"Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake

An heir, Titus,is born to Lord Supulchrave, the seventy-sixth Earl of Groan, in the castle of Gormenghast, a place in which every day is governed by tradition and ritual. An ambitious, ruthless and clever seventeen-year-old scullion, Steerpike, leaves his place in the kitchen determined to disrupt and destroy so that he can gain power. Despite the title of the book, it is Steerpike who is the protagonist-villain, who encapsualtes “The hatred of the young for the authority vested in age.” (The Un-Earthing of Barquentine)

It is difficult to find parallels for this work. It has been described as Gothic but I think this is on account of the setting (a castle) and the consequent feeling of claustrophobia. Classic Gothic literature involves the present being haunted by the past and in many ways this novel is its inversion: the present, in the shape of Steerpike, is destroying the present-as-shaped-by-the-past. It has been described as fantasy but there is no magic and very little in the way of supernatural happenings. There is a strong feeling of Lewis Carroll about it (among Peake's most critically acclaimed illustrations were those for Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark) and the characters are classic Dickensian grotesques. The creation of such a complete world is reminiscent of science fiction (and Peake's novella about Titus was published together with science fiction stories by William Golding and John Wyndham). 

It is a masterpiece of description. Peake's day job was as an artist and he describes things so that they can be seen. A member of my U3A group who read this book said that Peake often describes a scene in detail and then homes in upon the character in the scene who will carry that part of the story; this is a little like the way a camera sometimes zooms in upon a character in an establishing shot. The descriptions are detailed and rich and wonderful (and they reminded me, again, of Dickens, but they're better). “This is the most painterly form of literature imaginable" although it is true, in the beginning, before the story gets going properly, that the book seems "to move from set tableau to set tableau, more like a series of paintings than like a fluid narrative” (reference here) But I think it is because of these descriptions that Peake convinces us, reading a story about an impossible place, to suspend our disbelief. Anthony Burgess, writing in the introduction to the Penguin edition,  says “It is difficult, in post-war English writing, to get away with big, rhetorical gestures. Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means diffuseness; there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of his descriptions; he is always exact.” It is that precision of description that creates verisimilitude, even while you know that what is being described is unreal. (Kafka achieves the same in a very different fashion, by being utterly matter-of-fact about the madness he is describing.)

Written during the second world war, I imagine that the writer, a talented artist and illustrator with a taste for the grotesque, would have seen how Hitler had come from obscurity to smash traditional Germany; he might have seen the battle between the old and the new reflected in the Spanish Civil War, in the consequences of an overthrown Empire in the China where he grew up, in social changes in England following the First World War, and in the impact of Futurism and Vorticism in art. 

It is followed by the sequels Gormenghast, which is perhaps even better, and Titus Alone, which is rather different (perhaps because it was being written while Peake, still in his forties, was struggling with early onset dementia). A fourth novel, written by Maeve Gilmore, Peake's widow, based on the notes he left, has recently been published.

Selected quotes:

Some of those brilliant descriptions:

• “The Tower of Flints ... patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven.” (The Hall of Bright Carvings)
• “Like a vast spider suspended by a metal chord, a candelabrum presided over the room ... long stalactites of wax lowered their pale spilths drip by drip.” (Tallow and Birdseed)
• “Where the dust was like pollen and lay softly on all things.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “Seven clouds like a group of naked cherubs or sucking-pigs, floated their plump pink bodies across a sea of slate.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “To her right was an enormous crumbling organ. Its pipes were broken and the keyboard shattered. Across its front the labour of a decade of grey spiders had woven their webs into a shawl of lace.” (The Attic)
• “The moon slid inexorably into its zenith, the shadows shrivelling to the feet of all that cast them, and as Rantel approached the hollow at the hem of the Twisted Woods he was treading in a pool of his own midnight.” (Knives in the Moon)
• “His Lordship is dressed in black. His knees are drawn up almost to his chin. His long, fine white hands are curled slightly inwards as they hang over his knees, between which, and his supported chun, the wrists are wedged. But it is the eyes that strike a chill to the centre of those who watch, for they have become circular. The smile which plated across his lips ... is gone forever. His mouth is entirely expressionless.” (Early One Morning)
• “The first descent of the rain ... is falling from they sky in long upright and seemingly motionless lines of rosy silver that stand rigidly upon the ground as though there were a million harp strings strung vertically between the solids of earth and sky.” (A Bloody Cheekbone)
• “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.” (In Preparation for Violence)
• “Rolls of lard-coloured fat filled in the space between the chin and the clavicles.” (Blood at Midnight)

There are also some very funny moments:

• “In the dimness he flung his arms apart so that the buttons of his tunic were torn away, one of them whizzing across the room and stunning a cockroach on the opposite wall.” (Swelter)
• “As this was the first joke she had made for over a year, she tried to smile, but her facial muscles had become, through long neglect, unusable.” (The Room of Roots)
• “Seeing an Earl as an owl on a mantelpiece, and having part of one’s face removed by a cat, both on the same morning, can temporarily undermine the self-control of any man.” (The Twins Again)
• “The navel, that pivot for a draughtsman’s eye, that relic whose potentiality appears to have been appreciated only by the dead Swelter, who saw in it a reliable salt-cellar, when that gentleman decided upon eggs for his breakfast.” (Barquentine and Steerpike)
• “The Doctor showed about as much sign of having a pair of hips as an ell set upon its end, while Irma ... had ... a pair of hips capable of balancing upon their osseous shelves enough bric-a-brac to clutter up a kleptomaniac’s cupboard.” (By Gormenghast Lake)

Other selected quotes:

• “Their sole passion was directed, once their days of love had guttered, on the production of this wooden sculpture” (The Hall of Bright Carvings)
• “The air between them was turgid with contempt and jealousy.” (The Hall of Bright Carvings)
• “He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.” (The Great Kitchen)
• “The attacked the bungs as though unweaned.” (The Great Kitchen)
• “He was lost in a labyrinth of stone corridors, lit here and there by candles sunk in their own wax.” (The Stone Lanes)
• “Even the bed was at an angle, slanting away from the wall and crying out to be pushed back flush against the wallpaper.” (Tallow and Birdseed)
• “To have asked him of his feelings for his hereditary home would have been like asking a man what his feelings were towards his own hand or his own throat.” (Sepulchrave)
• “Her dressing became interrupted between the addition of each garment by dance movements of her own invention.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “She appeared rather to inhabit, than to wear her clothes.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “It was as though she enjoyed the artist telling her something quite fresh and new. Something she had never thought of before.” (The Attic)
• “She [Fuschia] said, dear, that she’d burn down the whole place, burn down Gormenghast when she was the ruler and she’d live on her own, and I said she was wicked, and she said that everyone was - everyone and everything except rivers, clouds, and some rabbits.” (Keda)
• “The Countess never entered it, preferring those parts of the castle where the lights and the shadows were on the move.” (First Blood)
• “The negative dignity of the room threw him out in relief as a positive scarecrow.” (First Blood)
• “I, as part of my work here, deliver the new generation to the old - the sinless to the sinful, ha, ha, ha, the stainless to the tarnished - oh dear me, the white to the black, the healthy to the diseased.” (Assemblage)
• “‘It’s power we want,’ lady Clarice repeated. ... ‘Yes, that’s what we want’, echoed Cora, ‘lots of power. Then we could make people do things’.” (Assemblage)
• “He knelt on the windowsill and then, turning around, slowly raised himself to his feet and stood outside the window, the hollow twilight at his shoulder-blades.” (Means of Escape)
• “He only knew that his throat was parched and beneath his belt a tiger was clawing in his stomach.” (A Body by the Window)
• “He was not the artist. He was the exact imitation of one.” (Soap for Greasepaint)
• “Prunesquallor and his sister both felt a certain delight in making the acquaintance of a young gentleman with brains, however twisted those brains might be.” (A Gift of the Gab)
• “Steerpike’s gallantry had for a moment taken the chill off her heart.” (A Gift of the Gab)
• “His face remained like a mask, but deep down in his stomach he grinned.” (A Gift of the Gab)
• “Gormenghast. The long, notched outline of her home. It was now his background. ... He stood against it, an intruder, imposing himself so vividly, so solidly, against her world, his head overtopping the loftiest of its towers.” (The Grotto)
• “He was holding her; she was in his arms; in his power.” (The Grotto)
• “‘Equality’, said Steerpike, ‘is the thing. It is the only true and central premise from which constructive ideas can radiate freely and be operated without prejudice. Absolute equality of status. Equality of wealth. Equality of power.” (The Sun Goes Down Again)
• “‘There should be no rich, no poor, no strong, no weak,’ said Steerpike, methodically pulling the legs off the stag-beetle, one by one, as he spoke. ‘Equality is the great thing. Equality is everything’.” (The Sun Goes Down Again)
• “But don’t you think it’s wrong if some people have nothing to eat and others have so much they throw most of it away? Don’t you think it’s wrong if some people have to work all their lives for a little money to exist while others never do any work and live in luxury?” (The Sun Goes Down Again)
• “To wear rich and becoming apparel no doubt engenders a sense of well-being in the wearer, but to be draped, as was Sourdust, in a sacrosanct habit of crimson rags is to be a world above such considerations as the price and fit of clothes and to experience a sense of propriety that no wealth could buy.” (The Burning)
• “The long shelves surrounded them, tier upon tier, circumscribing their world with a wall of other worlds imprisoned yet breathing among the network of a million commas, semi-colons, full stops, hyphens and every other sort of printed symbol.” (The Burning)
• “The old man would be complete, if not homogenous. He would not be headless, and his funeral would be no slipshod, bury-as-you-please affair.” (Sourdust is Buried)
• “Why must one try and be respectful to old people when they aren’t considerate?” (Sourdust is Buried)
• “‘I am not your father’, he replied. ... ‘I am the death-owl’.” (Half Light)
• “There are great pearls upon his forehead, and in each pearl is the reflection of a candle flame.” (A Change of Colour)
• “Five claws rip out a crimson wedge from his cheek immediately below the right eye.” (A Bloody Cheekbone)
• “You will be as fit as the most expensive of fiddles.” (A Bloody Cheekbone)
• “What use are books to anyone whose days are like a rook’s nest with every twig a duty?” (The Reveries: Reverie of Gertrude the Countess of Gormenghast)
• “He now moved his bulk across the earth as silently as the passing of a cloud through the dusk.” (Here and There)
• “A few feet above his head a spider scrawled itself across the ceiling.” (Presage)
• “The most disgusting sound - as of some kind of low animal with gastric trouble. Mr Swelter was laughing.” (Blood at Midnight)
• “Something was changing - changing in a world where change was crime.” (Blood at Midnight)
• “You don’t matter. You’re not going to be anything.” (The Earling)
• “What were problems for if not to be solved.” (The Earling)

Wonderful. February 2023; 506 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God