A simple, complex concluding couplet
The last book in the Gormenghast trilogy would probably have been a more substantial affair had Mervyn Peake not already been affected by the degenerative illness which took his life ten years after its publication. Titus Alone is slimmer by far than either Titus Groan or Gormenghast, and it seems somewhat less substantial in the complexities of its plot and characterisation; it is easy to believe that it was conceived as something larger and that this was all Peake could manage. However, the book is not without its virtues; in fact I would regard it as an integral part of the total work, and it is rich with the burnished, effulgent prose that makes the other books such a delight to read.
I usually go on about the relationship between the characters and the world they inhabit when I’m talking about secondary-world fiction, and I think that’s an area in which Peake is particularly strong. His best-beloved characters are creatures of Gormenghast, that hulking agglomeration of rotting architecture and brooding ritual: they could exist nowhere else, and every aspect of their psyches is formed in its shadow. The castle is beautifully described as a physical territory, but it is most fully articulated in the forms taken by its inhabitants. This is how things should be when an imaginary world is presented to the reader. And yet Peake’s characters are not exactly ‘realistic’; they are not convincing in the way that characters in novels are supposed to be. They are exaggerated caricatures, grotesques described with the cartoonist’s gleeful lampoonery; but they go, for me, a step beyond the satirical. The characters in the trilogy are archetypes, mythical figures, forged from the unpromisingly banal material of everyday characters in a novel; in this sense Peake is the inverse of Tolkien, who transforms the mythical archetypes that are the natural inhabitants of his world into rather stereotypical, one-dimensional characters in a realist novel. But then Peake is by far the superior novelist, and while Middle Earth stands alone (or in very limited company) as the great achievement of fantasy world-building, the Gormenghast trilogy has no difficulty holding its head up beside The Lord of the Rings as a monument of the genre.
Titus Alone is a very bleak book, more so even than its two unremittingly miserable predecessors. It is concerned with Titus Groan’s quest for personal freedom, a quest that is successful in the end, but at the cost of almost total solitude. Throughout the peregrinations depicted in the book he is attempting to free himself of the ritual and tradition that have formed him. He is continually forced to revisit his past, ultimately by means of a vicious satirical masquerade mounted by a jilted lover. At the end of the narrative he finds his way physically back to Gormenghast, but turns away from it, never, we are told, to set eyes on it again. Freedom, for Titus, and by implication for the rest of us (for the book is about a lugubriously allegorical as a book can be) is to be found in the severing of bonds, in the rejection of the past, but also in the rejection of any future favoured by society. Solitude is the price of liberty. This grim view is not one that I share, but the powerful means by which Peake articulates this depressing vision are incredibly compelling.
There is a lot more to say about Titus Alone. It’s a very complex book, a puzzle box of a novel, and must be seen in the context of the larger narrative. The sense of place that is so intensely felt in the two previous books is far less pronounced, and its episodic form is not so persuasive as a more intricate plot could have made it, but it functions in a similar way to the final two lines of a Spenserian sonnet, summing up, commenting upon, and transforming our understanding of what has gone before. In some sense its relative simplicity is a necessity. The previous two books have been a part of my life and my mind for a long while; I think it’s going to take me a long time to digest and assimilate the third.