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Titus Groan and Gormenghast are two of my ten favourite books (reviewed on my Favourites shelf), but despite some wonderful language, I struggled with this one, intriguing as it is. My first reading was not enjoyable � it was so far from what I was familiar with and what I expected. Subsequent readings have endeared it to me.


Peake's illustration of Muzzlehatch

Plot

In this, Titus, seventy-seventh earl of Gormenghast is 22 and wandering unknown lands. He is invariably being rescued, nursed or running away, especially by/from Muzzlehatch and Juno, though I’m never convinced as to why they go to such lengths for him. It’s all rather repetitive, especially when other characters start running away too! And then there’s Cheeta, a counterpoint to Juno, who also goes to extraordinary lengths, but for nastier motives.

Where and When?

This story is more dream-like than the earlier volumes: weird, disjointed, implausible, e.g. people at a party initially looking like animals, Muzzlehatch’s extraordinary driving technique (lying on his side), watching and being watched (though the last of those applies just as much to the other books). There are fewer recurring characters (and none from the earlier books, save Titus and Gormenghast).

It’s a totally different milieu and style (written when Parkinson's disease was exerting its toll on Peake). The other two have a wonderfully vivid sense of place (even though we don’t know where it is), but are intriguingly vague about the time period; this book is the other way round. It is explicitly in modern times, as cars and aeroplanes are mentioned, though there is still a distinct old world feel to it (including a Dickensian underclass), which sits oddly with futuristic floating electronic spying devices and death rays. Clearly, this is meant to reflect Titus' situation: adrift, without papers, in a strange country, where no one has ever heard of Gormenghast. In fact it’s so effective that even though this world is more akin to ours, after two rich volumes set in Gormenghast, the reader is almost as disorientated by this new world as Titus. Perhaps it echoe’s Peake’s bewilderment moving from China to England in his formative years. Poor Titus mislays his single flint from Gormenghast, but eventually he realises that doesn’t matter because “he carried his Gormenghast within him�.

What?

It is a strange hybrid: Dickensian characters living Under-River; a socialite’s party more like Wodehouse, Wilde or Waugh ("What is the point of being married if one always bumps into one's wife?"); a comic court scene more like Alice in Wonderland or Wind in the Willows (though the court is a little like Gormenghast: all symbol and procedure), and a few, brief and unexpected entries for the literary bad sex award ("his cock trembled like a harp string"). Overall, it is perhaps most like dystopian sci fi: a bemused outsider is treated as a mad and bad interloper by all-seeing, all-knowing authorities and where a rough underclass survives literally underneath the main cities, which makes me wonder if I would enjoy it more as a standalone book with no references to Gormenghast or the Groans.

Each time I read it, I am more baffled than the last.

Despite that, there are still glimpses of Peake's inimitable use of language: “merest wisp of a man... his presence was a kind of subtraction. He was nondescript to the point of embarrassment�; “his responses to her magnetism grew vaguer... he longed to be alone again... alone to wander listless through the sunbeams�; “head after head in long lines, thick and multitudinous and cohesive as grains of honey-coloured sugar, each grain a face... a delirium of heads: an endless profligacy.�, and an extraordinary simile “I don’t like this place one little bit. My thighs are as wet as turbots.�!

Quotes

� “The very essence of his vocation was ‘removedness�... He was a symbol. He was the law�. (Magistrate)
� “sham nobility of his countenance� (Old Crime)
� “a light to strangle infants by�
� The “merest wisp of a man... his presence was a kind of subtraction. He was nondescript to the point of embarrassment�. (Scientist)
� “a man of the wilds. Of the wilds within himself and the wilds without; there was no beggar alive who could look so ragged and yet... so like a king� (Muzzlehatch)
� “Within a span of Titus� foot, a beetle minute and heraldic, reflected the moonbeams from its glossy back.�
� “What lights had begun to appear were sucked in by the quenching effect of the darkness.�
� “A flight of sunbeams, traversing the warm, dark air, forced a pool of light on the pillow.�
� “The sun sank with a sob and darkness waded in�
� “What light there was seeped into the great glass buildings as though ashamed.�
� “The old and the worn, who evolved out of the shades like beings spun from darkness.�
� “his responses to her magnetism grew vaguer... he longed to be alone again... alone to wander listless through the sunbeams.�
� “that he abhorred her brain seemed almost to add to his lust for her body�
� “He was no longer entangled in a maze of moods.� (Titus)
� “Head after head in long lines, thick and multitudinous and cohesive as grains of honey-coloured sugar, each grain a face... a delirium of heads: an endless profligacy.�
� “I don’t like this place one little bit. My thighs are as wet as turbots.�!
� “a loquacious river�.
� A floating spy cam is a “petty snooper, prying on man and child, sucking information as a bat sucks blood.�
� “a voice of curds and whey�
� Brief but unexpected sexual references ("scrotum tightening", "his cock trembled like a harp string") and when he first regains consciousness and sees Cheeta, his greeting is "let me suck on your breasts, like little apples, and play upon your nipples with my tongue"
� Cormorant fishing � as in China!
� “they were riding on the wings of a cliché�

All My Peake Reviews

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