There are times when I need to spend a few months with a good thousand-page book. My problem is that when I get within a hundred pages or so to the end of a book, I can't pace myself. I just finish it. With a long book the temptation's removed, and I can read it in small chunks. (Infinite Jest and Mason & Dixon got me through months of business school. [Has anyone else ever written that sentence?])
So since August I've been living in Gormenghast, or rather, I've been reading The Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake. I found this book through this list of 20 Strange Books and was intrigued. It's hailed as an underappreciated fantasy classic that compares favorably to the Lord of the Rings; how could I not give it a try?
Actually (and thankfully), The Gormenghast Novels (TGN) are no LOTR-clone. (Anyone who's suffered through the Shannahara books knows what I'm talking about.) In fact, they're quite unlike anything I've read. The LOTR is a quest; the story has an end, and just about every scene advances the plot somehow. TGN are the beginning of an unfinished work, and plot often takes second place to the most densly visual writing I've ever come across. The LOTR ranges all over Middle Earth while TGN (the first 2 books, at any rate) take place in a single castle. My parents read the LOTR to me and my sister when I was seven. I wouldn't give TGN to anyone under the age of 16. It might seriously warp a personality, and besides, it requires having a copy of the OED close at hand. Peake has an enormously obscure vocabulary. (My favorite new word from TGN: "Ichabod: an exclamation of regret.") And LOTR is about a magical world, or rather, about the end of magic in the world. The first two books of TGN takes place in a world that is not magical, but is bound by rituals a thousand years old; the third enters the realm of science fiction, with flying machines, death rays, and intelligent spheres.
"Does it have sports in it?" asks the small sick boy in bed.
"Sports?" says the grandfather. "There are duels, betrayal, ritual, murder, masques, ambition, seduction, madness, rape, revenge, fire, floods, storms, scientists, secret societies, cats, cooks, professors, sculptors, thieves, and above all, architecture."
Architecture? Of course. The world that Titus is born into is the world of Gormenghast Castle, a castle so large that no one knows the whole of it. There are endless rooms, forgotten halls, entire wings abandoned to birds, follies, towers, tunnels. Peake was an artist and a poet before he was an author, and he paints Gormenghast with these incredibly vivid descriptions. I often abhor description, but Peake pulls it off again and again because the castle is not just the setting, it's the tone and the mood and a character of its own.
"But what is it about?" the small boy wants to know.
In part, it is about the castle of Gormenghast and its inhabitants. Peake has a Dickensian array of characters, grotesques but not cartoons. Listen to these names: Sepulchrave. Fuschia. Swelter. Flay. Steerpike. Rottcodd. The Twins. Doctor Prunesquallor. The Thing. Muzzlehatch. Sourdust. Peake just lets these characters live, comically and tragically.
It is also about rebellion. Titus Groan is the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, but rebels against the endless and meaningless ritual that is the real ruler of life in the castle. At the same time, the young Steerpike rebels against the social order that keeps him a lowly cook. Both threaten Gormenghast.
And it is about madness. Treachery drives Titus' father to madness. (Titus must avenge his father's death -- did I mention that his mother's name is Gertrude?) Nearly everyone is crazed -- by love, by vanity, by ambition, by loss. The Rituals are a kind of collective madness of Gormenghast.
And Mervyn Peake himself went mad -- not the madness of insanity, but the deterioriation of the brain from Parkinson's Disease. Reading the third book, we are watching Peake begin to fall apart. Titus himself enters a modern world, a world of science fiction where no one has heard of Gormenghast, and he struggles to keep his sanity as he begins to doubt the castle's very existence. It's hard not to read this as a metaphor for Peake's own mind, as the plot begins to crumble, the vividness of the writing begins to fade.
Peake planned for TGN to be the beginning of a series about Titus, a sort of Pilgrim's Progress. Of the last novel, "Titus Awakes", there are only a few pages, before Peake's manuscript devolves into an indecipherable scrawl. But before that happened, Peake wrote books that will occupy a few months -- and your dreams.
| Science Fiction | Tolkien | Mervyn Peake | The Curious Bookshelf |
Your willingness to grapple with the vocabulary is a good thing. Too many people are put off by a book which stretches their vocabulary, as if it's OK to strecth their thinking surreptitiously, but not their tools for articulation.
As Samuel Johnson wrote in Idler 70:
Vanity inclines us to find faults any where rather than in ourselves. He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency; but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
...but everything you've written about this book is intriguing. It is now on my list.
Comment #1 :: link :: February 14, 2004 11:06 AM
