented by a novel failing to make sense. I forgive him.
What's shocking to me is that even as Peake's mind degenerated, his language here is astonishingly weird and wonderful and deep and I needed a dictionary, just like the previous books. There are some passages of immense beauty — fewer, but they're here, and that makes the book invaluable. It couldn't be clearer that the author's skill is not to blame for this particular book's weakness as a novel. I expected that this would read as though it were a different mind entirely that had written it, but it wasn't. I recognize it, and it's the part of the experience of reading through Gormenghast that means the most. These books are a treasure in English, no matter what else.
I expect I have some final feelings about the whole shebang still to come, but as far as Book Three goes, I don't know what else to say. I'm sorry that it had to end this way, but still. Still, indeed.