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| Wednesday, September 26, 2007 01:01 PM |
| Thoughts on Titus Groan |
 by Fëanor |
Quite a while ago (I think Christmas?) poppy got for me a great big paperback book collecting all three of the existing Gormenghast novels (as well as a bit of the planned, but never completed, fourth novel; some critical essays; and two introductions, one by Quentin Crisp, and another by Anthony Burgess). It's a series I'd heard a bit about and had been curious about reading, so I was quite pleased with the gift, but I didn't actually get around to even opening the thing up until just recently (although I'm already also reading a book poppy just gave me for my birthday, so I'm getting better). The author, Mervyn Peake, is both a writer and an illustrator, so a picture drawn by him will occasionally crop up in the text. (So far I've only seen one, and it wasn't that impressive, but keep in mind that at this point I've read only a few chapters.)
The first book, Titus Groan, was published in 1946, the second four years after that, and the third nine years after that. But really, the world of Gormenghast, the people in it, and the way they speak are all so pulled out of time and so separate from our own world that the books could easily have been written as long ago as the 1900s and as recently as yesterday.
Some people apparently sort this series into the fantasy genre, but (so far, at least) it is not at all what would be considered traditional fantasy. It's not swords and sorcery, knights and dragons, that sort of thing. It's just another world - a very small, insular one, consisting of a castle and the houses surrounding it. A world, yes, trapped in a medieval sort of past. But a world also that's absolutely choking with the weight of time and dust and tradition and with the necessity of observing a whole host of strange and pointless rituals.
Now, as I've said, I haven't gotten too far into these books yet, but I'm already really struck by Peake's incredibly imaginative, extremely visual - and visceral - writing style. He has a really amazing ability to describe places and people such that you not only see them very clearly in your mind, you can actually feel the atmosphere around them, hear the sounds, sense the heat, and even smell the scents. Images in this book are already haunting me. The cluttered, messy room of Lady Groan, with its spider-like chandelier, the ever-growing cone of dripped wax on the table beneath it, the birds perching on the bed rung, and then the hordes of white cats swarming in. And the characters and what they have to say are just as memorable, complex, and fascinating. Very little has actually happened in the story as yet (except that the title character has been born - apparently he'll only be two by the end of the first book), and normally I find books that move very slowly and are full of descriptions rather boring. And maybe I will lose interest eventually. But for now this one has me absolutely riveted. |
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