God I loved this book and its sequels. They enchanted me in a way that very few other books have done in my lifetime – possibly only teenagers can really feel this way about novels. Decades on I can look at them a bit more dispassionately and see their (very minor) flaws, but they remain high on my top ten list, and will always do so. It’s not going to be easy explaining this obsession. You either love these books (or at least the first two, the third is more complicated as I will explain in a bit) or you don’t – indifference is rare.

Peake was a writer of extraordinary flair and confidence. This is how he opens Titus Groan:

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping arch, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

I wonder at the assurance and skill of an author who can open with a parenthesis like that. This is our introduction to 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. I have only limited evidence for this but I am personally convinced that as Peake wrote the novels the castle grew in his imagination, starting from a modest, realistic setting and with it finally ending larger than a city. Titus Groan, the first of the series (not strictly a trilogy as it was not conceived as such, more a 3 book series) opens in an extraordinarily cinematic way – taking the reader from the outside of the castle where the Bright Carvers reside to the Hall of Bright Carvings, through corridors and passageways into the heart of the castle, focussing down to a small eye-hole in a painting through which we see the novel’s newly born hero, Titus, heir to the crumbling towers of Gormenghast.

Slowly Peake introduces the cast of his drama. Lord Sepulchrave, seventy-sixth Earl of Groan, a melancholy man, a prisoner of the rituals that govern life in the castle.

Sepulchrave, 76^th Earl to the house of Gormenghast and lord of those tracts of country that stretch on every hand, in the North to the wastelands, in the south to the grey salt marshes, in the East to the quicksands and the tideless sea, and in the West to knuckles of endless rock.

His wife Countess Gertrude shuts herself away with her birds and her multitude of white cats. Their daughter is 15-year-old Fuchsia.

a girl of about fifteen with long, rather wild black hair. She was gauche in movement and in a sense, ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful. Her sullen mouth was full and rich – her eyes smouldered.”

Fuchsia is a typical teenager, moody, self-absorbed and selfish. Sequestered in the south wing of the castle are Sepulchrave’s identical twin sisters Cora and Clarice:

dressed in purple, with gold buckles at their throats by way of brooches, and another gold buckle each at the end of hatpins which they wore through their grey hair in order apparently to match their brooches. Their faces, identical to the point of indecency, were quite expressionless, as though they were the preliminary lay-outs for faces and were waiting for sentience to be injected.

Both suffered from ill-defined fits in their youth which left them with limited mobility and even less intelligence. They crave power and blame Gertrude for robbing them of their rightful place in the castle’s heirarchy.

This is the ruling Groan family. Their lives are supported by numerous servants. These include Mr Flay, Lord Sepulchrave’s personal assistant, who is obsessively dedicated to his master. Swelter, the castle’s enormously fat chef, is Flay’s arch-nemesis:

Swelter, as soon as he saw who it was, stopped dead, and across his face little billows of flesh ran swiftly here and there until, as though they had determined to adhere to the same impulse, they swept up into both oceans of soft cheek, leaving between them a vacuum, a gaping segment like a slice cut from a melon. It was horrible. It was as though nature had lost control. As though the smile, as a concept, as a manifestation of pleasure, had been a mistake, for here on the face of Swelter the idea had been abused.”

Nanny Slagg is the down-trodden Groan family carer, looking after Fuchsia and now Titus. Doctor Prunesquallor is the castle’s physician. Rottcodd cares for the Bright Carvings. Sourdust is the Master of Ritual.

Into this arcane, decaying, isolated world, comes Steerpike, a young kitchen boy who could give Machiavelli a run for his money, Rescued by Flay from the kitchen, mainly to irritate Swelter, Steerpike immediately starts scheming his rise to power. This is as much his story as Titus’s. Steerpike is the worm in the apple of Gormenghast, who slowly comes to corrupt the whole body-politic of the castle.

In some ways the castle itself is almost a character in the novel. Peake is endlessly fascinated by its eccentric architectural detail:

Most of these buildings had about them the rough-hewn and oppressive weight of masonry that characterized the main volume of Gormenghast, although they varied considerably in every other way, one having at its summit an enormous stone carving of a lion’s head which held between its jaws the limp corpse of a man on whose body was chiseled the words: “he was an enemy of Groan’; alongside this structure was a rectangular area of some length entirely filled with pillars set so closely together that it was difficult for a man to squeeze between them.

Some readers have struggled to allocate Titus Groan and its sequel to a particular genre. While often described as fantasy, there are no witches, dragons or magical spells here, nothing supernatural or other-worldly at all. We perhaps cannot tell where or when Gormenghast is, but the people who live there obey strictly the internal rules of the narrative. It is best read as a gothic adventure story, a romance. Yes it is peopled by grotesques who you are unlikely to meet in everyday – but you might. There are stranger people out there. Not that long ago the Guardian carried an article comparing the novel to its near contemporary The Lord of the Rings, trying to understand why it was not as well known or loved as Tolkien’s trilogy. This was surely a category error – one work is a quest trilogy peopled by dragons, dwarves, wizards and elves; in Titus we remain rooted in Gormenghast, and the only menacing creatures hiding in the shadows are the men and women of the castle.

Readers may struggle with Peake’s florid language. Without question some passages are over-written. The novel also has probably the slowest start of any classic – it takes an age to reach Titus’s birth and Steerpike’s escape from the kitchen. All I can say is that once you get past this point the pace picks up and the narrative is gripping across the two main novels. Steerpike is a compelling character – while he is clearly monstrous, we cannot help but sympathise with him for at least some of his journey.

Titus Groan and its sequels are wonderful, life-changing, superb novels. Peake creates memorable characters you come to genuinely care about, and who will stay with you. There is a Shakespearean quality to the tragedy that unfolds in this novel and its sequel, a tragedy compounded in a remarkable way by the turn of events in Peake’s own life that are reflected in the third and final novel in the series. They may not be universally popular – some readers may find it hard to find a hero to identify with, and the language over-indulgent – but I love them.