Nevertheless, he builds relationships with various people, including the larger than life, rudder-nosed, free-spirited Muzzlehatch, the beautiful, ample, and kind Juno, his three beggar bodyguards from the Under-River (into which the failures of the world descend), and the exquisite spoiled rich girl Cheeta, whose father is a scientist who has built a factory tower with identical faces in the windows and sounds like the smell of death. Forthright and self-centered, Titus moves through the modern world like an unstable Candide, not wanting to become tied down to places, friends, or lovers. Titus Alone is a strange novel! Picaresque, allegorical, science fictional, and dream-like, it concerns Titus’ struggle to come to terms with Gormenghast, with his desertion and memories of it, and with his tenuous hold on its reality. After his birth in the vast, decaying castle in Titus Groan (1946), the first novel in Mervyn Peake’s trilogy, and after his desertion of it in Gormenghast (1950), the second novel, in Titus Alone (1959/1992) young Titus finds himself lost in a modern world of cities, cars, airplanes, factories, concentration camps, detectives, and even sentient spy globes (and maybe even clones), ever pursued by mysterious identical twin men in tall helmets. Is Gormenghast only the delusion of a “dotty” young man? It appears in no atlas and belongs to a past age of lineage, lords, and castles. Those who explore Gormenghast castle will be richly rewarded.Titus Groan and Gormenghast in the Modern World This true classic is a feast of words unlike anything else in the world of fantasy. Unforgettable characters with names like Steerpike and Prunesquallor make their way through an architecturally stifling world, with lots of dark corners around to dampen any whimsy that might arise. Peake has been compared to Dickens, Tolkien, and Peacock, but Titus Groan is truly unique. On every day of the year from three hours before daybreak until about eleven o'clock, when the scaffolding and ladders became a hindrance to the cooks, the Grey Scrubbers fulfilled their hereditary calling. Peake's command of language and unique style set the tone and shape of an intricate, slow-moving world of ritual and stasis: The walls of the vast room which were streaming with calid moisture, were built with gray slabs of stone and were the personal concern of a company of eighteen men known as the 'Grey Scrubbers'.
The Gormenghast royal family, the castle's decidedly eccentric staff, and the peasant artisans living around the dreary, crumbling structure make up the cast of characters in this engrossing story. Mervyn Peake's gothic masterpiece, the Gormenghast trilogy, begins with the superlative Titus Groan, a darkly humorous, stunningly complex tale of the first two years in the life of the heir to an ancient, rambling castle.
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