Titus Groan, is the first of a trilogy collectively known as Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake. I enjoy and am stimulated by attending two science fiction and fantasy book groups in Chester, UK. One of them, TEBS (The Esoteric Bibliophilia Society – a title selected more in jest than arrogance) had selected Titus Groan for its December discussion. I have my doubts about the efficacy, or rather the appropriateness of this choice for a group restricting its tomes to science fiction and fantasy.
A brief synopsis corruptly snagged from Anthony Burgess: As the first novel opens, Titus, heir to Lord Sepulchrave, has just been born: he stands to inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that is Gormenghast Castle. More a small city than a castle. Inside, all events are predetermined by a complex ritual, lost in history, understood only by Sourdust, Lord of the Library. There are tears and strange laughter; fierce births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings; dreams and violence and disenchantment contained within a labyrinth of stone.
My writer instincts muchly liked: page references are for the 1996 paperback edition published by Mandarin Press.
P88 Mrs Slagg wore gloves ‘it was a soft, warm, summers evening but Nanny Slagg felt stronger in her gloves.’ Her heels ‘awakened small echoes.’
Her blood had quietnened.
Steerpike escaped from his high up room imprisoned by Mr Flay, onto the roof (p136) “Craggy canvas, conical towers – barren landscape with Misty Masonry in the pellucid light’
“… he could hear a heart beating. It was not his own.” (153).
(167) old weapons that were as thick with rust as a hedge of winter beech.
(168) built of a hard red sandstone from a quarry that had never since been located.
(168) the last of the daylight surrendered in the west.
Yet in among these literary gems are parody examples of purple prose such as on p333 “Centuries of experience had seen to it that there should be no gap in the steady, intricate stream of immemorial behaviour.” In other words nothing memorable happened for a long time. Haha. And there are many examples of tedious and unnecessary (defined as they don’t move the plot forward) infodumps or writerly Tell such as related to the outside Dwellers on pages 91-2.
However, it is not the Tell nor purple phrasing that makes me think this shouldn’t be in a SFF reading group, it is the basic plot, characters and general voice. That is, this isn’t a fantasy nor science fiction. Don’t get me wrong, I love Gormenghast and its colourful characters but it is basically a well-told murder story (not even a mystery) involving an eccentric, dysfunctional, aristocratic family tinged with madness set in middle Europe in an undefinable period that could be late middle ages or the 1950s. I’ve met people just like and madder than any of the characters in Titus Groan, after all I was brought up in Gloucestershire and frequented Berkeley and Sudeley castles and various stately homes retaining their families and ‘servants’.
In many ways the book is a metaphor of the class system and the virus within if of Steerpike representing the upstart working class overthrowing the ruling class. He was a downtrodden kitchen boy, intelligent, imaginative and resenting the hierarchical archaic system so much he inveigles his way into the weaker minds of the twins and others, to gain power and murder those whose existence could thwart him. The only sop I’d give to those saying it is a fantasy is the voice of the narrative and landscape. Not that such landscapes don’t exist. My goodness, I have walked on many rambling stone and slate rooftops, as Steerpike does. In the early 1990s I took a post as an I.T. Advisory Teacher for the Cheshire Micro Unit. As their Geography (and, ironically by default, their Science) specialist, I was responsible for loaning the Dartcom Weather Satellite system to both primary and secondary schools. I needed access to more rooftops than anyone else in the advisory team. Several times a school caretaker would take me up a lift to the roof but instead of walking out with me, carrying the one-metre-diameter dish and equipment, he’d stay at the door and say, “Watch out for the soft spots!”
Gormenghast reminded me of the rooftop of the Conway Centre (renamed Nelson Centre because Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson lived there) on Anglesey. The staff had difficulty getting me plus dish up stuck doors, and jammed rubbish-filled stairways to the roof. Up there we found roofscape just like the one Steerpike scrambled over. Funny because we discovered the remains of barbeques complete with discarded beer and coke cans. Teenagers (the centre is used as a residential centre for Cheshire schools) had climbed up the ivy on the stone walls to reach the roof!
So yes, a marvellous novel – and I enjoyed the BBC film of it too, even with the many differences from the book such as the wet nurse filmed as being pregnant in the film when in the book she’d already suffered a stillbirth, but NOT a fantasy. What do you think?
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Nelder News
We are still in December 2013 and so within the period when Kindle owners can download ARIA: Left Luggage for free for the five days from December 26th. Kindle Prime customers can already borrow it for free within three months from December 1st.
For US customers http://amzn.to/11rseH3
Also free to borrow for UK Amazon Prime here http://amzn.to/1gn3iHI
Also anyone who has a print copy of ARIA purchased from Amazon can buy the Kindle version for half-price through the Kindle Matchbook program.
While we are on Kindles – and this applies to those using the Kindle app on tablets, and Kindle for PC – my first novel, Escaping Reality, a humorous thriller is almost free – http://www.geoffnelder.com/ERinfo.htm for details of the plot and links to buy.
Also Hot AIR is at http://www.geoffnelder.com/hotair.htm It won silver and gold awards and is a thriller featuring a feisty redhead, set in the Mediterranean region.
Seasonal felicitations to all readers.
This story does not and could not take place in the real world. And I don’t think Peake thought it did. The second book makes its strange universe even clearer. This is fantasy … perhaps odd, vaguely surreal fantasy, obsessive in its dream-like details?
Fair point although if you’re right and it really is fantasy then I’ve lived in a fantasy world in my teens. I admit to it being somewhat surreal for most people who haven’t met eccentrics like those characters. But where is any magic, the characters, plot nuances, settings that can’t be found in the real world? There is none. It’s as if Peake collected the oddest events of his own cloistered youth as he lived near such a walled place like Gormenghast and populated it with my family! Hah.
Is any social commentary really intended? It strikes me as more of an affectionate poking of fun at a landed gentry that were rapidly becoming exhibits in a zoo rather than anything more socially significant.
I like your ‘exhibits in a zoo’ interpretation, which in itself is a ‘social commentary’ is it not? There’s no argument from me that it is a lovely novel.
Well it’s always problematic when one places works of art into categories: as soon as an artwork been allocated a category, aspects of it that don’t conform start to appear. Having said that, I don’t think that it’s entirely off-kilter to think of Titus Groan as being a fantasy novel. The third part of the trilogy, Titus Alone, includes certain “futuristic” elements – including a death ray, and strange floating drone-like orbs that seem to be spying on the characters.
Yes, I agree on the difficulty of categorisation and perhaps the undesirability of doing that. I love Titus Groan and it conveys a feeling of the surreal. Could be that my upbringing in Gloucestershire was also surreal and that’s why the book isn’t as fantasy for me as for others.
My own Escaping Reality novel suffered from editors seeking a category for it. It is a humorous thriller but that doesn’t exist in libraries, bookshops and publishers’ minds even though Comic Crime does.