My Weekly Book

Titus Groan and Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake

These are books I read in my teens, and wanted to revisit as an adult. How do you describe the extraordinary world of Gormenghast? I think as the wonderful product of imagination unlimited by scope or scale. This, however, isn’t very helpful for readers seeking information or enlightenment.

Gormenghast is a place and Groan a dynasty. The former is a huge rambling estate with lakes, forests, swamps, caverns, a mountain and a vast, unchartable, decaying castle as big as a country in which a handful of aristocratic protagonists live alongside the army of servants and retainers that support them. Clinging to the walls is a village of untouchables living in filth and abject poverty known as the Mud Dwellers. The Groans are earls, or at least 76 of them have been, at the point at which the series starts. Lord Sepulchrave, the current incumbent, occupies the castle with his family: his abstracted wife, his artless daughter, his unswerving servant - and his infant son, the newly-born Titus, a clean slate and heir to all his peculiar blue eyes survey.

We can imagine that the advent of this male baby must have been an unspeakable relief to every member of the Gormenghast entity. For primogeniture is alive and well here. And Gormenghast’s guiding principle is this: there must be no change. Tradition must be observed unto the last minute of every day, however meaningless its rituals now appear. And it is this observance that has sent Lord Sepulchrave three-quarters mad and made the Countess Gertrude withdraw so far into herself as to be almost incapable of speech. It is this that leaves Fuschia, the daughter without a role (and to my mind one of the most sympathetic of Peake’s characters) trapped in the world of an eight-year-old even when she is past twenty.

Titus’ birth is not the only instance of change that heralds the opening of the first novel. The other is a tiny act of rebellion - small in itself but gargantuan in the world of Gormenghast and in its implications. Steerpike, a 17-year-old scullion, tires of the abuse directed of him by his master Swelter, a nauseating clot of corpulence and spleen that oversees the castle kitchen. He flees. Steerpike’s motto is undoubtedly that you make your own luck; and the good fortune he creates for himself propels him rapidly to the heart of castle life.

The intertwining fates of Titus and Steerpike lead us through the first and second novels and provide the premise for the third.

In the Gormenghast stories we have an extraordinary setting and a cast of vividly-imagined and utterly original characters (who, delightfully, often speak in the most perfect 1930s English idiom, despite their fantastical surroundings). The third remarkable thing is Peake’s prose style, so dense, visual and adjective-laden that you might find it rather strong medicine - or, alternatively, an entirely absorbing and wonderful experience. These three elements combine, in Titus Groan at least, with a tight plot that’s almost worthy of a thriller.

Gormenghast by contrast, entered abruptly after a cliff-hanger propels the reader straight out of the first book and into its pages, seems far more concerned with themes (a possible comparison is with Arthur Ransome’s first two novels - the plot-driven and occasionally suspenseful Swallows and Amazons and the thematic and impressionistic Swallowdale.) I, personally, was alight to know the outcome of the main plot and did not entirely welcome a long diversion into Gormenghast’s educational arrangements and the marital prospects of its headmaster. But the threads are picked up, the story is resolved and, in the closing pages and as Titus Alone begins, the castle faces a crisis the like of which it has never encountered before (at least, as far as tradition can inform us). The title of this third book may leave the reader not entirely unaware as to the precise nature of the catastrophe.

It is a well-used aphorism that fantasy novels generally give us a new perspective on an old problem. In the Gormenghast trilogy this problem is the urge of each and every one of us to rebel against the norms of family and society. It is about the act of becoming a distinct individual, as opposed to merely a member of a caste or clan. In this sense it might be considered almost banal in its outlook and conclusions. After all, this is a topic that has been pretty well-done. But consider that it was written in 1946 - directly after the war, the agent of some of the most seismic social upheavals that European and American society have seen, and the subject gets a little more interesting.

Also very important to consider is that Peake never intended it to remain a trilogy. Titus Alone had to be reconstructed by editors after he became too ill to complete it. And a fragment of his intended next, Titus Awakes, in which the 77th Earl would presumably have had to face the consequences of his actions in the previous volume, was completed. Nevertheless, a trilogy is essentially what we have. As well as one of the towering achievements of post-war literature, and a must-read for every serious student both of the period and of fantasy literature in general.

Some links:

• Official author site
• Wikipedia: Mervyn Peake
• Gormenghast Castle fansite
• Peake Studies: Mervyn Peake FAQ
• Titus Awakes
• SF Reviews: Titus Groan (links to the rest of the trilogy)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 2:30 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge, Reads I recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.