The brilliant first novel in the legendary gothic fantasy trilogyAs 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 stand for Gormenghast 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 … tears and strange laughter; fierce births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings; dreams and violence and disenchantment contained within a labyrinth of stone.
As the ruling family grows, deep in the cavernous kitchens the ambitious scullery boy Steerpike plots his ascent, determined to subvert the archaic order and bring revolution to the ancient stasis of Gormenghast.
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Titus Groan is another one of my favorite books and it, along with The Worm Ouroboros, had a big influence on me while writing the Inheritance Cycle. The prose is incredible—it’s the ultimate gothic fantasy. And it’s so rich, it’s actually a little bit hard to read in one sitting; it’s better taken in small chunks.
Mervyn Peake, like so many authors who survived and endured the World Wars—World War One particularly—had a sense of the grotesque and the grotesquely beautiful that is hard to find. For anyone who’s looking for something that captures those elements, I would recommend this series. You’re not going to find anything like this among any other modern day writers. The closest would be perhaps China Miéville, but even he does very different things than Mervyn Peake.
T;LDR: Grotesque, bizarre, with dense prose filled with descriptions, Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake is hailed a fantastic work of gothic fantasy literature. And it is, once you get into the rhythm of the words on the page.u2060u2060
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u2060u2060Some people will find this book incredibly hard to read or boring or both. And I understand why that would be the case. The sentences are densely constructed; they twist and bend as much as the Gormenghast Castle does – and that may be the point. u2060u2060
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I found it fascinating, revolting, horrifying, and so bizarre as to be hard to describe. The characters almost rival the setting…almost. The story line is slow, with side plots for secondary characters, and it seems to be building to a larger crescendo than is in this current volume (it is a four-volume series). u2060u2060
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And yet, most of the characters grow and change. Their perspectives altered from the day Titus is born – the first part of the book – to the day he is two years old – the last part of the book.u2060u2060
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What I Liked & Liked Lessu2060u2060
I liked this book. It was tricky to read, required a fully functioning brain and the right attention span. It took me longer than usual to read it as well due to its sentence structure. u2060u2060
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It is an atmospheric book that is more about the picture Mervyn Peake painted than the characters within it, but then he was a visual artist, first and foremost. That comes across in the first sentence all the way to the last. u2060u2060
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I can’t say what I disliked here because I can’t pull it apart from the narrative and prose. I did find Keda’s chapters a bit boring…I could’ve skipped those and been perfectly happy, so there is something I disliked.u2060u2060
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To Sum Up (Too Late!)u2060u2060
Overall, this is a gothic fantasy novel without any major fantasy elements. It features fanciful characters, a monstrosity of a castle, and villain you definitely won’t like (which is a good thing).u2060u2060
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Would I recommend this book? Yes, but only if you like reading Russian novels, the sort where you have to chew through the sentences to find the meaning. Or other very complicated and dense prose.u2060u2060
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I liked it. I may even read book two in a bit.
I first read this book in one week. The castle of Gormenghast is an old and very large building, very much a world on its own, inhabited by eccentric characters. If you have never read this book, do so now.
I remember the Gormenghast trilogy was on everyone’s reading list when I was yet young. That was at about the same time that every aspiring guitar player was learning The House of the Rising Sun. Being perverse, I neither read the one nor learned the other, until just recently. Well, I’ve read the first in the trilogy: Titus Groan, and I can now play The House of the Rising Sun, but haven’t yet memorized the chords!
Mervyn Peake had an extraordinary imagination! His wildly improbable characters in their bizarre setting are utterly compelling, albeit he wrote in an earlier time, before ‘econonomical writing’ was so highly prized and universally expected. His is florid and excursive and, accustomed as we are to spare, unadorned writing, it takes a little getting used to but, get used to it I did, and quite readily. I hesitated to recommend Titus Groan to my wife, who dislikes ‘wordiness’, but she read and thoroughly enjoyed the book.
I highly recommend the book. A change is as good as a rest, and Titus Groan will take you somewhere you’ve never been, introduce you to the strangest characters, living in a world you could not have imagined.