Titus Groan

I didn’t really enjoy Titus Groan.  Meryn Peake’s book is over 500 pages long and I haven’t even marked a single bit that stood out so much that I want to write about it.  As such, this blog post will be mostly waffle.  It does also mean that the book wasn’t actually bad enough to inspire my hatred.  So at least there’s that. 

The copy of the book that I read was covered in quotes from Anthony Burgess and had an introduction written by him too.  I’m not going out on too much of a limb when I say that I think this prejudiced me against the book.  This, I was convinced upon seeing Burgess’s name, was essentially going to be 500 pages of Enderby.  It’s not that bad.  There are similarities, mostly in the tone and style of the thing, which is understandable as Peake clearly influenced Burgess a great deal.  But I did enjoy Titus Groan far more than any of Burgess’s attempts at humour.  There were, however, a few issues that I did have with the book.   I’ll tell you about them.

Firstly, there are the names of the characters.  Peake’s characters have surnames like Groan, Flay, Swelter and Pruneswallor.  It’s as though this is a medieval morality play, except that everyone’s defined by an obscure insult instead of the vice or virtue that they represent.  This is probably intentional, given that the epigraph is a John Bunyan quote.  The same is true for the mansion, Gormenghast- I get that this is an historical family seat on its last legs without the name of the house itself sounding like a death rattle.  It’s the same thing that JK Rowling does with her characters, things like Dolores Umbridge and Remus Lupin- but what works in books for kids should almost always be left out of adult fiction.

It might just have been me, but I found the whole thing just a little bit dry.  It has such legs as a concept-a noble house that it bound by such traditional that the patriarch must have books consulted each morning to find out what his actions that day have to be that is suddenly introduced to anarchy and to progress.  I’m just not sure that it’s very well done.   There is no time frame in which the book and the social progress of the anarchic Steerpike are contextualised.  It could be just after World War Two- the period that influenced Peake- or it could be as the Magna Carta was being signed.   Again, I understand that this was intentional (or at least I assume it was) but the book loses something for its lack of context.  The narrative doesn’t leave Gormenghast and so we have no idea if Steerpike is rebelling against society or bringing things up to date.

At times this entire book strikes me as an overly long joke told by a man who isn’t nearly as funny as he thinks he is.  I actually read Titus Groan alongside The Female Eunuch and although parts of Germaine Greer’s book are now horribly outdated, it’s easy to see why she was so pissed off.  Yes, Greer was writing twenty years after Peake but her points are applicable to it.  I don’t believe that this is a book that a woman could have written; there is something pervasively masculine about it.

I know I’ve focused so much on the negatives of Titus Groan but it’s difficult not to.  Humour has changed and so Peake’s epic feels very dated even as it chides its characters for the same thing.  The real joke in all this is on me- Titus Groan is the first part of a trilogy and one of the sequels is on The List. 

I’ve now moved on to The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James.