The internal workings feel rather Edwardian in a way, conscious of past glory and ignorant of the future. It's not terribly clear what era Peake imagines the novel to be set in. Peake weaves a grand miasma of doom and foreboding over the sterile rituals of the castle, introducing also the villainous Steerpike who seeks to exploit the gaps between the formal rituals and the emotional needs of the ruling family for his own profit.
Titus Groan starts with the birth and ends with the first birthday celebrations of the heir to the grand, tradition-bound castle of Gormenghast every grand fantasy citadel since owes something to Mervyn Peake (thinking, most recently in my reading, of Isse Tower in Cecilia Dart-Thornton's The Ill-Made Mute, but there are many others). "This extravagant epic about a labyrinthine castle populated with conniving Dickensian grotesques is the true fantasy classic of our time."- The Washington Post Book World.NwhyteThe Gormenghast trilogy did well in my 2011 reading poll, so I've got underway I realised that I have in fact read the first two books, so this is my first reread of 2011. " are actual additions to life they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience."- C. "Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. Introductory Essays by Anthony Burgess and Quentin Crispįragment of the unpublished novel, Titus Awakes
Accompanying the text are Peake's own drawings, illustrating the whole assembly of strange and marvelous creatures that inhabit Gormenghast.
In these extraordinary novels, Peake has created a world where all is like a dream-lush, fantastical, and vivid. At the center of it all is the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, who stands to inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that form Gormenghast Castle and its kingdom, unless the conniving Steerpike, who is determined to rise above his menial position and control the House of Groan, has his way. A doomed lord, an emergent hero, and a dazzling array of bizarre creatures inhabit the magical world of the Gormenghast novels which, along with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, reign as one of the undisputed fantasy classics of all time.
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