A sentence or paragraph is like a chord of harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect.
– Ursula K Le Guin, from her introduction to “The Left Hand of Darkness”
The reading of ‘Titus Groan,’ a fantasy novel by the British author Mervyn Peake, was an experience that has stuck with me unexpectedly. I’d heard of the novel and the sterling reputation that it and its sequel, Gormenghast, have in the ‘genre’ fiction community – both are seen as landmark works that are demonstratively literary in their approach to the writing of fantasy.
I know that I myself can be a bit of a rambler – I regrettably fill pages and pages up with writing, will into being words to tumble and trickle and play viciously amongst the long slopes of language in a way that is obfuscating and entirely unnecessary. It is not out of the question that I might interject with cliché anachronisms, (their insertions can seem almost deliberate in their ruining of the flow of a piece) and at others I interrupt with phrases that are too modern and bombastic in their natures to suit the otherwise contemplative nature of what is written. I can be a horrible writer. I relish in unseemly grandiosity, in terrible examples of the purplest prose. I write without a modern voice, with affectation and distance from the present day. I write like I am afraid. There is no way to reign all this in; to do so would require such force that I’m quite sure saddle and rope would fall to pieces.
Reading Peake’s work, then, was a true revelation – amongst those barren fields of microwave-oven prose that litter fantasy novels rises a grotesque, obsessive authorial structure, one that looms on the literary horizon. A structure, a behemoth, speaking with its strength and grandeur and twisted obscurity. Titus Groan and Gormenghast strike a gargantuan pose on the landscape, digging deep to the earthen bones of the place of the novel whilst joyously scraping at the sky with jagged peaks.
A beautiful place, but one that could all the same never really be called friendly. What I love about fantastic fiction is that it can seem to stand on its own, written and so read separate from the world we live in. ‘Titus Groan’ then is a book written for itself – it is beautiful and terrible and grotesque. It is a novel that should be read, and I am very glad that it has been written.
Fruit Thief 