Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Novels, an Overview

Note: The following review was originally published in 2012 at a blog of mine which I maintained while living in Japan. I’ve left the text intact for now; I may go back and revise it eventually.

Recently I completed Titus Alone, the third book in what is often called the Gormenghast Trilogy, although “trilogy” is not really accurate. The first two books in the series are Titus Groan and Gormenghast. In addition to these three main works, written and published by Mervyn Peake at roughly the same time as J.R.R. Tolkien was publishing his much more famous fantasy trilogy, Peake wrote a novella set in the Gormenghast universe entitled Boy in Darkness, which I have not read. There is also a fourth book in the series, Titus Awakes, which was based on Peake’s notes and written by his wife, Maeve Gilmore, after he died; this book was published just last year, after the manuscript was discovered in an attic, and once again I have not read it. There are indications in Peake’s notes that he intended to write at least five Gormenghast books, with the fifth being tentatively titled Gormenghast Revisited.

I have decided to write a review of the Gormenghast series because it has affected me more profoundly than anything I have read since, oh, early adolescence, I’d say. As a writer, I found the experience of reading the books both instructive and inspiring.

What are they about? This question, when asked of books in general, is so often answered with a plot summary, which is so often an inadequate answer. In the case of the Gormenghast series a plot summary is beyond inadequate. Moreover, I can’t answer the question with a description of a particular character, because Titus, the nominal protagonist, hardly features in the first book at all, and anyway the characters are merely tesserae in a much larger mosaic. Some people like to say that the Gormenghast books are about a place, and there is truth in that. But when I hear that said about a fantasy book, I tend to think: oh great, worldbuilding. Gormenghast is about a place, but not at all in the sense that, say, The Lord of the Rings is about Middle-earth.*

Mervyn Peake works on a smaller scale than Tolkien: Gormenghast is not a world, but a castle. The first book opens as the titular Titus Groan, destined to become the 77th earl and lord of the castle, is born. Titus Groan follows several of the castle’s inhabitants during Titus’s first year of life: the royal family—Titus’s mother, father, sister, aunts—and a selection of their servants. Their lives are governed by ancient, intricate, and pointless rituals. A kitchen boy, Steerpike, grows unhappy with his lot and decides to start climbing the hierarchy by any means necessary. There are a few dramatic incidents—the burning of a library, a conflict between two servants that ends in murder, the unraveling of a certain character’s sanity. Around these bursts of plot Peake weaves psychologically acute studies of his characters (in one amazing scene he gathers the whole cast together for a feast, and then plunges into each character’s head, one by one, stream-of-consciousness style) and copious description of the castle itself: the light, the shadow, the dust, the stones, the changing weather through the windows.

The result of this narrative style is the creation and sustenance of a kind of heightened reality. More so than any fictional place I’ve encountered in literature, Gormenghast feels real: the people who live there seem like real people; the things that happen there happen slowly, over swaths of time, as in real life; the structure of the castle begins to take on weight, solidity, tactility…

But not just real—more than real, hyperreal, real in a way that can only exist in art. Allow me to briefly digress: I am not a terribly observant person, on the whole, and I tend to go about my daily existence blind to the wealth of detail that surrounds me. I have occasional moments of transcendent noticing—of being suddenly and vividly aware, of having my senses opened up—but so much I tune out, so much fades into a background murmur. The Gormenghast books, in their greatest moments, provide a dizzying density of sensory information, a concentration of reality that seems to transcend the real thing—because no one, in real life, could possibly notice so much. Peake’s marvelous knack for noticing has taught me a great deal as a writer: he has taught me to always keep my eyes peeled, and that believable fictional worlds are made up, not of elaborate invented mythologies, but of these little bits and pieces of the world we inhabit, distilled, distorted, and rearranged.

That hyperreal quality extends beyond Peake’s physical descriptions of the castle; the series is absolutely suffused with it. In the world that Peake creates everything approaches the real, but is finally too much, too vivid, although it’s only once you’ve left the books and fallen back to earth that you realize how everything in that other world was a little askew. While you read, the plot seems to proceed at a pace resembling that of real life, but then you return to the real world, where years do not pass in pages. The characters, likewise, seem absolutely real as you read: they are perfect products of their environment; they fit Gormenghast like a glove. But then you leave Gormenghast, and you realize that they, too, were grotesques, too wholly themselves to be real people.

The second book is an organic expansion of the first; the atmosphere is seamlessly sustained as new characters are introduced, new avenues of the castle explored. Gormenghast follows Titus over the course of ten years, from seven to seventeen, and as he becomes a more prominent member of the cast the book quite naturally evolves into a coming-of-age story. Peake’s treatment of this theme is totally consistent with his style: Titus’s experiences are taken seriously, given real emotional weight, and are specific enough to be those of a real adolescent—but Peake lends them an unreal clarity and intensity. The mystery of Peake’s writing is how through this dreamlike exaggeration, rather than in spite of it, he manages to arrive at the universal. Take the passage in which Titus, frustrated with the senseless code of ritual to which he is bound, runs away from home and loses his way in the surrounding forest; he stumbles upon an otherworldly golden glade, glimpses a feral child who haunts the woods, and falls desperately in love with her. She is totally separate from the world of the castle and totally mysterious to him; the very idea of her is enchanting. Why should this first love—no doubt unlike any experienced in the real world—seem such a perfect representation of all first love? Peake writes like he is digging to China: he scratches away so ferociously, so obsessively, at a specific feeling, image, or sensation that, before you know it, he has tunneled all the way through the specific and popped out at the universal end of the spectrum.

There are so many things that Mervyn Peake does well that I am bound to neglect a few. Let us take a moment to admire his Dickensian flair for names: Lord Sepulchrave, Steerpike, Dr. Prunesquallor, Barquentine—and I am barely scratching the surface. Let us also not fail to note that the Gormenghast books are often really funny. Peake is seemingly incapable of writing a boring line of dialogue, and much of the banter between characters is hilarious. He can also, despite silly complaints (by tasteless philistines) that the books are plotless, write an absolutely harrowing action scene: Steerpike’s increasingly ruthless murders are as suspenseful as anything I’ve read. The Gormenghast books are rich. They explore just about the full possibilities of fiction.

Mervyn Peake was one of those guys who make basically everyone seem lazy and unaccomplished in comparison. In addition to writing the Gormenghast series, he was a poet, a playwright, a painter, one of the most famous illustrators of his day, and a designer of costumes and sets for various stage productions. Sometime in the 1950s, after the publication of the second volume in the Gormenghast series, he began to exhibit signs of a mysterious degenerative disorder, which was later identified as Parkison’s disease. At the time there were apparently rumors that he had driven himself mad immersing himself in the dark subject matter of his books, which was, of course, nonsense. Over the next decade he steadily lost his ability to draw and paint; his symptoms were worsened by doctors ignorant of the disease. He managed to finish the third Gormenghast novel, Titus Alone, before he was totally incapacitated by Parkinson’s; however, the original 1959 edition of the book was horribly mangled by editors, and a version more closely resembling his manuscript did not emerge until 1970, two years after his death.

Few people think as highly of Titus Alone as they do of the first two books in the series, even in its present, improved state. It is altogether different from the books that precede it. The title is a clue: Titus remains our protagonist, but the rest of the familiar cast is gone. Titus has left Gormenghast. Where he finds himself I won’t reveal, except that it is almost certainly not where you are expecting. Peake’s inimitable writing style remains, and the book contains familiar flashes of humor, darkness, and beauty. But the book has its own rhythm: the chapters are brief, choppy; the detail less dense; the characters sketchier. Some think these are intentional choices that reflect Titus’s disorientation in his new surroundings; others think Peake’s skill as a writer was in serious decline as a result of his disease. Most likely the effect is partially intentional, and partially the result of the book’s being hastily written. I imagine Peake feared that his illness would prevent him from completing the book at all.

Titus Alone is not, unfortunately, a third masterpiece—but, you know what, it feels petty to pick apart a book written as its author was in the throes of a debilitating degenerative disease. Rather than approach this book as the definitive ending to a series—because it wasn’t even intended to be in the first place—think of this third installment as a generous gift, a bonus supplement, a kind of happy miracle. Its existence, especially in this current state of faithfulness to Mervyn Peake’s vision, is an unlikely blessing.

The Gormenghast series feels much more believable to me than most fantasy because the books build a world from the ground up, beginning with a foundation of concrete imagery. They contain no magic and no elves, but are nonetheless some of the most purely fantastic books I have ever read in their evocation of another world, a world which seems, at times, to supersede our own in splendor. As a writer I find Mervyn Peake’s unique fantasy vision inspiring—one gets the sense that he wrote what he wanted to write, period, and that’s what fantasy should be, right? As a reader I appreciate that the books engage on so many different levels; most books are box lunches, but each of these is a banquet. Once you’ve read Gormenghast, you may find that other books seem a little flat, a tad lifeless, not quite complete.

* I basically agree with those who don’t think there is much value in comparing Peake to Tolkien. They were, by and large, totally different writers doing totally different things. However, Tolkien’s work did, unfortunately, become the template by which pretty much all fantasy has been written since. In comparing the two writers I intend merely to separate Peake’s writing from a highly generalized notion of “contemporary fantasy,” with which it has little in common.