Titus Groan
by Mervyn Peake
Summary
In the vast, crumbling castle of Gormenghast, ruled by the seventy sixth Earl Sepulchrave through rituals so old that no one, including the Earl himself, remembers what most of them mean, two events arrive within days of each other: the birth of the Earl's son and heir, Titus, and the escape of an ambitious kitchen boy named Steerpike from the castle's brutal, sweltering kitchens. Peake follows Steerpike as he climbs, methodically and without a shred of loyalty to anyone, through Gormenghast's rigid hierarchy, manipulating the Earl's dim witted twin sisters into burning down Sepulchrave's beloved library, the one place in the castle that gave the ritual bound Earl any peace. The fire, and the death of the castle's elderly Master of Ritual in it, unbalances Sepulchrave completely; he comes to believe himself one of the owls that live in a nearby tower and is finally devoured by them, driven mad by a catastrophe Steerpike engineered entirely for his own advancement. Meanwhile the loyal, awkward servant Mr. Flay, banished from the castle for striking out at Steerpike, sneaks back in secret and kills the sadistic head chef Swelter in a duel fought by torchlight among ancient stonework. The novel closes on Titus's first birthday and his formal investiture as the new Earl, an infant with no understanding of the elaborate lakeside ceremony built entirely around him, who marks the occasion by dropping the sacred stone and ivy branch handed to him straight into the water below.
Peake, who trained and worked as a painter, writes in dense, almost sculptural prose, piling up physical description of stone, shadow, and grotesque faces until entire chapters pass with barely any plot advancing at all. It reads slowly and demands real patience with atmosphere over incident, closer in rhythm to gothic fiction than to conventional fantasy, and readers who love it tend to love exactly the thick, unhurried texture that readers who cannot finish it name as the problem.
Titus Groan is the first of what became a trilogy, followed by Gormenghast in 1950 and Titus Alone in 1959, and Peake wrote much of it while serving, unhappily and with worsening health, in the British army during the Second World War.
Historical Context & Significance
Peake was British, which placed Titus Groan outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction regardless of Eyre and Spottiswoode's 1946 London publication. The real prize that eventually came to the Gormenghast books went to a different volume than this one: the Royal Society of Literature gave Peake its William Heinemann Award in 1951 for Gormenghast, the sequel published in 1950, together with his poetry collection The Glassblowers. Titus Groan itself received no comparable prize of its own.
Early reviews were warm. The novelist Elizabeth Bowen, writing in Tatler and Bystander in April 1946, predicted for Titus a smallish but fervent public that would renew itself, and probably enlarge, with each new generation of readers, and she called the book one of pure, violent imagination, its poetry running through what she termed volcanic writing. That prediction has held; the trilogy's reputation grew slowly through the paperback era rather than through any single prize, and the BBC's 2000 television serial Gormenghast, drawn from this book and its sequel, carried Steerpike to an audience the novels alone never reached.