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| Saturday, March 22, 2008 07:13 PM |
| (Last updated on Sunday, November 30, 2008 07:44 AM) | | Book Report - Titus Alone & Titus Awakes |
 by Fëanor |
I have finally finished Mervyn Peake's Titus books. You can find my thoughts on the first one, Titus Groan, here and here, and the second one, Gormenghast, here.
The volume I have, which collects all of the books together, also includes a number of critical essays which I haven't quite finished yet, but which have already enlightened me a bit about the details of Peake's life, and gotten me thinking about the books in new ways. Peake's biography is a pretty sad story. He was a poet, artist, illustrator, playwright, and novelist, but he never really struck it big in any of those fields during his lifetime. While he was still writing Titus Alone, he was taken ill with a form of Parkinson's disease which made it impossible for him to continue writing and which ultimately killed him. Peake was not able to assist in the editing and polishing of Titus Alone for publication. His wife, unsure of what to do, simply approved all of the publisher's suggestions for edits, which led to a number of whole chapters and some smaller sections being cut out. Some of that text has since been restored. But still, it's hard to look at Titus Alone as a complete, finished work.
Titus Awakes, the proposed sequel, suffered an even worse fate; of the little of the story Peake was able to record to paper, only a page and a half was legible. This page and a half is included in the very back of my volume, along with Peake's very basic notes on the characters and events that might have appeared in the rest of the book, and in the later Titus books Peake had envisaged.
The only other extant writing about Titus by Peake is a short story called "Boy in Darkness," set between the events of Gormenghast and Titus Alone. I might have to track that down one of these days.
As for Titus Alone itself, it's a very odd piece of fiction, even more so than the first two books, and indeed very unlike them. It may be a bit of a spoiler to say this, but I think it's important to mention that during this book we never return to the setting of Gormenghast, and in fact it is revealed at the end that Titus himself never returns to that place for the rest of his life. I realized this fact rather early on, and it kind of horrified me. One of the most interesting things about the first two books is Gormenghast - its vast beauty, its strange atmosphere, its mysterious rituals. To spend the first two books building up the place until it seems like another character, and to then discard it entirely in the third book seemed insane to me. But in fact Gormenghast's absence is a continual presence throughout this novel. Practically all that Titus talks about or thinks about is Gormenghast, and everything he does is in relation to Gormenghast. In a way, the book is about the fact that it is not set in Gormenghast.
As the book opens, Titus has been wandering away from Gormenghast apparently for some years. During that time, he has been followed continuously (and will be followed throughout this book) by a pair of identical helmeted men. Who they are and where they came from is never explained, but my immediate assumption was that they had been sent from Gormenghast to find their wayward Earl and bring him back home. If that's so, then their final act of murder at the end of the book is a little puzzling. Maybe they're simply meant to be a symbol of authority and tradition attempting to bring things back under control.
While escaping from these men for what is apparently not the first time, Titus sees a city in the distance. Titus displays his usual fortitude and collapses in a faint into the bottom of a boat, which fortuitously floats directly up to a dock of the city, where Titus is removed from the boat (again thanks to luck, or fate) by a beggar. The twin helmeted men come for Titus again, but the boy is swept away from them and into the heart of the city by one of the major characters of the novel, Muzzlehatch.
Besides being one of the book's major characters, Muzzlehatch is also pretty much the book's only likable character. He is a huge man with a generous nature, and a love of adventure and of animals.
One of the first things we see of Muzzlehatch is his car, and this is just the first of the many shocks the book had in store for me. I mean, a car? I wasn't sure what we would find in the world outside of Gormenghast, but in the first two novels, the castle seems pretty clearly to be situated in a Medieval world - a world of horses and swords. Instead, the world that Titus stumbles into here is one of machines and electricity, airplanes and robots. It is, in short, a science fiction setting. To find not only that Gormenghast has been denied us, but that now we are also in a completely different genre is more than a little unsettling. And it's odder still that Titus himself, having grown up, I assume, without ever even having heard of any of these technologies or devices, and certainly without ever having seen them, doesn't seem to find them particularly surprising or hard to understand.
But back to Muzzlehatch's car. It's quite a fantastic contraption, and described as if it is almost alive; Muzzlehatch even ties it to a nearby tree or post when he's done with it. In other words he treats it like another one of his animals - of which he keeps an entire zoo at his house. These animals are nearly human in their emotions and actions, and Muzzlehatch has a strange power over them. He's quite a character. But instantly upon awaking, Titus flees from Muzzlehatch and his zoo. This will be the pattern of the book, repeated over and over. Essentially, Titus' journey is never one to anywhere in particular; it is always instead away from Gormenghast, and away from any other person or place that might try to offer him help or love or kindness - anyone that tries to ask anything of him, hold him down, or control him in any way. Titus is in no way a man of action. He is a man of reaction. Since he was a boy it seems he's spent most of his life fainting, passing out, and collapsing. He is a lost man, running from everything. He wants most of all to not be the Earl of Gormenghast - to not be a part of that gigantic, consuming machine of ritual - but at the same time, that machine is all that he knows, and all that he is. What can he be if he is not the Earl of Gormenghast? He spends the whole book trying to discover the answer to this, to find himself, even while he's obsessed with dreams of his past life. Perversely, now that he has gotten far enough away from Gormenghast that no one knows what it is, he is outraged by their ignorance. Why do they not treat him with the respect due his position? Don't they know that he's the one who hunted down and slew the madman Steerpike, enemy of Gormenghast? (This act - the only real action he ever performed - is his most treasured memory.) In fact, they don't know, and they find his stories of Gormenghast so unlikely that many believe they are just that - stories. In fact, they think he's a madman himself, and after a while, he even begins to suspect that perhaps Gormenghast is just a fantasy or a dream and that it never really existed.
A thought that eerily calls to mind the fact that Gormenghast is, of course, just a story. Which further calls to mind parallels between this book and the real world. Is Titus' perverse love/hate relationship with Gormenghast a symbol of Peake's own love/hate relationship with the fictional place he built? Did Peake think it had to be left behind for the Titus story to grow, only to realize that it was the very soul of the Titus story?
Perhaps I'm reading too much into things there. But it certainly feels as if Peake, the man, is more at the forefront of this novel than of any of the others. Part of him must at least be there in the character of the tired old writer, confined to his bed or a wheelchair, and surrounded always by towering structures made out of his own unsold books.
Whether the story is really about Peake himself or not, it continues with Titus stumbling into an even more science fiction-like part of the city, where he finds himself running from automatons into a deserted part of a large building, and from there observing a surreally crowded party where the rich and extremely eccentric are whiling away their time. He falls into the room and is on the verge of being arrested when he is saved miraculously yet again by Muzzlehatch, who appears just in the nick of time. Also helping him this time is the beautiful, bounteous Juno, a character who is so full of all of the classically good characteristics of a woman - loving, giving, and nurturing, and yet also sexual, alluring, and adventurous - that she seems to be an almost impossible archetype. As usual, Titus angrily rejects the help and love they selflessly offer him, and manages to get arrested after all.
And the story continues like this, with Titus getting himself into horrible trouble, somebody (usually Muzzlehatch) saving him, and Titus being rude and idiotic and running away again. Titus' perverse obsessions, and the arc of his character through the book, are interesting in an abstract sense, but annoying in practice; mostly you just want to slap him as he constantly whines and moans about Gormenghast, and collapses into faints and feverish dreams of Gormenghast, and insults the only people who love him. The final sequence, where he comes all the way to the last hill beyond which he knows the towers of his home rise - so close that he can even hear the bells ringing there - and then turns and runs away forever, is very moving and effective. And there are in fact a number of interesting concepts in the rest of the story - like the idea of someone building a faux Gormenghast and peopling it with horrible parodies of the people Titus knew there, in order to drive him finally into true madness - but most are executed just as poorly as the main character and premise. The story is badly paced, episodic, and full of seemingly meaningless and pointless (and not to mention boring and irritating) characters and scenes. The dialogue and narration is often melodramatic and unsubtle and clumsy. Many of the characters are half-formed and two-dimensional. Every once in a while there are glimpses of Peake's talent for visual description, and some interesting concepts well executed (as in that final scene), but mostly this is just a very disappointing novel that I found it rather hard to get through. It's quite a step down from the other Titus books.
As for the few pages of Titus Awakes that survived, it's hard to even give them much of a review. They pick up exactly where Titus Alone ends, with Titus running down the hill and away from Gormenghast. He then falls into a strange, seemingly symbolic dream peopled by some of the characters from the other novels - including Flay and Swelter. Which is odd, because if I remember correctly Swelter died before Titus could ever have really seen and known him. I also found it odd that Titus knew in Titus Alone that his father had died by being eaten alive by owls. I could be wrong, but I thought that was a secret that Flay took with him to his grave. Maybe at this point in the series, Peake had simply lost his hold on the continuity. Certainly this page and a half are full of typos, misspellings, and other errors.
It's very sad that Peake's illness not only ended the Titus series prematurely, but very probably took its toll on the quality of the final, "completed" book. Still, I'm very glad to have read this series, and definitely consider Titus Groan and Gormenghast to be truly great, and truly unique, epics of the fantastic. |
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