This is sometimes a worthwhile exercise – try to imagine what it would have been like to read a novel such as Titus Alone when it was first published. Titus Groan and Gormenghast had been published in 1946 and 1950 respectively, and while the narrative had come to a natural close for many of the characters, Titus’s story is set to continue. You have waited nine long years (almost as long as those waiting for the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire) and finally Mervyn Peake’s sequel is published, picking up almost exactly at the point Gormenghast finished nine years earlier.
But it confounds all expectations. Instead of being another static story set in Gormenghast, it is free roaming. Instead of being set in a quasi-medieval world without mechanisation, it shockingly takes place in a world in which cars and aeroplanes appear, and seem to have existed all along outside the hermetic world of the castle. The novel is as hard to categorise in genre terms as its predecessors, but it is unsettlingly different.
Unsurprisingly the critical reaction when Titus Alone was published was confused. This was compounded by the editorial decisions made at the time. It was not until several years later that a subsequent editor, reviewing Peake’s original manuscript, noticed serious discrepancies between it and the published version. The original editor had butchered the text, making a bewildering number of unnecessary changes. In its restored form the novel proved far better than critics originally supposed. (Incidentally I wonder if the editor or publisher of the Penguin Modern Classics edition illustrated below had read the novel, because while the drawing of Irma Prunesquallor is a wonderful example of Peake’s draughtmanship, she doesn’t appear in the novel.)
What readers at the time would not have known is that Peake was in the first stages of the Parkinsonism which would eventually take his life. This undoubtedly had an impact on the text – it could account for some of the surreal elements of the narrative, the comparative lack of structure, and the profound difference between this novel and its predecessors. But what it doesn’t do is make it a bad novel. (Incidentally I can only think of one other example – Terry Pratchett’s The Shepherd’s Crown – of a novel written by a dying author where their condition shows on the page. Other authors died part way through the completion of the text, but their illness doesn’t show through. Edwin Drood for example could have been written by Dickens at pretty much anytime during his career, I would argue.)
Titus Alone follows Titus in self-imposed exile from his hereditary prison. Traveling through a wasteland he comes to a mysterious city where he encounters two faceless, silent figures – police officers? – who want to take him into custody, or worse. He is rescued and befriended by zoo-owner Muzzlehatch, and goes on to explore his new surroundings. A series of disjointed and surreal incidents and adventures follow. There is a Kafkaesque feel to this narrative – Titus is constantly menaced by ill-defined threats, and never feels fully safe, even when Juno, Muzzlehatch’s former lover, agrees to be his guardian and takes him to live with her.
They become lovers, but it can’t last – Titus has a restlessness that compels him to keep moving. He is followed by a mysterious floating orb which he smashes with his piece of Gormenghast flint (his only token of home). The dark adventures continue culminating in an intense scene of destruction which is some of the most intense writing I think I have ever read. It’s certainly impossible to do it justice in a synopsis. The novel’s conclusion has haunted me for years. Escaping the city Titus wanders the wasteland alone for months, until he comes across a outcrop of rock that he recognises from his childhood. Hearing the guns of Gormenghast saluting the missing Earl, he knows he is home. But that knowledge is enough.
If Peake had only written Titus Alone we would of course judge the novel differently, rather than it always being assessed by its differences to its predecessors. It is less claustrophobic and faster paced than the previous two novels, more disjointed and in many ways lighter. Titus is lost without the structure of life in the castle, and bemused by the menace of the wider world, and many readers will share his post-Gormenghast reaction.
Titus Alone is in the words of one blogger “a jewel that possesses more facets than Titus Groan and Gormenghast yet will be elusive to some readers precisely for that reason”. Extremely well put. It’s also worth looking out Michael Moorcock’s comments on Titus in the introduction to a recent edition from which I have borrowed the information above about the novel’s editorial history. Moorcock knew the Peakes at the time the novel was being written, and has some interesting observations on the creative process involved and the novel’s place in 1950’s Britain.
Titus Alone was Peake’s attempt to take his character and method out of the hermetic world he had created in Gormenghast and Titus Groan and make it confront not only issues of identity, time and human interaction but the problems of modernity and even post‐modernity — the world as it emerged from terrible, unprecedented conflict, confronting the Cold War, nuclear weapons and new forms of authoritarian dictatorship springing up like weeds from the ruins of the old world. In following this path Peake recognized the limitations of the form he had developed with such genius and was consciously seeking a means by which he could expand it to expose his protagonist to the 20th century.
There are certain books you will always love, no matter whatever else you read, and to which you will always return; these three novels would be my desert island choice. They are of such scope and ambition that they reward many, many rereadings. Together they represent an extraordinary achievement and I cannot recommend them highly enough.
The Reading Bug 