TITUS ALONE (Gormenghast Trilogy 3)

Titus Alone (Penguin Modern Classics) - Mervyn Peake My first impression of Titus Groan, the first part of the Gormenghast Trilogy, was that it was a deeply weird book. I was warned that Titus Alone, the third and last part, "gets even... weirder," and I'd say that's the case, and it feels very different than the other two. The first two books establish the strange world of Gormenghast Castle, a crumbling edifice that seemed timeless and hermetically sealed, a world unto itself and one that was hard to place but seemed pre-Industrial and bound by pointless ritual and Byzantine intrigues. The first book began with Titus' birth, and at the end of the last book, having grown to manhood, he's leaving the castle and abdicating his position as the 77th Earl. So gone is the warren-like castle from this book and all the characters I'd grown fond of. It's more than a bit of a shock when Titus reaches a city--one that's never heard of Gormenghast--to find it's a world that has automobiles, airplanes and elevators--and ray guns and hovering spy devices. The Publisher's Note says that Peake was already suffering from the illness that killed him when he was writing the story, and that the text had to be pieced together from a manuscript and notes--it was essentially a draft, not a polished, finished novel, and I think you can see that in reading this book. It's a lot sketchier than the other two books, with a third of the chapters less than a page, and some merely a few paragraphs, as if what he wrote was a mere outline he intended to flesh out later, and this book is half the length of the other two. Ironically I think that did pick up the pace--this was a faster read than the first two books, but not I think a better read, even if the prose was still vivid and and the imagination still prodigious as seen in creations like the Under-River. I read that Peake was among the first civilians to visit a Nazi concentration camp, where he saw inmates still too sick to be moved dying before his eyes, and I thought I could see that experience in his powerful and macabre depictions of Black Rose and "the factory." But Titus wasn't one of my favorite characters in the two earlier books--and he's utterly unlikeable here. He really doesn't connect with any of the people he meets--and neither did I. Acreblade and Cheetah aren't as fascinating villains as Steerpike, and Juno and Muzzlehatch aren't characters I grew fond of in the same way as Lady Fuchsia, Flay and Doctor Prunesquallor in the prior books. Nor do I understand in this book why so many strangers seem to be immediately taken with Titus, who is not their hereditary lord but a vagrant and a sullen young man of no extraordinary intelligence or talents or good looks. It seemed rather Marty Stu and not in keeping with the spirit of the prior books. The plot and characters, the style even, of the first two books for all their strangeness had their own internal logic, which I felt this one lacked. Which is not to say this book didn't have its fascinations and flashes of the prior brilliance, but no, I can't say I find it comparable to the fantastic first two books.