Titus Alone (original 1959; edition 1968)

A very odd skeleton of a book. It is not nearly as fleshed out or detailed as the first two books in the trilogy. I think that had Peake not been ill while writing this, it would have been a different book indeed.

The world Titus has found outside of Gormenghast is vaguely steampunkish in feel, though this was written decades before steampunk was conceived of. It's an interesting contrast -- Titus with his mind full of the crumbling towers of Gormenghast Castle and his traditional duties versus a more modern world full of light bulbs,elevators, helicopters shaped like fish, and cars like sharks.

I didn't like this installment as much as the rest of the trilogy, both because of the mentioned lack of detail and because a more fractured plot. ( )

It is years and years since I first struggled with this one, in the Penguin Modern Classics edition. Reading it a second time, it seems like a completely different book. I don't think the text has changed - the Penguin is this Langdon Jones revised version - so it must be me, older and wiser and more indulgent. The narrative hangs together well, the characters are interesting, after two volumes of wandering around the corridors and halls of Gormenghast I felt as "dépaysée" (don't think there's an equivalent English word) as Titus venturing into this strange new world both Dickensian and Orwellian, both lugubrious and enlightening, and the ending was satisfyingly appropriate. This Folio Society edition is abundantly, even lavishly, illustrated with black and white drawings. On the negative side, some of the sentences need further polishing. For instance, there is one with several clauses, two of them beginning with "as though". But I now take back all the negative things I thought and said about this back in the 1970s. ( )

My first impression of Titus Groan, the first part of the Gormenghast Trilogy, was that it was a deeply weird book. I was warned that Titus Alone, the third and last part, "gets even... weirder," and I'd say that's the case, and it feels very different than the other two. The first two books establish the strange world of Gormenghast Castle, a crumbling edifice that seemed timeless and hermetically sealed, a world unto itself and one that was hard to place but seemed pre-Industrial and bound by pointless ritual and Byzantine intrigues.

The first book began with Titus' birth, and at the end of the last book, having grown to manhood, he's leaving the castle and abdicating his position as the 77th Earl. So gone is the warren-like castle from this book and all the characters I'd grown fond of. It's more than a bit of a shock when Titus reaches a city--one that's never heard of Gormenghast--to find it's a world that has automobiles, airplanes and elevators--and ray guns and hovering spy devices. The Publisher's Note says that Peake was already suffering from the illness that killed him when he was writing the story, and that the text had to be pieced together from a manuscript and notes--it was essentially a draft, not a polished, finished novel, and I think you can see that in reading this book. It's a lot sketchier than the other two books, with a third of the chapters less than a page, and some merely a few paragraphs, as if what he wrote was a mere outline he intended to flesh out later, and this book is half the length of the other two.

Ironically I think that did pick up the pace--this was a faster read than the first two books, but not I think a better read, even if the prose was still vivid and and the imagination still prodigious as seen in creations like the Under-River. I read that Peake was among the first civilians to visit a Nazi concentration camp, where he saw inmates still too sick to be moved dying before his eyes, and I thought I could see that experience in his powerful and macabre depictions of Black Rose and "the factory."

But Titus wasn't one of my favorite characters in the two earlier books--and he's utterly unlikeable here. He really doesn't connect with any of the people he meets--and neither did I. Acreblade and Cheetah aren't as fascinating villains as Steerpike, and Juno and Muzzlehatch aren't characters I grew fond of in the same way as Lady Fuchsia, Flay and Doctor Prunesquallor in the prior books. Nor do I understand in this book why so many strangers seem to be immediately taken with Titus, who is not their hereditary lord but a vagrant and a sullen young man of no extraordinary intelligence or talents or good looks. It seemed rather Marty Stu and not in keeping with the spirit of the prior books. The plot and characters, the style even, of the first two books for all their strangeness had their own internal logic, which I felt this one lacked. Which is not to say this book didn't have its fascinations and flashes of the prior brilliance, but no, I can't say I find it comparable to the fantastic first two books. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1629691.html

I'm afraid I was simply not convinced by Titus Alone. In fact, I was bored and confused by it. Titus, having run away from his home, finds himself in the neighbouring industrialised countryside (where people have never actually heard of Gormenghast, despite its absolute domination of its own hinterland). He becomes the object of obsession - in particular of the two women, Juno, with whom he has a love affair, and Cheeta, who rejects him and then develops a bizarrely elaborate plan to humiliate him by throwing a party at which various aspects of Gormenghast are satirically brought to life, but also of the self-appointed guardians from the Under-River. The imagery was intense, and I suppose it is in some way a spiritual and allegorical journey for Titus growing up, but in the end he ends back exactly where he started, and it did not work for me. ( )

Should never have been published. ( )