Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake: ***1/2

Writing, writing writing. Peake proffers a writing extravaganza. Wow. I was consistently stunned by his descriptive prowess. Peake really impressed me. Again I find that I've read a book largely devoid of any real momentum, and yet I loved it. There is a plot, after a time, though a major percentage of the book is character study, for which Peake is ultimately most suited. His description of Gorgmenghast castle and the surrounding area is absolutely fantastic. I couldn't stop gushing to Ellie (my wife) the entire time I read it, forcing her to listen to snippets of Peake's prose as I read them to her before she could ask me not to.

The story - well, this is probably Peake's weak point, not because plot is pushed to the background (with this I have no problem, as has been the case with me for many years), but because the plot is just pretty straightforward: man dislikes other man, tries to stab him, woman longs for more power, men fight over woman. It's fine enough, but mostly the plot just spins along, providing a backdrop for character study and ambience. Fortunately, Peake is a master as describing these straightforward plot scenarios, the high point of which might have been a bizarre fight absolutely filled with tension. Actually, a sequence about a young kid's short-yet-long journey is at least as amazing. And then there's that chapter about this woman returning home that's pretty great too. Peake makes banal ideas glisten. Plus, he has an excellent sense of the fantastic and absurd, drawing unique, larger-than-life characters to fill his tale. The writing alone makes this novel worth reading, but the amazing characters only cement the book's value. If Peake can develop a better sense of plot in the second and third novels, this may become a masterpiece. At the moment, it's just very, very good.

Quotes:
As with Wolfe's books, virtually any paragraph is quoteworthy, so I'll just pick a few at random:
pg. 246: "When Keda came back to her people, the cacti were dripping with rain. The wind was westerly, and above the outline of the Twisted Woods the sky was choked with crumpled rags. Keda stood for a moment and watched the dark rulers of the rain slanting steadily from the ragged edge of the clouds to the ragged edge of the woods. Behind the opaque formations the sun was hidden as it sank, so that but little light was reflected from the empty sky above her."

pg. 311: "The morning of the next day opened drearily, the sun appearing only after protracted periods of half-light, and then only as a pale paper disc, more like the moon than itself, as for a few moments at a time it floated across some corridor of cloud. Slow, lackluster veils descended with almost imperceptible motion over Gormenghast, blurring its countless windows, as with a-dripping smoke. The mountain appeared and disappeared a score of times during the morning as the drifts obscured it or lifted from its sides. As the day advanced the gauzes thinned, and it was in the late afternoon that the clouds finally dispersed to leave in their trace an expanse of translucence, that stain, chill and secret, in the throat of a lily, a sky so peerless, that as Fuschia stared into its placid depths she began unwittingly to break and rebreak the flower stem in her hands."
(Spring 2004)

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