Titus Groan by Mervyn PeakeMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was a fascinating book to read during the build-up to the British Royal Wedding. Whatever our opinion of the royal family, during all the wedding hullaballoo we couldn't help pondering the tradition of the monarchy and its role in British life. No one can deny it's a long and significant tradition.
In Titus Groan, we meet the inhabitants of Gormenghast on the day of the birth of the heir to the throne, Titus, who will one day become the seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast.
Titus's father is morose, buried in books and in the daily rituals required of him as Earl. His mother is slightly kooky and spends her days talking to birds and cats. The kingdom is crumbling and power is shifting in a most fascinating way.
Throughout the book, characters are bound by tradition and ritual, actions dictated by centuries of precedent. Actions still weighted with importance, though their meanings have long been lost. They seem meaningless, rituals for ritual's sake.
Society in Gormenghast is highly regulated, segregated and hierarchical, meant to maintain itself unchanging for perpetuity.
Of course, this will prove impossible. Forces of entropy and decay are at work, and people with feeble minds are easily manipulated by those with slightly more brain power at their disposal.
In the introduction, Anthony Burgess not to read this book as just a catalogue of eccentrics. However, it's just this quality of the writing that appealed to me. Peake's storytelling stands out because of the bizarreness of its setting and the eccentricity of its characters. The writing follows suit and allows for some very unusual descriptions.
Peake is best when describing people. Just the names are beyond belief: Prunesquallor, Sourdust, Flay, Fuchsia. Here are a few character introductions I just love:
His fish eyes swam all round his glasses before finishing at the top, where they gave him an expression of fantastic martyrdom. (59)
Their faces, identical to the point of indecency, were quite expressionless, as though they were the preliminary lay-outs for faces and were waiting for sentience to be injected. (109)
It seemed the features had been forced to stake their claims, and it appeared that they had done so in a great hurry... The nose had evidently been the first upon the scene and had spread itself down the entire length... and spreading on both sides with a ruthless disregard for the eyes and mouth which found precarious purchase. (139)
The next best thing is the place: the crumbling castle, the vast miles of rooftops, the dreary mountains. Peake has a marvelous way of saturating the landscape with human emotion, so it seems the natural world reflects the state of the people in it. In Gormenghast, that state is often a horrible sickness overlaid with the stink of decay.
Summer was on the roofs of Gormenghast. It lay inert, like a sick thing. Its limbs spread. It took the shape of what it smothered. The masonry sweated and was horribly silent. The chestnuts whitened with dust and hung their myriads of great hands with every wrist broken. (413)
I can't forget the stone sky-field that Steerpike stumbles across in his grand escape across the barren expanse of rooftops, and spends a cold night on. For the rest of the novel, I wanted him to go back there, for something to happen there. It never did.
I finished the book with a thousand questions. What are the death owls and why do they live in the Tower of Flints? What is the stone sky-field and what will happen there, as surely something must?
What will come of the suspicions that are beginning to grow in Gertrude's, Fuchsia's and the doctor's minds? Is Fuchsia smarter than she seems?
And what does this world tell us about the role of rulers, of tradition, of dusty antiquities?
Titus starts early bucking tradition. At his Earling ceremony (he's still only one year old) he refuses to hold the sacred objects and instead throws them into the lake. Perhaps this is indicative of his reign to come.
Strangely enough, the most 'normal' character in the book, Keda, Titus's wet-nurse, held no interest for me. I found nothing to keep me interested in her story and just wanted her chapters to end quickly. Fortunately, most of the chapters were very short so I could quickly return to a more intriguing corner of Gormenghast.
I look forward to the next two books in the Gormenghast series.
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