An oddly entertaining book. Way over written and using words that I never read or heard and not having much of a plot it none the less was difficult to put down. Peake created a strange world at Gormenghast mixing modern references with a hint of magic. I will read the next in the trilogy. But not soon. ( )

Tried it several times, can't get into it at all. ( )

Here's what I see as the central dilemma of Titus Groan (perhaps the whole series?): What do you do when your life is a metaphor? The big themes of good and evil, human fulfillment and self-realization, and the pushmi-pullyu of the Freudian tripartite psyche are all there, all compelling. But the characters that are compelled to demonstrate them are problematic, because they're more than ciphers, but less than fully human. They're compelled to inhabit an allegory, and an ugly one, and inside they're suffering. And so when they each of them get frothed up into enacting their own little psychodrama (something which happens again and again in this book, and reminds me of Final Fantasy characters doing their little pose-and-theme-music routine when they come onstage or do something awesome), it's uncomfortable. Peake is unable to repress his evocative talent, it seems, and so Fuchsia's feelings of violation when she finds Steerpike in her attic, or Cora and Clarice's spinning resentful idiocy, or Irma's old-maid routine, feel real--we are a little too much with them in their suffering, but then we have to watch them suffer further as they are compelled by the author to enact that suffering for ludicrous reasons and in histrionic and one-dimensional ways. It's interesting that I picked all women--not to say it isn't true of the male characters too, but it's also interesting that the exception to this caricature problem, the Dweller wetnurse Keda, is so nobly and exhilaratingly alive. Going from the scene where the two dudes fight it out for her love in the clearing back to the castle and its gothytwee intrigues is more than uncomfortable, it's a bit depressing.

None of which is bad, exactly--or certainly it takes talent, and a lot of scenes make for wonderful reading, either in a painterly way, in keeping with Peake's first career, or in a dramatic way, like the stunningly choreographed fight between Swelter and Flay, or Steerpike's climb to the attic. Here is one of the former:

"This is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inward as deeply. It is the love of a man or woman for their world--for the world of their centre where their loves 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 haunted 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 toward 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 floor boards, so the slow landsman on his acre'd marl says with dark Fuchsia on her twisting staircase, 'I am home.'"

I'll keep reading! ( )

"Oh my God." Those were my initial thoughts when I opened Titus Groan and glanced at the first sentence – an extremely long and complex sentence with few words that I could actually understand. Luckily for me, the rest of the novel was a little more readable, but it was still quite a slog. Peake's novel may read like a masterpiece, but his target audience is clear – especially from the introduction, which is written by a fan even more verbose than the author! To read a novel like Titus Groan, a strong grasp of the English language is required. To fully enjoy a novel like Titus Groan, an exceptional grasp of the English language is required.

For those willing to grit their teeth and push through it, however, there is enjoyment to be had. The descriptive language flouts the very idea of pace in favour of utterly breathtaking detail, rendering the world of Gormenghast in phenomenal clarity. It is a bizarre and unique world of light and shadow, filled with mysteries, surprises and brilliant ideas. In fact, Gormenghast Castle is not too far removed from Hogwarts; they both share a wondrous, warren-like quality that fills readers with a desire to explore. The style is elaborate and quirky, with a dry, veiled humour lurking constantly in the wings.

At the very heart of this book are its delicious characters: a cast of vibrant, varied and vivid individuals who drive the novel along. All are exaggerated, but none are mere caricatures. Readers will love, hate, laugh at and pity them, from start to finish. Above all, they are really what makes this novel worth reading.

Unfortunately, it would be a blatant lie to say that the slowness and complexity of the writing does not detract from the reading experience. It does. The pace may pick up a little towards the middle of the novel, but it soon falls back again. Tense switching and time jumping, while they are interesting techniques, only exacerbate the problem. For most readers, enjoying this book on the same level that one might enjoy a mainstream novel will simply not be a possibility. The best they can hope for is a more sophisticated kind of enjoyment, quietly permeated by a lurking, peripheral impatience. If you're feeling brave, however, then I say 'go for it'. Rest assured, it will be unlike anything you've read before.

Isimply can't say enough about this masterpiece.
The book is set in the huge castle of Gormenghast, a vast landscape of crumbling towers and ivy-filled quadrangles that has for centuries been the hereditary residence of the Groan family and with them a legion of servants.
Creepy, gothic, musty, mystic, epic, brilliant.
Mervyn Peake is a virtual lterary god, an anomoly, not unlike John Kennedy O'Toole (Confederacy of the Dunces). These two mysterious enigmas have created modern works of timeless art--though very different in style and subject matter.
It is a smorgasbord, a banquet, a frothy overblown decadent gawdy horrific fantastic freakshow of wonder.
I am in awe. ( )

I expected TITUS GROAN, (in which we follow the seventy-seventh Earl of Groan through the first year and a bit of his life), to be dense, wordy and difficult. I'd read scads of reviews that emphasized Peake's verbosity, and a quick scan of the first page seemed to bear them out. I figured I was in for a slog, albeit an enjoyable one. I prepared myself for at least five days of reading; six or seven seemed more likely.

It is indeed wordy. I've heard it said that Peake never uses two words when eighteen will do, and this is very, very true. But for all that, it's surprisingly readable. The book is broken into segments, not chapters, and most of them are ten pages or less. I found it fairly easy to use these segments to plot my reading. I couldn't exactly read quickly, but I still managed a solid and satisfying hundred and fifty pages per day.

The whole thing is just so interesting! The moldering castle of Gormenghast is a world all its own, and Peake limns it with absolute conviction. The castle's rituals and traditions seem strange and grotesque to us, but the characters believe in them to the core. They navigate via a most peculiar moral and social compass; all their actions and interactions seem to have been twisted a quarter turn to the left of what we in the western world would do if faced with a similar situation. And these actions are unquestionably the focus here. Peake isn't interested in time so much as space. He's perfectly willing to use up a page or six on some small, inconsequential detail that is nevertheless vitally important to the characters or their setting. It makes for some fascinating reading.

And on top of that, it's occasionally quite funny. Many a time, Peake's ponderous sentences made me laugh aloud, and some of his imagery is just priceless. One of my favourite scenes involves a bizarre ritual in which the infant Titus is placed inside an open book, the pages of which are safety-pinned together at the top. It's such a strange, surreal image, and the characters treat the whole thing so seriously. I'm not sure it's meant to be funny, but I found it hilarious.

As much as I enjoyed the book as a whole, I must say that the last hundred and fifty pages didn't do quite so much for me as the first chunk. I took a break (read: slept) right before Titus's birthday Breakfast, a lengthy scene in which Peake abandons the past tense in favour of the present. Alas, he has some trouble sticking to his chosen tense; every few sentences or so, he slips back into the past in a most jarring fashion. It bugged the hell out of me, and I had a lot of trouble getting back in to the story.

But that issue aside, this was excellent. I really enjoyed it, and am looking forward to reading GORMENGHAST good and soon. I highly recommend it, but be forewarned: if you're expecting anything like a traditional fantasy story, you will be sorely disappointed.

(This review originally appeared in a somewhat lengthier form on my blog, Stella Matutina. ( )

This was a deeply descriptive book that took me into a world with fascinating characters who have their own idiosyncrasies. I look forward to reading what happens next to Titus in Gormenghast. ( )

I'd been looking forward to reading the Gormenghast trilogy for years, so when I finally got round to picking up a copy of the first book in the series, Titus Groan, I was very happy.

After slogging through it for over a month, I'm sorry to say I really didn't enjoy this book at all. I had to struggle to finish it. It's not a bad book, nor is it poorly written, but it was definitely not to my tastes. I didn't enjoy the style of writing or the language Peake used, I disliked the characters, the world of Gormenghast and the plot.

In short it's one of those books that are hailed as a classic, but which to me just... isn't. I won't be re-reading this, nor will I be reading the rest of the Gormenghast trilogy. ( )

This is such a weird and wonderful tale, so extravagant and bizarre and funny and upsetting, that it's hard to know how to approach it. It's a twentieth century novel whose plot is full of Gothic exuberances; its characters are slyly-observed caricatures; the universe in which its events take place must surely exist in a kind of hermetically-sealed bubble, because that existence would otherwise be impossible. This beginning to the Gormenghast trilogy is so outlandish that it would be difficult to approach it seriously, if it weren't for one thing: the language. This is less a novel than it is a poem-in-prose, hundreds and hundreds of pages of Peake doing things to language that make me wriggle in delight. ( )

Not a book for the impatient, Titus Groan is a novel to be savored in loving detail. In spite of the word 'FANTASY' stamped on the side, this novel has less to do with post-Tolkien heroic quests than with authors such as Dickens who in many ways it reminded me. It chronicles a year in the life of the inhabitants of castle Gormenghast, home to the Groan dynasty for 76 generations upon the birth of Titus, heir to the Earldom. The members have only rare contact with the outside world and are bound completely by tradition. Titus, however, is not the only newcomer. Steerpike, the ambitious kitchen-boy, brings with him the force of change and it is difficult to decide whether to love or hate him for it, especially as events spiral out of control. Either way, don't trust him. ( )

The stars and planets conspire to make me like Titus Groan. It has everything I commonly ask for in a novel: unique prose style, vivid descriptions, memorable characters with fantastic names, a sharp sense of humor and an almost bottomless imagination. Yet as much as all these elements, which leap out on every page, delighted me, in the end I did not like Titus Groan. I did not even manage to finish it. There was some ineffable quality that prevented me from turning one more page.

I believe it may be in part due to the profoundly static nature of the book. Mervyn Peake (whose own name rivals those of his characters) was a painter and illustrator, and he writes like one. The book is laced with incredible descriptions of an almost Baroque power or accumulated detail. Yet nothing happens. You may as well tour a museum, with each description engraved on a canvas. Peake was no fool, and the story’s setting the crumbling fantasy kingdom of Gormenghast, plays to the static nature of the writing: it is place full or ancient rituals and little action. The only action in the book revolves around the arriviste Steerpike, but he is really a narrative device rather than a character, his function of creating something akin to a plot is baldly apparent. While a novel or prose-paintings may sound deliciously experimental, and in many ways it is, I began to miss the movement of time.

There is also a certain hermetic quality to Titus Groan that wore away at my interest. This is a common danger of any fantasy fiction; it risks completely shutting itself off from the real world. Some see this principle of absolute separatism as a virtue, and I cannot deny that it can produce works, like Titus Groan, of considerable beauty and intelligence. But these novels, for all their brilliance, are hot house flowers. Sooner or later you must close the book, rub your eyes, and step back into the actual world around you. And when you do, those fantastical flowers wither very quickly. And the best books, including fantasy books like the His Dark Materials trilogy and even the Harry Potter series, not only dazzle and delight, they also give you a little something, an idea, an observation, a value, or even a notion, that survives the inevitable transition back into the real world. Titus Groan presents an intricate, gorgeous, labyrinthine world that has no conduit into our own. It is a beautiful, airless vision that may entrance readers, but does not enrich them in any sustainable way. ( )

I just couldn't read this. Too much language for language's sake and not enough plot. ( )

Fantasy is not my usual genre, but I enjoyed this novel, the first in the Gormenghast series. The ancient family of Groan live a life bound by ritual, in an ancient castle. An heir, (the Titus of the title) has just been born and a kitchen boy schemes to take control. This work is fantasy in that Gormenghast bears no relation to the world as we know it, although it is still reassuringly Earth. The characters, though somewhat grotesque, are human and have the same clocks, dresses, toys that we do. Sometimes funny, always gorgeous, I'm pleased with my discovery of this series. ( )

A fascinating, almost operatic book set in a fantastic world where nothing is supposed to change: the huge, decaying, ultimately unknowable castle of Gormenghast. There, the traditions of the House of Groan are worshipfully followed by a cast of characters whose minds and desires are quite human, even though their bodies, exaggeratedly expressive, often verge on the grotesque. A beautiful tale of the fight between great, statuesque Stasis and the small, clever hobgoblin of Change. ( )

Definitely the most unusual book I have read in a long time. Every character is a bizarre combination of creepy, quirky, and likeable (although I don't suppose I can find anything to like about the gluttonous homicidal chef). They rarely interact with each other, and even when they do, they make no real attempt to communicate. I felt oddly ambivalent about Steerpike, the ambitious and deftly manipulative villain, who is in many ways as sympathetic as any of the characters. And the castle itself is a fascinating, barely-explored character, with entire wings that no one has entered in years. I suspect that there are plenty more odd characters and settings to be discovered in the second and third books.

Peake's use of English is frequently spellbinding. There are some very funny scenes to help lighten the mood. At times the story moves quickly, but at other times it is slow-paced. ( )

Of all the lauded works of fantasy, and there are many, the Gormenghast trilogy of novels wins my vote by a light year. Peake creates an authentic mirror world of our own, but one that is also utterly unique, completely skewed and apart. Where Tolkien irritates with his sanctimonious cliche ridden moralizing, Peake shows us all the shades of everyone we know. I don't think anyone comes close. ( )

Book Review (spanish) ( )

Excellent. Dense, engrossing detail. Very slow going at the outset, but full of characters with almost palpable presence: so strange and abstract that they hook the imagination, yet realistic in their obsessions. ( )

A great monstrosity of a novel. Great, twisted prose, folding back in time as the story covers the first year in the life of the title character. I read this book, first, in high school, and carried it around with me during the reading. And re-reading. I was teased for it, of course. The best jape? "Tightest Groin." Yes, high school kids say the darndest things.

The book is not diminished by such farcical parody. It is, indeed, a great work of imagination and storytelling. But it is not designed for those who like simple stories. It's for those who want to be "bowled over." ( )

Titus Groan is nothing less than the extension of Franz Kafka's vision to its chilling nadir. It's Franz Kafka narrated by a stuffy British professor in tweed who's long ago retreated into the bitter chambers of his imagination and shut the doors, tight.

Full review: http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/blog...

http://www.sfreviews.net/titusgroan.h...
http://www.fantasybookspot.com/node/3... ( )

OMG. This was completely different from my usual reading, and was one of those rare serendipitous finds. Nobody recommended it, I just picked it up to fill out my 3/$1 stack at the flea market. It's a slow-moving, lazy book. Over 500 pages, and dense prose at that, so it took me nearly 3 days to read. But the words...! You absolutely cannot rush this book. It's like the chocolate mousse of words, and not that sickeningly sweet Jello-pudding-like ersatz mousse with so little chocolate you might as well be eating sweetened cream, either. These words are rich and delicious, and you roll them around on your tongue, savoring the flavor. Not all that filling, but damn, it tastes so good you don't care. :) He uses big fat meaning-rich words, and never uses one word when three will do. Most writers I'd have been skimming by page 3. It takes some doing to make me enjoy slow, wordy prose. ( )

The first book in Mervyn Peake's amazing Gormenghast trilogy finds young Titus Groan, heir to the mysterious Gormenghast Castle, coming under the influence of the villainous kitchen slavey Steerpike. ( )