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A review by skyraptor_66
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
5.0
This book is an odd one in that I loved it, and yet I struggle to justify recommending it. Not exactly a glowing opening sentence for a review, when I do mean that something in the atmosphere of this book is exactly what I have wanted aesthetically. I think it's that, not unlike other media I enjoy that tickles some deep feeling in me but I rarely talk about to others (Carnivale being one), the book revels in its setting and makes you feel it like a thick fog around you. Weighed down with such strong and evocative language, the pacing lumbers, feeling heavy and slow. Things happen, but not in any rip-roaring way, or even Poelike way given this series is generally identified as gothic. It says something that Lord of the Rings felt pretty fast-paced in its language after this, Dickens' David Copperfield on-par.
Titus Groan of the Gormenghast series is technically a fantasy as well, but will inevitably disappoint anyone picking it up for that reason. It lacks pretty much all of the usual genre trappings except for the weirdness of an eccentric alternate culture, designed to be a grotesque caricature at all times. Gormenghast castle is a sprawling, yawning, and ponderous thing of endless towers surrounded by a village that its inhabitants rarely interact with outside of ceremonial events. In true gothic form, the place has a gloomy, labyrinthine personality of its own. Its Earl of Groan, Lord Sepulchrave, has just had a son, dubbed Titus. His wife the Countess Gertrude is the original cat lady, also obsessed with birds, and actually quite intimidating and also sharply competent when not absorbed with her animals, which she is most of the time. Likewise, the eldest daughter Fuchsia lives in her own self-absorbed fantasy world of which she is protective, and so isn't exactly all there herself. None of the characters are particularly attractive, in personality or in looks. The doctor Prunesquallor seems the most grounded and moral of the lot, but even he is prone to sardonic speaking and a habitual irritating laugh that punctuates a lot of his dialog. If the name choices themselves are any indication, the cast might as well be DaVinci's studies of grotesques--sometimes literally, as Peake was also an illustrator, and my edition included the odd character sketch by him.
Then there's Steerpike. The infant Titus actually doesn't have much to in this book, but rather the whole plot is pedaled forward by Steerpike's Machiavellian rise to power. A former kitchen boy abused by the hulking, abhorrent Chef Swelter, he escapes by climbing onto the castle's roof(s) and stumbles into Fuchsia's secret room where she keeps her collection of various things conducive to her private sense of fantasy. She's the first person he truly shows his manipulative chops with, putting on a clown show that pinpoints her exact level of fancy, enchanting her in spite of her anger at his presence in her secret room. From there, she helps him become the apprentice of Prunesquallor, and the next thing you know Steerpike is pulling every string he can find to build his hold over the whole of Gormenghast--particularly in regards to the uncanny and dull-witted twin sisters of Sepulchrave, Clarice and Cora, who feel entitled to their thrones over Gertrude, who they seem to loathe in particular.
The book, in its way, feels a lot like a class commentary when I sit with it. Steerpike is by no means good, but all of the blue-bloods are so self-absorbed in their eccentric obsessions as to feel like parodies of plush aristocrats. The servant characters, while also alien in their own ways, feel more put-upon and half-mad as maybe a kind of vicarious stress from whom they serve. A major side story revolves around Keda, a woman from the surrounding villages who enters the castle briefly as a nurse to Titus. She leaves shortly after, but we continue to follow her and the tragedies of her life afterward, with both shows us glimpses of the world outside the castle but is also treated with the least amount of dark humor and grotesquery from Peake. The people outside the castle still feel otherworldly, but not nearly as alien as the people inside.
Gormenghast is also beholden to strange, elaborate rituals that must be done to the letter, and this makes the very culture of it stifling to everyone involved. I don't know enough about Peake to guess what he might be parodying here, but it's clearly a parody of something nonetheless. In a way, I wish even more classical fantasy novels would do some of the things this book does, between the genuinely weird characters and the fun being poked agonizingly esoteric ceremony, and then the odd fact that Peake feels both aware and also sincere in his portrayal of all these things and the dramas of their lives. But again, this book is nearly unrecognizable as a fantasy.
Mervyn Peake ultimately wants to wrap you in the atmosphere of this book like a thick shawl, and doesn't mind how much he has to layer on to do it. For example, this is from an early description of Swelter as he preaches drunkenly to his kitchen boys: "His voice came down from the shadows in huge wads of sound, or like the warm, sick notes of some prodigious moldering bell of felt." The whole book is written like this. Peake wants you to roll in what this place feels like, as if drenching you in tar. And, for better or for worse, it's one of the things I love about it, even as it sometimes felt like years before I finished a paragraph of text. Titus Groan is probably more for people who like A Series of Unfortunate Events or Dickens than fans of stuff like Name of the Wind or Wheel of Time.
Titus Groan of the Gormenghast series is technically a fantasy as well, but will inevitably disappoint anyone picking it up for that reason. It lacks pretty much all of the usual genre trappings except for the weirdness of an eccentric alternate culture, designed to be a grotesque caricature at all times. Gormenghast castle is a sprawling, yawning, and ponderous thing of endless towers surrounded by a village that its inhabitants rarely interact with outside of ceremonial events. In true gothic form, the place has a gloomy, labyrinthine personality of its own. Its Earl of Groan, Lord Sepulchrave, has just had a son, dubbed Titus. His wife the Countess Gertrude is the original cat lady, also obsessed with birds, and actually quite intimidating and also sharply competent when not absorbed with her animals, which she is most of the time. Likewise, the eldest daughter Fuchsia lives in her own self-absorbed fantasy world of which she is protective, and so isn't exactly all there herself. None of the characters are particularly attractive, in personality or in looks. The doctor Prunesquallor seems the most grounded and moral of the lot, but even he is prone to sardonic speaking and a habitual irritating laugh that punctuates a lot of his dialog. If the name choices themselves are any indication, the cast might as well be DaVinci's studies of grotesques--sometimes literally, as Peake was also an illustrator, and my edition included the odd character sketch by him.
Then there's Steerpike. The infant Titus actually doesn't have much to in this book, but rather the whole plot is pedaled forward by Steerpike's Machiavellian rise to power. A former kitchen boy abused by the hulking, abhorrent Chef Swelter, he escapes by climbing onto the castle's roof(s) and stumbles into Fuchsia's secret room where she keeps her collection of various things conducive to her private sense of fantasy. She's the first person he truly shows his manipulative chops with, putting on a clown show that pinpoints her exact level of fancy, enchanting her in spite of her anger at his presence in her secret room. From there, she helps him become the apprentice of Prunesquallor, and the next thing you know Steerpike is pulling every string he can find to build his hold over the whole of Gormenghast--particularly in regards to the uncanny and dull-witted twin sisters of Sepulchrave, Clarice and Cora, who feel entitled to their thrones over Gertrude, who they seem to loathe in particular.
The book, in its way, feels a lot like a class commentary when I sit with it. Steerpike is by no means good, but all of the blue-bloods are so self-absorbed in their eccentric obsessions as to feel like parodies of plush aristocrats. The servant characters, while also alien in their own ways, feel more put-upon and half-mad as maybe a kind of vicarious stress from whom they serve. A major side story revolves around Keda, a woman from the surrounding villages who enters the castle briefly as a nurse to Titus. She leaves shortly after, but we continue to follow her and the tragedies of her life afterward, with both shows us glimpses of the world outside the castle but is also treated with the least amount of dark humor and grotesquery from Peake. The people outside the castle still feel otherworldly, but not nearly as alien as the people inside.
Gormenghast is also beholden to strange, elaborate rituals that must be done to the letter, and this makes the very culture of it stifling to everyone involved. I don't know enough about Peake to guess what he might be parodying here, but it's clearly a parody of something nonetheless. In a way, I wish even more classical fantasy novels would do some of the things this book does, between the genuinely weird characters and the fun being poked agonizingly esoteric ceremony, and then the odd fact that Peake feels both aware and also sincere in his portrayal of all these things and the dramas of their lives. But again, this book is nearly unrecognizable as a fantasy.
Mervyn Peake ultimately wants to wrap you in the atmosphere of this book like a thick shawl, and doesn't mind how much he has to layer on to do it. For example, this is from an early description of Swelter as he preaches drunkenly to his kitchen boys: "His voice came down from the shadows in huge wads of sound, or like the warm, sick notes of some prodigious moldering bell of felt." The whole book is written like this. Peake wants you to roll in what this place feels like, as if drenching you in tar. And, for better or for worse, it's one of the things I love about it, even as it sometimes felt like years before I finished a paragraph of text. Titus Groan is probably more for people who like A Series of Unfortunate Events or Dickens than fans of stuff like Name of the Wind or Wheel of Time.