Titus Groan (review)
Title: Titus Groan Author: Mervyn Peake
One of the strangest & most beautiful books I have ever read.
The writing is stunning, there are sentences in here that lit up neurons I didn't know I had. The narration whirls between tiny details and grand vistas in a way that is deliberate and tightly controlled and leaves behind a lasting impression. The language itself is sonorous and rich with beautiful words like 'lambent' or 'abactinal'. Above all, Peake has range, able to gracefully slide between the grotesque & absurdly funny to the tragic & profound and back.
I couldn't resist including some of my favorite passages:
The door knob moved and then the door began to open and Flay’s physical opposite began to appear around the opening. For some time, so it seemed to Flay, taut areas of cloth evolved in a great arc and then at last above them a head around the panels and the eyes embedded in that head concentrated their gaze upon Mr Flay.
It did not look as though such a bony face as his could give normal utterance, but rather that instead of sounds, something more brittle, more ancient, something dryer would emerge, something perhaps more in the nature of a splinter or fragment of stone.
The Countess began to climb, and although the sound of the wooden stubs being broken on either side of the pole accompanied her, yet her progress towards the window held a prodigious inevitability in every step she took and in every heave of her body. Like something far larger than life, her dark dress shot with the red of the fire, she ploughed her way upwards to the window. There was no one on the other side to help her, for Steerpike was in the library, and yet for all the contortions of her great frame, for all the ungainliness of her egress, a slow dignity pervaded her which gave even to the penultimate view—that of her rear disappearing hugely into the night—a feeling rather of the awesome than the ludicrous.
This is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or of a woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.
The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast. Born as a plunger into the deeps he is at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every coloured sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean’s faery floor, one hand clasped to a bedded whale’s rib, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. He is in love.
The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry upon his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes’ handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in love.
The rich soil crumbles through the yeoman’s fingers. As the pearl diver murmurs, ‘I am home’ as he moves dimly in strange water-lights, and as the painter mutters, ‘I am me’ on his lone raft of floorboards, so the slow landsman on his acre’d marl—says with dark Fuchsia on her twisting staircase, ‘I am home.’
The book is incredibly funny, one of the rare cases where I laughed aloud more than once reading it. It's an extremely dry humor, I can't quite think of the right comparison atm.
‘Name?’ said Mr Flay. ‘My name?’ asked Steerpike. ‘Your name, yes, your name. I know what my name is.’ Mr Flay put a knuckly hand on the banisters preparatory to mounting the stairs again, but waited, frowning over his shoulder, for the reply. ‘Steerpike sir,’ said the boy. ‘Queerpike, eh? eh?’ said Flay. ‘No, Steerpike.’ ‘What?’ ‘Steerpike. Steerpike.’ ‘What for?’ said Flay. ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘What for, eh? Two Squeertikes, two of you. Twice over. What for? One’s enough for a Swelter’s boy.’ The youth felt it would be useless to clear up the problem of his name.
The characters are classic British grotesques with exaggerated physical features, batty psyches, and ridiculous verbal tics. But as the book progresses they are given lots of humanity. Dr. Prunesquallor comes off as a giggling sycophantic dandy with an enormous, fake, 'dental' grin, but he's the only one to not panic during the library fire. Flay is crooked, bitter, and senselessly devoted to ritual, but end's up being the hero of the climax & achieves some kind of redemptive hermit status at the end. Nannie Slagg is weepy & self-pitying but the only one to really show Fuschia & Titus maternal affection. And so on. Like the best humorists, Peake perfectly balances ridicule and pathos for his cast of broken & twisted characters.
I don't really understand the plot -- I could recount the events of the book in approximately the order they happened, but in many cases their significance is lost on me. I expect some will be cleared up in the sequel(s) but also that a lot was meant to be mysterious; in that sense, Peake reminds me of another mid-century British eccentric, Robert Aickman, insofar as there seems to be an inscrutable unconscious logic that only teases at the surface of events.
Drear ritual turned its wheel. The ferment of the heart, within these walls, was mocked by every length of sleeping shadow. The passions, no greater than candle flames, flickered in Time’s yawn, for Gormenghast, huge and adumbrate, out-crumbles all.