What are you, Titus Alone? Are you a gothic romance? A "fantasy of manners"? Gormenghast-visits-Vile Bodies? A bildungsroman? A psychoallegory? A parody of the first two books? A satire on a literary genre that doesn't even exist yet? A conversation piece for those interested in the remaining possibilities of le mot juste? A series of storyboards? An experiment, the artist cloaking dreams in words instead of images? A nightmare of inspiration?

Whatever you are, it's a little bit wry but no insult to the memory of your creator to say that you're better off for being unfinished. Partly that's a result of Peake's working method, where he sketches you out scene by scene, frames to be filled in later with his heavy, lush, totally enveloping and downcrushing lushness of detail, where a flash of beauty is a flash of what it takes to remain human in Gormenghast (how silly and strange for Irma Prunesquallor, the most Gormenghasty of characters, to appear on the cover of my edition--just when everything becomes different and we set her sort aside). But now we've left Gormenghast--we are with Titus, traveling the sands of earth under our hobnailed feet, seeing airplanes and shark-cars and getting in entanglements that are ever so modern, and we are straight out of the first two books, noble, infantile, wounded, tender.

This is a story about finding magic in a broken childhood and preserving that magic in the grownup world as strength. It reads almost like a manifesto, but one made up of images,moments, feelings so pregnant with poignancy (poignant with pregnancy?) that they spin up and around us, that, and resolve into a dew that sits poised and quivering on our shoulders as on Titus's, an invisible mantle, a reminder that our world may be garish and grotesque, and we venal and afraid, inflammations of raging ego, it and we are also majestic and magical. ( )

Mervyn Peake was, by all accounts, a powerful presence, an electric character, and a singular creative force. While Tolkien's poetry is the part everyone skips, Peake's envigorates his books. His voice and tone are unique in the English language, and his characterization is grotesquely vivid. As an illustrator, he was perhaps somewhat less precise than Dore, but more evocative than Beardsley.

All in all, his life and his vision were singular, from his birth in China to his years on Sark, and finally, his slow deterioration, until he was unable to speak, and drew only clowns in profile, capped as dunces. Though many suggest this deterioration marks the perceived failing of Titus Alone, Peake would complete his final illustrations more than a year later, and not succumb to death for another decade.

There were some editorial problems with Titus Alone, and though they have been mostly repaired, there are still dissatisfied grumblings about the final form. The final Titus book is not easy to come to terms with, and indeed it took long thought and consideration. However, I will not coax or argue mitigating circumstances. This book is Peake's vision, and while not as expansive or clear as the others, it stands as its own work, and completes Peake's philosophical and literary journey as well as we could wish.

Peake was never one to pander. He did not write in order to please, and he certainly did not write to facilitate escapism. He may have fashioned his work by aesthetic, so to mesmerize or mystify the ear, for to tug at the mind, and certainly to tickle the eye, but he did not give comfortable or simple answers.

The first two books are rather congruous, despite the subtle shifts, the advances and retreats, the many skirmishes Peake engages the reader in, only to draw back the veil before any victory or defeat could be claimed. It was not Peake's intention to stroke and comfort his readers, but to take them from highs to lows, to present them with wonder and with a vast, unconquerable world of wretched beauty.

Over the long stretch of the first two books, the reader becomes accustomed to the castle of Gormengast. The reader comes to identify with Titus' everyday struggles, with the plodding tradition. Even as characters die, others take their place, filling out the ranks, bolstering the ancient walls with their very breath.

There is a safety in the tradition, in the comfort of Gormenghast, and in a world that remains unknown and always outside. Like Titus, the reader imagines that the outside world must be like the inside one. It cannot be so different, after all, from this crumbling castle, this place which has become another home to legions of happy readers.

But any reader content to watch it all play out so familiarly has not been paying attention, has not been listening to Peake. Though there is always a call to that comfort, that tradition, we must not forget that tradition is death, is rot, is stagnant waters.

Many readers find themselves utterly thrown when they first begin to encounter the world outside Gormenghast, and realize that it is not what they expected. However, it is difficult for me to imagine how such readers could at once praise Peake for the the singular, spectacular vision of the first two books, and then become upset when he continues to expand his vision. One would imagine they would prefer that he keep writing the same old revolutionary thing he wrote last time, and not give them such an unwelcome start.

Peake continues a thread of literary exploration which draws through the great epics, from Homer to Virgil, Tasso, Ariosto, and Milton, to Byron, to Eliot. Like these great works, Peake explores the role and nature of the hero, of his connection to tradition, and of the purpose chosen for him.

Originally, the hero was governed by his own mind, and in Odysseus, a mind devious beyond measure it proved. However, Virgil created a hero of tradition, of Piety, and of submission. His hero grasped tradition, trusting in it to lead him. This was a message to the populace: trust in our ways, our traditions, and our Emperor to provide all that you need. While this message is useful to an empire, it is rather destructive to the individual, asking that he give up himself to the greater good.

Milton eventually continues this tradition, except he promotes subservience to Church instead of Empire, though there was little difference at the time. However, as a caution, Milton included the old, violent, self-serving hero as a cautionary tale. Humility and piety are Adam's strengths, while Satan has the 'false' strengths of warlike might and unending skepticism.

Many later writers, including Byron, found that the Satanic mode of heroism was more appealing to the individual, especially the iconoclast and artist who was tired of being told to 'pipe down' and 'follow orders'. Nietzsche would carry this sense of heroic individualism to the cusp, when he stated that mankind would have to demolish all tradition and create a whole philosophy of meaning for himself, a philosopher of the future known famously as the Ubermensch.

Of course, there is a point when we all must question the whole of tradition, and just as we did when we first learned the art of speech, test what happens when we respond to all questions and demands with a resounding 'no!' These later rebellions, these existential crises can happen at any time, whenever we are trying to find a place for ourselves.

Titus leaves home, as he must to be true to himself. He cannot honestly accept or reject Gormenghast and its tradition unless he can see it objectively, which requires that he develop a more worldly point of view. Like anyone progressing from childhood to adulthood, he questions the fundamental assumptions of his parents and teachers, and sets out on his own. And also, like any of us on the brink of adulthood, he learns that the world the adults promised doesn't really exist.

The real world is stranger, more daunting, and far more vast than the 'right and wrong' of the adult, or the far-flung imaginings of the child. Even though his readers have been through this shift, and should expect it from a changing young man new to the world, Peake still manages to catch his readers off guard. Like Titus, they expect the world to be different and challenging, but like Titus, they cannot imagine how truly different it will be when it arrives.

Titus Alone has a self-contained plot. It has its own allies and antagonists, its own places, its own conflict, and its own climax. They all add to Peake's running themes of change, growth, beauty, and meaning, but they are their own. However, the climax in Titus Alone is only a dress rehearsal for the true climax, which comes only at the very end, and which remains unsure until the end, as pivotal and sudden as the twelfth book of the Aeneid.

This resolution is the culmination of Titus' childhood, of all his former conflicts, of his life and purpose and individuality. It is the thematic culmination of the bildungsroman of his childhood. It is the philosophical conclusion of Peake's exploration of the role of the hero, the self, and of tradition. It is also the fulfillment of his vision, his unyielding artistic drive. It is the final offering to the reader, his companion and opponent on this journey.

He ends with beauty, with questions, with verve, and with a wink.

It still confuses me that many readers seemed to expect Peake to follow his revolutionary works with something familiar and indistinguishable. There are many who do this, it is true. There is the revolutionary who topples the regime only to create his own. There is the mountain climber who tops Everest, and then imagines that the greatest challenge is to do so twice.

You get no higher no matter how many times you climb the mountain. The true visionary adventurer climbs the mountain, and then, as an encore, paints the ceiling of a cathedral. It may not be expected, it may not please those fans who only wanted more of the same, but anything less is to admit defeat. Peake earned his laurels, and while we could hardly blame him for resting on them, he refused to.

Perhaps many readers became comfortable with his rebellion, his iconoclasm. They sympathized with his rejection of tradition, but then simply made that rejection into a new tradition. Like Aeneas, they trusted in tradition, and hoped it would carry them through. However, Peake was not content to topple one tower only to build another in its place. He showed his humility and commitment to art by razing even what he built.

As Nietzsche said, we must push everything, and abandon whatever topples, no matter how familiar it had become. ( )

The much-maligned conclusion of Peake's trilogy - I liked it the best. ( )

Reviewed Feb 2005

Horrible, horrible story. It is as if Peake had asked someone else to write it using his characters. It took forever to figure out what was going on. And even then I barely figured it out. Titus in a modern world with elevators, helicopters and chemical factories? People floated throughout the story - with no introduction - dropped out of the story (ie...Black Rose) just as suddenly. And as I predicted Titus made his way back to Gormenghast, but by being dropped by a helicopter? It was a bit like "Alice in Wonderland" meets "The Prisoner" and maybe something by the author of "Enders Game". Rambling paragraphs, meaningless characters how could anyone get through this story taking it seriously as a work of a serious author. If he didn't have the first two successful books already published I can't see anyone touching this book for print. Titus's character is seen as someone on the verge of madness, inability to plan or see obvious consequences, unable to judge other peoples characters. I wish he would have died - that way Gormenghast would have to start a new linage with a new bloodline - one without bad leadership and madness. In a nutshell this book was like Glenda the Good being put in Kansas without her powers - trying to discover who she was, running from her responsibilities. I doubt I will ever read anything as bad as this again. God help me if this isn't true.

6-2005 ( )

This third book of the Gormenghast trilogy is in many ways a weaker book than the first two, Titus Groan and Gormenghast. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that Titus Alone was unfinished when Peake died, and that it was written as he was succumbing to the Parkinson's disease that was eventually to kill him. It's very rough and unpolished, feeling in places more like a series of interconnected (and even at times unconnected) sketches than an actual novel. This feeling isn't helped by the fact that Titus Alone is only a third to a quarter of the length of the other two books in the series. There are a number of scenes that are not only choppy because of their short length, they are downright cryptic - even though Peake retained to the last the beautiful style that makes him such a joy to read. A lot of these problems could probably have been resolved if only he had had more time to write.

However, there are a couple of things that I think would have detracted from the novel even if Peake had had time in which to finish it. Most of these things are caused by the shift of setting from the crumbling grounds of Gormenghast to the City and the Factory of the Country where Titus finds himself, from the insular quasi-medievalism of the first two books to the expansive modernity of the third. It's more than a little jarring. As far as the first two books are concerned, they had always seemed to emphasise the closed-off nature of Gormenghast, an airless, breathless little world where nothing ever changed, no one new ever arrived, nothing ever left. The picture I had in my head was of a world that seemed a lot like an old watercolour, or engraving in a book - a strongly etched castle in the centre, defined against the massive bulk of Gormenghast Mountain; but with the image slowly petering out to indistintness and nothingness the further away you move from the building at the centre. Having something exist in the world away from that castle - something so close to our own world, too - seems off kilter and out of place.

The satire is still as biting and droll and dark and weird as ever. If you are a completist, or if you just want to drown yourself a little more in the way Peake uses language ("Under a light to strangle infants by, the great and horrible flower opened its bulbous petals one by one..."), then I'd say read it. If you're not, then you might very well want to give this a miss. ( )