Titus Groan

Finishing Titus Groan, the first volume of the Gormenghast series, made me feel as though I was one of the few people to have scaled a towering, oddly-shaped mountain.

Set in the sprawling, half-ruined Castle Gormenghast, Titus Groan centers on the constrained, almost frozen relations between a declining noble family and their many servants, some of whom strain against the social order with all the energy of Satan in Paradise Lost.

Peake’s work is by turns inspiring and maddening: he would turn a phrase or describe a scene in such an arresting way that I couldn’t imagine how… show more.

Mervyn Peake was a writer, artist, and poet. His masterpiece is the Gormenghast trilogy (Titus Groan; Gormenghast; Titus Alone). Talk about world-building! Good lord, it’s wonderful. 

A friend of mine read them over a summer holiday in blazing hot Greece, and all he could remember about it was the rain and cold and floods and clouds of Gormenghast. Peake was very ill when writing the third book, which is less satisfactory than the earlier volumes. He was too weak to give it the work that he knew it needed. Perhaps not laugh-out-loud humour, but plenty of sly, dark,… show more.

This was the first fantasy novel I ever bought and I was enchanted by the beautiful imagery and wonderful writing. Fresh from studying medieval French stories of love and tragedy and fantastic worlds, it was a joy to find a modern version where imagination combined with danger and complex characters. A gothic fantasy in a decayed and dilapidated castle that dominates all with its crumbling presence. Dark, and menacing, full of secret passages and gloomy attics, a place of dust and danger. I wanted to write a book just like that one day!

I love the vivid characterisation and rich, intricate prose. In the crumbling, stultifying world of Gormenghast castle obscure rituals, unchanged for centuries, are reenacted at times on a daily basis, though no one seems to quite know why. There dwells Lord Sepulchrave, melancholy and mad; the formidable, self-indulgent Lady Gertrude with birds nesting in her hair; their sulky, impulsive daughter, Fuchsia. Then there’s Abathia Swelter, the loathsome chef with a taste for cruelty; his arch-foe, the skeletal Flay. Steerpike, an ambitious, manipulative kitchen boy who escapes his world of drudgery, seeking influence and power in the world of Gormenghast. And… show more.