Peake starts his masterpiece with what will become his hallmark: a seemingly unending stream of descriptive text. Whether or not you enjoy Titus Groan probably depends entirely on your reaction to this quality of Peake’s writing. Persons, architecture, geography: do a thousand words of delicately chosen physical descriptions thereof hit you like a brick wall, or immerse you in a living, breathing world? I suspect that for some readers it will be the former and others, the latter. But here’s my first warning: if it is too difficult or too unpleasant to read through the first chapter, which finds itself enormously concerned with setting- and mood-building, don’t expect future chapters to become easier. The obsession with the physical, visual, and psychic state of the castle and its inhabitants will not let up, not even in the novel’s last few paragraphs.
There are plenty of other great things to read if that seems like a drag. After all, fiction these days is expected to be a great deal more efficient than this. That is to say, what is to be said is wont to be said with fewer words. Stories open with strong hooks, the plot train rarely makes stops, and most of all the reader must never be bored. Of course, Titus Groan was written in very different times. But though the writing trends may have been different, and in some ways less stringent, for traditionally-published fiction in those days, writers were no less artisans then than they are now. The resulting question: what do all these words accomplish?
It is often written, usually hyperbolically, that a story’s setting is a character in itself: living, breathing, with its own motives and tendencies and even sometimes its own progression. If that is true for Titus Groan, the setting is sort of a half-alive shambling zombie of a thing. And this works very much to the story’s favor. What Peake builds is a cold, hard world, in a state of perpetual decay but whose near-corpse is so expansive and indomitable that there is a sense that it will never complete the process of decomposition.
Castle Gormenghast, the birthright of the title character - who is born in the first chapter and who is no more than a toddler at the book’s end - is of such grand proportion as to invite fantastic interpretation despite the fact that the story has no explicit fantasy elements. And it’s not just the architecture. The mood is produced even moreso by the weight of history that is evident in the social roles of its inhabitants, the disuse of large tracts of the structure, the precise ritual carried down through time immemorial, and the lost knowledge that extends to almost every notable activity.
If the setting is of great importance, the prose itself is no less so. Partially by use of an expansive vocabulary that allows Peake to strike ideas with neat precision, or skirt carefully around their edges as he pleases, there is a sophistication bestowed upon Gormenghast. The careful word choices are accompanied by a good deal of run-on sentences and as many sentence fragments. There are sometimes whole paragraphs composed of the latter. This results in a twisting, winding, dreamlike experience not unlike how I imagine a trip to Gormenghast might feel. This only enhances the sense of place.
Establishing the setting is very important here, because the characters are defined by their relationship to the castle and its traditions. But the characters, too, might be polarizing. They are beautifully- (or horrifically-) drawn caricatures in both physical appearance and psychology. Much of the fun and the intrigue is had from how they bounce off one another. It’s like a bunch of wind-up dolls, each of whom has unique and peculiar behaviors, are thrown into each other’s paths. It’s not easy to predict exactly what they’ll do scene-to-scene, but characters rarely break from routine, except where disrupted by the outsider character. As the story goes on, a handful of characters hint convincingly of greater depth. Hopefully this is expanded upon in the sequels.
Unfortunately, the entire work does feel like so much set preparation for things to come. Characters, places, motives, and lore are all built up. Several characters begin arcs that do not quite come to fruition. There is a continual foreboding of things to come, which is heightened by some serious occurrences, but never quite ripens. If there is anything that feels near concluded at the end of the book, it’s the theme of tradition, and the title character’s role in its endless continuation. Titus Groan, to whom it is spoken:
“From horizon to horizon all is yours, to hold in trust -- animal, vegetable, and mineral, time without end, save for your single death that cannot stem a tide of such illustrious Blood.”
I will say no more than this.
Content warning: violence, suicidal ideation, gaslighting, body negativity in the extreme for a variety of body types and facial features (and paragraphs-long disgusted descriptions thereof).
Plot: 4
Characters: 8
Themes: 10
Prose: 10
Overall score: a library lost to illness
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