Reprinted from Green Man Review.
Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books are one of those few works that inhabit a world so fully realized and so powerful that they remain with you long after you put them down. Peake often gets compared to Tolkien, but the main similarity between their most well- known works are that they encompass three books. Beyond that, the world of Gormenghast resembles Kafka more than Middle-Earth. Peake’s is a sprawling epic, nearly a thousand pages long, filled with interesting and grotesque characters, murderous intrigue, and the stuff of nightmares. Mostly, it is the story of Titus Groan, 77th Earl and heir to the throne of Gormenghast, the seemingly endless labyrinthine castle that is his home. To try to summarize these three books, (which were apparently intended as a long cycle, not a trilogy, and take the reader through Titus’ entire life, from birth to death) would be akin to summarizing the plot and characters of The Lord of the Rings, so I will not attempt that here. Instead, my review will offer some insights and observations on this unique and wonderful work of fantasy.
Titus Groan introduces the reader to the castle of Gormenghast and the infant Titus, born as the work begins. From the outset, we know that his will be a lonely life. He is taken to his mother shortly after his birth, but the Lady Groan is uninterested, and instructs his nurse to bring the child back when he is five. And loneliness and solitude are, to say the least, recurring themes in the book. Characters are often seen walking alone down endless corridors, speaking to themselves, inhabiting rooms empty or musty through decades of disuse, pining for some past time when things were whole. The castle is a crumbling behemoth, with endless passageways and rooms long since forgotten. Its inhabitants are slave to bizarre rituals and rites whose origins and meanings have been obscured through the centuries, if they were ever known at all. There are various functionaries, librarians and masters of ritual who perform arcane and strange tasks day after day, presumably because if they stopped, the life of the kingdom, such as it is, would cease.
Into this strange setting comes Steerpike, a youth from the kitchen who wishes to overturn the hierarchy of Gormenghast and become more than a scullion. He escapes the Great Kitchen, and soon takes up with Fuschia, Titus’ sister, in the hopes of using her to aid what he hopes will be an ascent to power. He simultaneously tyrannizes two ancient ladies, Titus’ aunts, identical twins who are so old and forgetful that he easily cajoles them into allowing him to become their manservant. His oily determination imbues the novel and its sequel, and he proves remarkably adept at lying, manipulating, and imposing his will on nearly everyone around him.
Eventually, Steerpike engineers the destruction of the vast Gormenghast library, filled with books so ancient and rare that their end drives the Earl of Groan mad. The fire is intended to lionize Steerpike, who arrives just in time to save most of the people inside, and it does so, but it also kills the librarian Sourdust and turns Steerpike into something monstrous.
The writing in this work is poetic and beautiful, and as a prose stylist Peake is unmatched when compared with other fantasy writers. Consider this very funny passage, describing the drunken debauchery of Mr. Abiatha Swelter, the obese and cruel chef of Gormenghast:
The kitchen had become as silent as a hot tomb. At last, through the silence, a weak gurgling sound began to percolate but whether it was the first verse of the long-awaited poem, none could tell for the chef, like a galleon, lurched in his anchorage. The great ship’s canvas sagged and crumpled and then suddenly an enormousness foundered and sank. There was a sound of something spreading as an area of seven flagstones became hidden from view beneath a catalyptic mass of wine-drenched blubber.
(Titus Groan, 28)
As you can see, there is a lot of humor in these works; aside from the spectacle of the chef there are a great many unfathomable rituals. For example, the Earl performs one in which he ascends and descends the Tower of Flints all day, “leaving on each occasion a glass of wine on a box of wormwood” (Titus Groan, 257). There are ceremonial breakfasts, coming of age parties for the young ‘Earling,’ and various other Byzantine rites that become comical by their sheer number and pointlessness.
At the heart of Titus Groan, though, is the deadly ambition of Steerpike pit against the enormity and grandeur of the crumbling castle. By the end of the book, the former kitchen scrubber’s is poised to rise to power. In Gormenghast, Steerpike ingratiates himself further into the life of the castle. Under the tutelage of Barquentine, the Master of Ritual, he positions himself as the heir to great influence in the castle. He continues his pursuit of Fuschia, and adds more murders to his dossier.
The reader is introduced to the hilarious strangeness of the Professors, who seem to do absolutely nothing, sometimes sleeping before their charges as the young scholars sit and wait for their lessons to be over. Irma Prunesquallor, the sister of Dr. Alfred Prunesquallor, decides to ensnare a husband through a well-devised dinner party, and we get some more insight into the social life of the kingdom.
What is striking about Gormenghast, as it was in Titus Groan, is the way in which the rigid class structure and ritual of the castle overwhelm all of its inhabitants. Irma is middle aged and single not by choice, but because she never thought marriage was a possibility. The Professors, likewise, hardly ever considered anything except their lives of pedantry. Everything is so rote, so ingrained in the daily life of the seemingly dying castle, that no one dares do anything out of the ordinary. The exceptions to this are Steerpike, Titus, and, to a lesser degree, Fuschia, who desperately wishes she could be something else — perhaps an heir, like Titus, or at someone with a bit of freedom. Steerpike is maniacal in his attempts to overthrow the entire order with violence. Titus, however, wants mainly to be a free young man, which is impossible for him. He is the heir to all the dense ritual and ceremony of Gormenghast, and has barely a free moment to enjoy childish games or roam through the countryside, as he so desperately wants to.
His brief sojourns outside the castle are permeated with the wonder and excitement of a young boy just discovering that there is a world beyond his home, and make him want to escape permanently. Titus feels great turmoil within himself, and the claustrophobic confines of Gormenghast are oppressive to him:
He hated the lack of choice: the assumption on the part of those around him that there were two ways of thinking: that his desire for a future of his own making was due to ignorance or to a wilful betrayal of his birthright. (Gormenghast, 670)
This sense of conflict is at the heart of the novel, and one quickly begins to feel great sympathy for Titus, who is too young to really attain the freedom he wants, but old enough to understand that he has to choose his own path. Slowly, he realizes that he wants to be free of castle life, and has no desire to be heir to Gormenghast. A great flood closes the pages of Gormenghast, as if heralding in Titus’ nascent manhood and clearing the castle for good of all its dross.
Titus Alone follows Titus after his “abdication,” as he leaves Gormenghast forever. Things quickly get even stranger than they were in the castle, as Titus, now a young man, floats down a river in a boat to a city that has automobiles, flying machines, and its own deceitfulness and betrayals. The difference now is that Titus is not an Earl, but just one of the crowd. He is taken into custody by a local magistrate, and, since no one has ever heard of Gormenghast, he is accused of being a liar and thrown into prison for a time.
The loneliness and strangeness of the first two books are at work to perhaps an even greater extent in Titus Alone. Here, Titus must fend for himself, and constantly questions his decision to leave home. At least there, he reasons, people knew him — he was somebody. In the world at large, he is no one, and the thought seems more frightening than anything Gormenghast had to offer.
The style of Titus Alone is spare and almost elegiac. Peake here avoids the dense and meticulous description of the previous works for a more imagistic approach. The effect is startling, and nothing like what a reader would expect on the heels of the first two books. We see a young man on a voyage of self-discovery, finding his way in the world without much of a guide. He is befriended by Muzzlehatch, who saves his life, and has his first love affair, but finds that he easily becomes restless, and leaves his new friends quickly. Soon after, he meets a young and arrogant woman who appears to be his equal.
The final scenes of Titus Alone are some of the most chilling in the three books. All along, Titus has been mocked as a liar and fake for his outlandish tales of his home and the strange people he knew there. A spurned lover, Cheeta, re-enacts the nightmares of his youth for a large audience, leaving Titus defenseless, disoriented, and nearly mad. He sees a parade of people from his past, including his dead family members, impersonated in grotesque and cruel ways. This makes Titus unsure of whether his entire life has been a nightmare, and leaves the reader quite unsettled as well.
In the end, Titus continues on his adventures, assured that his life has been real, that Gormenghast and his family existed, if only in his past. The first few pages of Peake’s next work in the planned cycle, entitled Titus Awakes, are included in the Overlook Press edition I read. It was with great regret that I put this book down at their conclusion. If you haven’t read Mervyn Peake and care about fantasy at all, you need to read these books.
Peake’s black and white illustrations are a highlight of the book, and a haunting addition to the work. The Overlook edition also includes several critical articles on Peake and his work that will be of interest after you read the novels. Vintage Press recently released the books again, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Titus Groan.
(Overlook Press, 1995)
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