DICKENS IN A CASTLE


I have just finished reading Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. It’s been a great read, and I wonder why it took me so many years to get round to it. I saw an excellent stage adaptation in the mid-90s and that was enough gothic fantasy at the time, but of course I reckoned without Peake’s beautiful, elaborate – occasionally overwrought – prose style, in which words like “adumbrate” and “umbrageous” sit comfortably, and which is perfectly suited to describing the world of Gormenghast.

Pre-dating the first of the Lord Of The Rings books by two years, Titus Groan introduces the reader to a world as perfectly realised as Tolkien’s, full of colour and populated by unforgettably spiky characters, but thankfully free of elves and magic. The castle itself looms over its world, its occupants with their internal monologues and power struggles being the focus of the action. It is a place bound by calcified ritual and forms the backdrop to all the important scenes. Peake himself seems to be held in its spell; when his narrative occasionally wanders away from Gormenghast, it becomes far less compelling and much more the stuff of a more ordinary fantasy.

The best part of the book is the animation of the characters. A vein of dark humour permeates the pages as the author hones their idiosyncracies, like one of his own “Bright Carvers” - every twitch, stride and thought process is catalogued in detail. Their names are equally evocative: Sepulchrave, Dr Prunesquallor, Fuchsia, Swelter, Flay. Imagine Dickens set in a castle.

Like Dickens, Peake experiments with a variety of prose and narrative style. For example, when he portrays the same event from the point of view of all the characters present, or the half page devoted to the description of a raindrop trickling down a leaf. There are so many passages I could quote. The teenager Fuchsia’s love for her attic space (with echoes of Yeats’s Long-Legged Fly, perhaps) is beautifully captured here.

“As Fuchsia climbed into the winding darkness her body was impregnated and made faint by a qualm as of green April. Her heart beat painfully.

There is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inward as deeply. It is the love of a man or a woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.

The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast… The love of a painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry upon his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes’ handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in love.”

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