ŷ������

How to review this weird and wonderful book? The setting, characters and plot etc are extraordinary, but it is the language that is utterly bewitching. The fact Peake was also an artist is evident in the special care with which he describes light (or absence of), skin and textures. Anthony Burgess wrote that it “has the kind of three dimensional solidity which we often find in pictorial artists who take to words�� illustrations would have been supererogatory�� �� even though Peake sketched in the margins as he wrote, and later editions were published with the pictures.


Peake's illustration of Titus going to his tenth birthday masque

Writing in Tatler, novelist Elizabeth Bowen said:

“It is certainly not a novel; it would be found strong meat as a fairy tale�� one of those works of pure, violent, self-sufficient imagination�� poetry flows through his volcanic writing; the lyrical and the monstrous are inter-knotted�� in the arabesque of his prose�� I predict for Titus Goran a smallish but prevent public�� [that] will probably renew itself, and probably enlarge, with each generation.��

Genre

It is usually classed as fantasy, but it is more like historical fiction, with a dash of magical realism. Or is it? This first volume has a profound sense of place (Gormenghast castle is arguably the main character and its inhabitants “could not imagine a world outside it��) but a very vague sense of time. They have got to the 77th earl, but electricity, motor vehicles and even guns are unknown.

Plot

The title relates to the birth of Titus, a male heir to the ancient house of Groan. However, it is really a richly imagined story of an enclosed world, suffocating under the weight of detailed and largely pointless arcane ritual: “If, for instance, his Lordship... had been three inches shorter, the costumes, gestures and even the routes would have differed from those described in the first tome.�� and “It was not certain what significance the ceremony held... but the formality was no less sacred for it being unintelligible��.

It explains how a clever upstart, Steerpike, quickly goes from orphan kitchen hand, to rebel to opportunist to schemer, plotting his rise to power and influence. There is also a sub plot concerning Keda, a woman from the mud huts outside the castle where the skilled Bright Carvers live.

It is always a page-turner though at times the plot is slow because the descriptions are so rich. Peake sometimes meanders along lengthy diversions (e.g. when likening the cracks in plaster to an ancient map, he goes on to imagine journeys across such a landscape) and conjure strange metaphors,�� clean she was... in the sense of a rasher of bacon��! It will certainly improve your vocabulary, though even the unfamiliar words are used so carefully that you can get the gist if you don’t have a dictionary to hand. At other times, Peake conveys a great deal in relatively few words: “Lord Sepulchrave walked with slow strides, his head bowed. Fuchsia mouched. Doctor Prunesquallor minced. The twins propelled themselves forward vacantly. Flay spidered his path. Swelter wallowed his.�� which tells you most of what you need to know about almost all the main characters.

There are macabre episodes (Peake is not afraid to kill off significant characters in nasty ways), but also moments of wonder (the sky pavement), mystery (the death owl) and humour (a comic cat-and-mouse fight in almost total darkness, except for occasional flashes of lightning).

An Artist Writes

Peake’s artistic eye is evident in vividly visual descriptions, especially, skin, masonry and candle wax (“His face was very lined, as though it had been made of brown paper that had been crunched by some savage hand before being hastily smoothed out and spread over the tissues.��). Perhaps that is also why carvings are such a big deal in Gormenghast: the annual competition is explained near the beginning of the novel, rivalries are fierce and the carvers�� skill is the only reason the “dwellers�� are tolerated so near the castle. Yet what value is really placed on their skill when all but the best three carvings are ceremonially burned, and even those winners are stored in a dusty attic, rather than revered?

For a few chapters, the narrative switches to the present tense, for no obvious reason (“A Change of Colour�� to the end of “Here and There��) and Peake is oddly and confusingly inconsistent in how he refers to some people (The Earl of Groan and Lord Sepulchrave are one and the same and his sisters are indeed his sisters, even though they are also referred to as his daughter’s mother’s cousins and his daughter’s cousins).

I love the second volume as well (Gormenghast, reviewed HERE), but be warned that the third (Titus Alone, reviewed HERE), is totally different and harder to appreciate.

Nevertheless, I still think this is one of the best-written books I know and, like all great works, only improves with each rereading.


Quotes

�� “Lord Sepulchrave walked with slow strides, his head bowed. Fuchsia mouched. Doctor Prunesquallor minced. The twins propelled themselves forward vacantly. Flay spidered his path. Swelter wallowed his.��
�� Swelter’s voice is “like the warm, sick notes of some prodigious mouldering bell��.
�� Cracks in the wall “A thousand imaginary journeys might be made along the banks of these rivers of an unexplored world��. (A similar idea in Boy in Darkness, when Titus looks at a mildewed spot on the ceiling.)
�� The Countess’s room was “untidy to the extent of being a shambles. Everything had the appearance of being put aside for the moment.��
�� “His [Sourdust] face was very lined, as though it had been made of brown paper that had been crunched by some savage hand before being hastily smoothed out and spread over the tissues.��
�� The Earl’s life, and to some extent everyone else’s, is governed by detailed and largely pointless arcane ritual. “The second tome was full of blank pages and was entirely symbolic... If, for instance, his Lordship.. had been three inches shorter, the costumes, gestures and even the routes would have differed from those described in the first tome.�� “It was not certain what significance the ceremony held... but the formality was no less sacred for it being unintelligible��.
�� “She [Fuchisa] appeared to inhabit, rather than to wear her clothes.��
�� “as empty as an unremembered heart�� (the “stage�� in Fuchsia’s attic).
�� "Today I saw a great pavement among the clouds made of grey stones, bigger than a meadow. No one goes there. Only a heron. Today I saw a tree growing out of a high wall, and people walking on it far above the ground. Today I saw a poet look out of a narrow window... I saw today... a horse swimming in the top of a tower: I saw a million towers today."
�� The twins�� faces “were quite expressionless, as though they were preliminary layouts for faces and were waiting for sentience to be injected��.
�� An extraordinary metaphor at the end of this one about Irma Prunesquallor: “more the appearance of having been plucked and peeled than of cleanliness, though clean she was... in the sense of a rasher of bacon��!
�� “Treading in a pool of his own midnight��.
�� “We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect.��
�� Burned books are “the corpses of thought��.
�� “lambent darkness�� is a good oxymoron.
�� Lightning is, “a light like razors. It not only showed to the least minutiae the anatomy of masonry, pillars and towers, trees, grass-blades and pebbles, it conjured these things, it constructed them from nothing... then a creation reigned in a blinding and ghastly glory as a torrent of electric fire coursed across the heavens.��
�� “The outpouring of a continent of sky had incarcerated and given a weird hyper-reality of closeness to those who were shielded from all but the sound of the storm.��

All My Peake Reviews

All my Peake/Gormenghast reviews (including biographies/memoirs and books about his art) are on a shelf:
HERE.