The Gormenghast Trilogy (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone) by Mervyn Peake

I first read part of the Gormenghast when I was a teenager, in the early 1970. Fresh from Tolkien and Eddison, I was looking for more of the kind, and I was thus drawn to what promised to be another epic fantasy. But I ran into something very different, and at the time it was somewhat off putting. At the time I only made it through the first volume, Titus Groan. While fascinated by bits of the story and by some of the images (Lord Groan driven mad by the burning of his library and deciding that he was the death owl particularly struck me), overall I felt a bit let down. This wasn’t The Lord of the Rings or The Worm Ouroborus, which at the time defined fantasy for me. It took me a few years to get around to the second volume, and until now – 30 years or so later – to read the third book.

One thing that lead me back to Gormenghast was knowing that my own tastes have changed over the years. As a teenager, I read primarily for story and plot (and maybe character), but didn’t as much appreciate prose for its own sake, wit and humor (at least not anything subtler than Get Smart novelizations), and quirky characters. I had yet to spend much time with Dickens, who I grew to love in my twenties and thirties. I had yet to learn that sometimes one wants to deliberately slow down one’s reading, to better appreciate the texture of a work. But now, I think, I’ve learned those lessons, and so, still remembering parts of Gormenghast (far better than books I’d read far more recently and liked more than I remembered liking Peake’s work), I decided to re-read the series (or, in the case of the final volume to finally read it).

This time, I found the series – the first two books, at least – to be a marvel. Filled with beautiful prose, ripe with incredible imagery and memorable characters, it truly was a work to be savored. I read slowly, enjoying the sentences, thinking about the characters, appreciating the trip. It’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. Those who think that all prose should be “transparent,” that the models of writing are Hemingway or Heinlein, will not like this. Peake is for fans of Dickens (or, more recently, Mieville) and readers of poetry, who want complex prose that is noticeable for itself, not just for what it says.

The trilogy tells the story of the seventy-seventh Lord of Gormenghast, Titus Groan. Or rather Titus is the common character of the three volumes, and as the trilogy goes on more of it centers on him. But he is only a minor character in the first novel and one of several focal points in the second. The real focus of the first two books is Gormengast itself, the great, monstrously large castle, ruled for centuries by the Groans, a place of ritual where “change” is synonymous with “treason.” It is people by a strange, quirky, sometimes repellent, but occasionally likeable characters (and in fact some characters who start as simply quirky grow in our affection as we move through the novels).

Titus Groan start with the birth of Titus, but that’s not really the pivotal event of the series. Very early on, as Flay, the angular man servant of Lord Sepulchrave, Flay, whose knees click as he moves, enters the domain of his nemesis – Swelter the cook. One of Swelter’s kitchen boys, Steerpike, ambitious and without conscience, sneaks out, following Flay. Flay catches him, and locks him in a room, but Steerpike escapes across the roofs of Gormenghast. Everything that happens, all the dire events in violence that follow, flow either directly or indirectly from this event. It is Steerpike who sets in motion the events that result in the destruction of the library and the deaths of several people. It is Flay’s unease of Steerpike’s escape that causes him in irritation to strike out at Swelter, setting in motion another set of events that lead to violence and death. It is thus Steerpike, not Titus, that is the driving force behind the first two novels. Even Titus’s coming to prominence is a result of his setting himself up in response to and in opposition of Titus.

But although the novels revolve around Steerpike and Titus, there are many other memorable and often engaging or infuriating (or both) characters. Most prominent is Titus’s mother, the Lady Gertrude Groan. Early on, all she thinks of are the birds and the white cats that she loves and cares for. She asks that Titus be taken away from her at his birth and only brought back when he is five. Yet, when crisis strikes, her brain, after years of slumber, awakes, and she becomes one of the most potent forces imaginable, as she leads the search for Steerpike when he is uncovered as a murderer while also directing the castle’s response to a massive flood.

Dr. Prunsquallor starts out as a merely a strange, quirky doctor, but he is one of the characters you grown close to, both because Peake gives you glimpses of this thought but also his actions, whether it’s doing the best for his insufferable and dim sister Irma or his affection for Titus’s sister, Fuchsia (who herself is both the most engaging and most tragic character in the series).

And no one who reads the books can forget Lord Groan’s two sisters – the dim-witted Cora and Clarice. Living alone in a deserted part of the castle, the sulk, convinced that the power they deserve has gone to their sister in law. They are thus easy to manipulate, and Steerpike does so, convincing them to burn Sepulchrave’s library. They eventually go mad, and starve to death when Steerpike locks them away. Their insane ramblings, their way of talking to one another and those around them, are almost hypnotic and certainly aren’t easily forgotten.

Nominally, the first two books are the story of Titus coming of age – from birth, to triumph over Streerpike, to heading out on his own. But as one reads the books, Titus is secondary to Gormenghast itself. The great castle is so real. Peake rivals Tolkien in creating something that is so well imagined, so well described, that it feels like a real world (though of course it’s a world far smaller than Tolkien’s).

The third book of the trilogy – Titus Alone – is a strange beast. It is so different from the first two books in the series that in some ways it’s better to view the series as a duology, followed by a single book. For although it follows soon after the close of Gormenghast – which saw Titus setting off on his own – it is a very different kind of book. The first two books had a sense of realism. Gormenghast was so real, so present, that it grounded the book. As you read the first two books, you see, smell, and feel the world around you. The prose is rich and luscious, and I found myself re-reading paragraphs just to savor the description. Not so the third book. Gone is the realism of Gormenghast, replaced by several very strange locales. Titus, lost, pursued by a pair of men wearing strange helmets, enters a city, though we never get a feel for it, only for a few of its strange inhabitants. Moreover, the timeless nature of Gormenghast is replaced by the twentieth century – with cars, planes, and even flying surveillance devices. It’s Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka and The Prisoner, with touches of other twentieth century novelist thrown in.

The third book is a mildly interesting fantasy in its own right, yet it’s very much of a letdown after the power of the first two books. In the end, the Gormenghast trilogy really stands on the strength of the first two novels, which remain powerful, memorable novels. I normally try to stay away from judging a book based on where I wanted it to go rather than where the author took it, but I can’t help wishing that we’d have spent more time in Gormenghast, with Doctor Prune and the others, rather than following Titus into the strange world beyond its borders.