Titus Awakes
by John Holbo on June 18, 2011
When I was but a callow lad, the Gormenghast novels were among my favorites. Now that I am grown into a strapping, callow man, they are still among my favorites. I do so hope that Titus Awakes
[amazon] turns out to be good. It was written in the early 1960’s by Maeve Gilmore, Peake’s wife, and only discovered last year in an attic by their grand-daughter. Gilmore based it on notes and an outline by Peake himself. Here’s a Telegraph piece about the rediscovery.
It won’t be released for a few more weeks, but you can listen to the first bit of the audiobook here. Simon Vance is the reader.
Quite a bit of Peake stuff is being reprinted right now, or has come back in print only in the past few years. Just in the next couple months: Peake’s Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings of Mervyn Peake
; Mr. Pye
; A Book of Nonsense
. Poke around if you like Peake. I haven’t checked out Boy in Darkness and Other Stories
yet. My daughters have enjoyed Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, and my vintage copy is rather falling apart. So it’s nice to know new ones are available
.
Let’s discuss our hopes and fears for Titus Awakes.
{ 27 comments }
geo 06.18.11 at 4:52 pm
Damn. I thought for an instant this was going to be about Titus Andronicus.
Niall McAuley 06.18.11 at 5:31 pm
I have a very nice Alice with illustrations by Peake.
Simon 06.18.11 at 6:06 pm
It’s very interesting that there is a new Titus novel, though one that seems to be even more removed from it’s original author than the last — but does anyone even like Titus Alone? I’ve always found it more strange than readable, where the first two books were the reverse.
tomslee 06.18.11 at 6:15 pm
I’ve read Titus Groan many times, Gormenghast twice (and not recently) and Titus Alone once, and I suspect that’s a common pattern. I fear that nothing can recapture the magically ponderous quality of the original stone and I expect to be disappointed: the madness that made Titus Groan so wonderful was really not sustainable over multiple books.
That said, the chance that it may be Something after all will make me follow the discussion, but I suspect I won’t read it unless the reviews are really good.
By the way, does anyone know how much Maeve Gilmore contributed to the books? The Telegraph article statement that “she was so involved in Peake’s writing” is intriguing but I know nothing about her.
Phil 06.18.11 at 10:05 pm
The trouble with the Titus books is Titus. I mean, Titus Groan is wonderful, but it ends with Titus a baby. Gormenghast has wonderful bits – and some horribly dark bits, which bring home the real horror of the darker parts of Groan – but it also has a lot of stuff about Titus’s schooldays, which isn’t terribly good. Titus as a teenager and young adult could have been interesting, but removing him from Gormenghast altogether was what Sir Humphrey would call a courageous decision. Having said that, I was mildly obsessed with Titus Alone at one point – as an undergraduate I wrote an extended essay mapping the correspondences between characters and situations in the outside world of TA and the Gormenghast of the first two books – but it reads like the work of someone who’s losing his faculties: the writing is thin and scrappy, several scenes and some characters are hallucinatorily weird, and the horrors are nightmarishly senseless and rebarbative. (Most of this also applies to Boy in Darkness.)
As for the new book, it’s an interesting find, but it’s not Peake – unless it turns out that Maeve had a role in the earlier books, of course.
tomslee 06.18.11 at 11:56 pm
Simon Vance is the reader
I want to be Simon Vance when I grow up. I’ve heard a couple of books he has read, and he is brilliant.
David 06.19.11 at 12:02 am
Good news about Captain Slaughterboard.
Kieran Healy 06.19.11 at 12:43 am
I’ve read Titus Groan many times, Gormenghast twice (and not recently) and Titus Alone once, and I suspect that’s a common pattern.
Yeah … I remember flying through the first one and then very quickly becoming more and more disappointed.
John Holbo 06.19.11 at 3:11 am
I really liked all three books. I liked the way the fantasy element because a weird sf element. So I guess I’m the target audience here.
“unless it turns out that Maeve had a role in the earlier books, of course.”
The style of the very little bit we can hear is, at the very least, Peakean enough for me to enjoy. But I think it’s possible that the opening bit is the only bit actually written by Peake himself. We’ll see.
David Tiley 06.19.11 at 7:22 am
I’ve always assumed that Titus Alone is a sketch of the real book. Peake was pretty sick by the time he wrote it. The other two are written like a film animator describing scenes – you could drop them into a storyboard very easily – but that density and sumptuously visual language is weaker in Titus Alone. So a fourth book takes us even further from the original vision.
John Holbo 06.19.11 at 7:48 am
Yes, that’s all true, David. But I’ve always loved the third book for it’s sheer, genre-bending weirdness. Like if spaceships had shown up in “The Return of the King”.
Phil 06.19.11 at 9:02 am
I think Peake was in some ways an oppressed writer – there’s something genuinely nightmarish, a sense of a threat that’s crushing and inescapable but utterly mindless, about both of the driving forces of the first two books (Gormenghast itself and Steerpike, its nemesis). Titus is something of a cipher – he wants to get out of this mad, oppressive place and away from (the work of) this mad, oppressive man, which makes him more human than the rest of the cast but much thinner as a character. The world of Titus Alone has some of this thinness – he has escaped, after all; he’s out in the real world – but the nightmarish quality is still there.
belle le triste 06.19.11 at 9:47 am
This may just be a version of “the sky was more perfectly blue when I was young”, but the colour printing in the new Capt.Slaughterboard doesn’t quite seem to match my memories of the edition my dad had as a child, which was kept at my gran’s house and disappeared long ago. The purple in particular seems to mask some of the drawings a bit too much.
bigcitylib 06.19.11 at 11:23 am
After having read the trilogy three times, I’ve come to accept T. Alone. At least, I think it “fits” in the overall scheme of the trilogy, rather than just being a sign of Peake’s mental deterioration. I think the far simpler prose style may be a sign of this, although even that too can be justified. Think of the first two books as a closed society in Popper’s sense, and the choice at the end of Gorm as the choice between returning to that and embracing something closer to modern capitalism (the world in TA).
As for the fourth book, well…which will suck more–that or the upcoming Steig Larson novel?
bigcitylib 06.19.11 at 11:24 am
Also, Titus Andronicus rocks. Stickles is a boy genius.
John Holbo 06.19.11 at 2:08 pm
Yes, Titus Andronicus does rock. And I liked Anthony Hopkins as Titus as well.
Pyre 06.19.11 at 8:38 pm
Well, the whole Gormenghast/Titus trilogy/series/trajectory never did really *conclude*, did it?
Titus is shaped, emerges, and then….?
So I’m looking forward to how Titus Awakes completes (?) the arc.
Peter 06.19.11 at 9:31 pm
Maeve Gilmore was an artist rather than a writer, and contributed nothing literary to the Titus books. She was given much help over her memoir of her husband, A World Away, but in the late 70s she began to write for herself and published at least one short story. Titus Awakes is all hers, apart from the opening pages which reprint the notes that Peake left for what he called Titus4, long available in the Overlook Press edition of the Titus books.
ajay 06.20.11 at 8:17 am
it reads like the work of someone who’s losing his faculties: the writing is thin and scrappy, several scenes and some characters are hallucinatorily weird, and the horrors are nightmarishly senseless and rebarbative.
This is quite right – also the point that Titus himself is the weak point of the first two. He doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t do anything at all in the first book, what with being a baby, and he’s pretty inert in the second one as well – right up to the fight in the ivy he’s just being pushed around by Prunesquallor, by his mother, and later by Flay. The only action he takes is running away – and then he falls under Flay’s wing.
They’re still terrific books because the other characters and the settings are so rich; but by the end of the second one almost all the interesting characters – Fuchsia, Steerpike, Sepulchrave, Flay – are dead. I think I made a bit of an error reading the third one at all, to be frank; there’s a touch of Lewis’ Syndrome about it (an ill-advised sequel retroactively poisons all the other books in the series; see also Tehanu and the Revelation of St John).
Phil 06.20.11 at 11:21 am
To be fair, I think Tehanu was meant to retrospectively taint the earlier books, but didn’t – what it did was raise prospective doubts about the author (which weren’t entirely borne out – The Other Wind is OK).
Revisiting Titus Alone, I find I’m quite taken with my 19-year-old self’s idea about the characters being distorted reflections of characters in the earlier two books – Muzzlehatch/Sepulchrave, Juno/Gertrude… But I didn’t know what to do with the idea then & still don’t.
wufnik 06.20.11 at 12:09 pm
Slightly apropos, the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, one of Britains’s best small museums, currently has a very nice exhibition of Peake’s work, mostly drawing from Titus and other books as an illustrator, including the Grimm tales and Captain Slaughterboard. Runing through 17 July–worth the trip.
Cian 06.20.11 at 12:37 pm
Pallant house gallery is worth the trip purely for the permanent collection, or even the building.
I loved Tehanu. Easily my favourite of all the Earthsea books, though I understand why many didn’t, but then in a sense that rejection parallels one of the themes of the book.
ajay 06.20.11 at 12:59 pm
I’m quite taken with my 19-year-old self’s idea about the characters being distorted reflections of characters in the earlier two books – Muzzlehatch/Sepulchrave, Juno/Gertrude
Or, possible, undistorted reflections? Muzzlehatch and Juno are much less grotesque and closer to, well, normal humanity than Sepulchrave and Gertrude. Maybe that’s the way Peake wanted the whole series to go – Titus gradually moving further away from the weirdness of his childhood.
Nababov 06.20.11 at 1:27 pm
I always felt that in Titus Alone, you could feel the real world impinging in a way it didn’t in the first two. I could imagine how his time as a war artist in Belsen would have influenced Titus’s terrible new world of science and factories.
ajay 06.20.11 at 2:54 pm
But I’ve always loved the third book for it’s sheer, genre-bending weirdness. Like if spaceships had shown up in “The Return of the Kingâ€.
Spaceships don’t, but industrialisation and pollution do, at least in the last chapter… give Sharkey a few more years and he’d probably have built a motorway along the Greenway.
Phil 06.20.11 at 4:39 pm
To be fair, I loved bits of Tehanu and find they’ve stayed with me – the slow quiet bits – but even then I wished it wasn’t an Earthsea book.
Lemuel Pitkin 06.25.11 at 5:33 am
see also Tehanu
Nothing to say about Gormenghast, not having read it — maybe I will, now? — but enthusiastic agreement to his. You couldn’t write the Earthsea books now — certainly not if you are a principled feminist like LeGuin — but you shouldn’t retrospectively rewrite them either.
Funnily, tho, her most recent stuff is every bit as good as what she was doing in her prime. The stories in The Birthday of the World are every bit as good as the ones in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. To be that genuinely creative at nearly 80…
So where’s the new LeGuin? (Yeah, yeah, China Mieville, yeah I know…)
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