The Gormenghast Novels (Titus Groan / Gormenghast / Titus Alone)

I have been reading some of the more negative reviews of these books and decided it was time to update my remarks. Let me put it this way: Gormenghast, (like the Magic Theater in Hesse's STEPPENWOLF) is NOT for everybody. It is, indeed, just as great as others (including myself) have said. But! If you're a big fan of action--you won't find that here. If your particular bane is a lot of descriptive passages---flee these books as you would the Bird Flu. HOWEVER: If you're in the mood for a slower read that inundates you with the wonderful power of the English language---then these books are for YOU!!! In THAT sense, this trilogy is perfect. This is the way the Masters USED to do it. Peake uses English the way Virgil used Latin...in other words, he had the vocabulary DOWN, man, and he shows it and there are a lot of loverly sounding (and emotionally evocative) words that we rarely encounter in the works of more modern writers that are, nevertheless, part of our heritage...and you will find a great many of THOSE here. But, as I say, it isn't for everybody. It's for madmen only.Titus Groan (Gormenghast Trilogy)

I have a bad habit in reading fiction: I tend to skim over the descriptive passages and go straight to the conversations, since that's where most of the action is. Well, if I did that with this series, I'd finish it inside of an hour (all 900 pages worth) and have no idea of what happened. I end up having to read through the descriptive passages, which I tend to do over-quickly, then find I missed something and have to go back to find that some character was left behind or they're now in a totally different part of the castle. So I had some difficulties with Peake's writing style.Someone said that Peake writes like a painter, and I think that's true. There's very little motion in his writing but rather a lot of imagery, and that is wonderfully vivid. Imagine walking into Gormenghast Castle. Imagine every footfall echoing down the long corridors and the stones creaking beneath your feet. Beside you are walls of worn and chiseled stone, next to you a dusty table. Light shines through a barred window high above, illuminating the dusty table. Imagine all this described in exquisite detail, so that you can picture it confidently in your mind's eye in every particular. That's the way Peake writes, and all you've done is to take a couple of steps. He'll describe your next steps the same way.So these books are magnificent if you have the patience for them. Gormenghast is as alive as any character in all its enormity, and the human characters are drawn with equal vividness: the mournful Earl, dragged day after day through all the rituals required of him; the flighty, imaginative, immature daughter Fuchsia, living all but alone in her attic; the loyal servant Flay, banished from the castle but still loyal to the family; and the evil Sternpike, who in his ambition will devastate the rituals and the stasis that all the others who live in Gormenghast hold dear.What plot there is is "vaster than empires and more slow." A son, Titus, is born, who as he grows older holds ever less truck with going through all the many rituals and runs away at every opportunity. Meanwhile, Sternpike takes every chance to ingratiate himself with someone with more power and to eliminate those who stand in his way.Calling it a trilogy is something of a misnomer. The first two books, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, form an interconnected pair, following Sternpike's ambition and Titus's rebellion to a thundering climax. Titus Alone takes a dramatically different tack, with Titus running away to a not-quite-modern city. Instead of the plodding, ornate pace of the first two books, we get a kaleidoscopic, almost hallucinogenic choppiness as he copes with the complexity and pace of city life and the characters he deals with there. (The PBS dramatization, recently aired, covers only the first two books.)And despite being classed as a fantasy, there is scarcely anything in the way of fantastic elements here: no witches, gnomes, or fairies, just a great castle with some very strange, intriguing

We are swept along from scene to scene better than the best cinematographer could imagine. Each room of the huge castle is painted in all its beauty or horror, each dusty corridor is as real as can be imagined. Peake's gift for words creates not just images, but we follow the thoughts of his characters and feel loathesome or melancholy or exuberant in all the textures that Steerpike and Sepulchrave and Fuschia do. These are some of the strangest books I have read. They are heavier and darker than Tolkien's works, against which they are often compared. They are finely focused to the smallest details on the castle, and they have a scope that is both compressed and alarmingly huge.There is a sense of immersion into the world of Gormanghast that is not present in any other book I have experienced. I could almost feel the heaviness of the air on the day Titus was born, and from then on the books drowned me and exalted me and left me breathless from one moment to the next.It is obviously difficult to describe the way one feels for reading Gormenghast. The best that can be said is that Peake has created literature of the highest order. He may even have shattered every standard of literature with his strange creation. Whatever else I know of Gormenghast, I know it belongs on my bookshelf.

For sheer, sustained, imaginative power; an unfailing attention to character detail (Dickens' caricatures had none of this realism); a brooding, dark humour that goes deeper than any other work I can think of against a backdrop of unimaginably stifling rigidity and routine, Gormenghast has not been bettered by anyone in any genre. Full-stop. Titus Groan acts almost as an appetizer for the grandeur of the second in the trilogy. The immensity of the crumbling castle, it's labyrinthine corridors, rooms and even roofs is conveyed by Mervyn Peake with such believability that it's image never leaves you, even years after it's read. Yet it is the goings-on within it's grey walls that leave the greatest impression. I can still see the scheming Steerpike, the sour Fuschia, Swelter the cook, the Prunesquallors and Titus 77th Earl of Groan as clearly as if I'd just met them. One can almost feel the stifling grip the castle holds over Titus as he struggles to break free of the asphyxiating tradition of his home. To even try to convey what this trilogy is about would be trite and pointless. The odd world of Gormenghast has to be experienced. Read them and be changed.