Peake a visual as well as literary
artist, Titus Groan spreads like
paint across a canvas. Slowly and
deliberately the story creeps across the page, casting a net that either snags
the reader for its mysteriousness of purpose, or leaves them aside, bewildered
as to what others find so attractive about it.
For the connoisseur of fantasy and literature, the detail by detail description
of movement, place, and dialogue can be fascinating, heart-slowing
reading. For others, it can be
foreboding, perhaps even excruciating. The
opening paragraph itself lets the reader know what their ticket gets them:
“Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of
the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous
architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of
those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each
one half over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the
innermost of these hovels laid hold on the inner walls, clamping themselves
thereto like limpets to a rock. These
dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold
that loomed above them. Over their
irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten
buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow
of the Tower of Flints. This tower,
patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the
fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing
throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.” (1)
Titus
Groan
is set in this vision of Gormenghast castle.
Home to the Groan family for seventy-six generations, the story opens
with the birth of its next heir, the eponymous Titus. Anything but typical, the cast of characters
surrounding little Titus are full of quirks and idiosyncrasies. His father, the Earl Sepulchrave, is a grave,
phlegmatic man prone to books and routine.
His mother, the Countess Gertrude, hands the little boy off upon his
birth asking that he not be brought back until after his sixth birthday, her
hundreds of white cats and owl following her out the door. Titus’ older sister Fuchsia lives a secluded
life, the daft but faithful Nanny Slagg her only real companion. And there are others: the nervous laughter of
Dr. Prunesquallor, the shallow minds of the twins Cora and Clarice, and of
course, our antagonist du jour, the
unpredictably athletic, goofily clever, and ambitiously devious, Steerpike.
And it is in character and character
interaction that the majority of delight in Titus
Groan is to be found. Singular to
the point of caricature yet unequivocally human down to their core, each of the
eccentric citizens of Gormenghast speak in a distinct voice and act with
individual demeanor—something Peake obviously took joy in creating. Plot seeming to develop as a result of their
eccentricity, one tiny knot in the woodwork is removed at the beginning, which
leads one character to go to another, who goes to another, and to another, and
before long the whole ship is listing to one side, no one aware of how it came
to be. A thread on the sweater of
Gormenghast’s aristocracy pulled slowly, watching it slowly unravel, the slow
stirring to life of characters and the resulting chaos is a joy to watch—Peake
guiding his characters to the only fate they could have.
But there are deeper levels to Titus Groan. Very much a look at the stagnation of culture
(e.g. the emptiness of ritual and frailty of age-old decadence), what seems a
peculiar sequence of scenes on the surface reveals itself to be something more
when put into context of the larger narrative.
The strongest contrast is seen in the plight of Keda. Titus’ milk nurse until leaving the castle,
the life she returns to in the forest is full to the brim. Possible to be taken as a scene from
Pushkin’s “The Gypsies”, the carvers fighting for her love, the savor of food,
and the salient unpredictability of it all admit to a deeper connection with
what Peake would seem to say life really is, rather than the solemn habits that
Sepulchrave and Sourdust, his Master of Ritual, solemnly carry out. Cementing this idea in place is the fate
which awaits the loss of Sepulchrave’s rituals.
Working directly from this point is
another aspect of the novel: revolutions and their beginnings. Granted the scope is limited (to a group of
eccentric characters, nonetheless), but the undercurrent of story is one of
change: the state of Gormenghast at the beginning is different than the
end—subtly, yet still different. The
seeds of revolution sown in Titus Groan,
it remains for Gormenghast to see
them blossom.
In the end, Titus Groan is a moody, melancholy comedy with an underlying wit
and profundity that cannot be denied.
Style its most prominent feature, Peake wades ponderously into the
story, easing the reader in one word, one letter, one unspoken idea at a
time. Characters slowly blossoming to
life, the eccentric cast would act in a surreal fashion were it not for the
virtues and vices of humanity motivating their actions. A subtle, ingenious plot the result, the
birth of Titus portends more change for Gormenghast castle than could be
expected given the staid circumstances into which he is born. A host of people since taking the cue, it’s
fair to say Tim Burton, Neil Gaiman, Jeff Vandermeer, and any other creator and
artist which employs Gothic surrealism has read the book.
No comments:
Post a Comment