Mervyn Peake's TITUS GROAN

I think I'd be hard pressed to find a better example of decadent art than Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, if Volume One, Titus Groan, is any example. And I'm not just talking about the state of the castle in which most of the action (and, more importantly, inaction) takes place. That's just the most obvious (crumbling, half-abandoned, ill-explored*, spiderwebbed, dusty) example. 

Another feature of decadent art that Titus Groan exemplifies even more completely than its direct depiction of actual decay is the greater focus on the parts than the whole, and on the signifiers than the signified. And in this regard, Peake's work is almost farcically representative of the decadent. 

Take, for example, how the title character's father, Lord Sepulchrave**, the 76th Earl of Gormenghast, spends his waking hours: at breakfast he spends a good hour or two with his Master of Ritual, first a nonagenarian named Sourdust and later Sourdust's one-legged septuagenerian son Barquentine, consulting an incredibly detailed and comprehensive archive of rituals to determine what forms of what ceremonies need to be performed that day. Most of the rest of the day is given over to performing those rituals. So many rituals.*** No wonder the castle is all but tumbling down. Who has time to even sweep the floor except on, like, Ritual Floor Sweeping Day Which Occurs In The Eighth Month of Any Odd-Numbered Year But Only When The Full Moon Occurs On A Date Within That Month  That is Mathematically Divisible By Seven And The Sweeping Is Done With A Tiny Hand Broom That Has Been Passed Down Through Untold Generations Of Attendants Except It Was Stolen By An Owl 200 Years Ago So Now A Lower Servant Just Walks Across The Floor Making Broom Noises With His Creaky Ancient Voice.

I may have exaggerated a little there, but then again, I haven't read the sequels to Titus Groan yet. Heh.

Moreover, the individual parts of the human body get more attention than entire bodies do, and not just in the matter of how most characters are all but defined by notable body parts. Thus Sepulchrave's cadaverously thin manservant, Flay, is always announced by the distinctive sound of his creaking knees, head chef Swelter is a grotesque flow of fat with a face and maybe some limbs somewhere, Dr. Prunesqualor has a remarkable head of grey hair that one can't hear described without thinking of Eraserhead, rising servant Steerpike is both "high shouldered" and has a "bulging forehead" over eyes (and boy, wil we talk about eyes in this book) the color of drying blood, etc. They're almost like Homeric epithets. But that's not all, either.

Mervyn Peake had a thing about eyes. Many people do, of course, and many writers have made use of the image of eyes rolling or narrowing or bulging from their sockets, but Peake asks those eyes to hold his eye beer while eyes that feel unduly confined by his characters' heads perform feats no other eyes could ever be imagined to.

A passage I particularly enjoyed from the ongoing battle between Swelter and Flay is worth quoting here:

"Swelter's eyes meet those of his enemy, and never was there held between four globes of gristle so sinister a hell of hatred. Had the flesh, the fibres, and the bones of the chef and those of Mr. Flay been conjured away and away down that dark corridor leaving only their four eyes suspended in mid-air outside the Earl's door, then, surely, they must have reddened to the hue of Mars, reddened and smouldered, and at last broken into flame, so intense was their hatred—broken into flame and circled about one another in ever-narrowing gyres and in swifter and yet swifter flight until, merged into one sizzling globe of ire they must surely have fled, the four in one, leaving a trail of blood behind them in the cold grey air of the corridor, until, screaming as they fly beneath innumerable arches and down the endless passageways of Gormenghast, they found their eyeless bodies once again, and reentrenched themselves in startled sockets."

I mean, come on! Is that not the most delightfully bizarre passage in 20th century literature, if not indeed of all literature? 

Now imagine it read in the rich and rolling tones of Simon Vance, audiobook narrator par excellance, who made such a meal of it I had to rewind and have not only seconds, but thirds.

Indeed, for this reader, Titus Groan proved a book much better experienced on audio than in print. It was Simon Vance and Vance alone who got me past my prior point of abandonment from years before (when Fuschia first retreats to her secret attic, in case you were wondering). Some stories really need to be read aloud to be appreciated fully. I had a similar experience with The Vorrh trilogy, which took on whole new dimensions of awesome in Allan Corduner's voice.

Oh, and there's a plot in here somewhere: the title character is born in the first chapter, undergoes several ceremonies throughout the book, and becomes a weak sort of fulcrum for some other plots involving the high-shouldered Steerpike and Sepulchrave's dim-witted and power-mad twin sisters and the Earl's one refuge from ritual, his library.

And there are other amazing female characters to enjoy, especially Titus' mother, Countess Gertrude, a massive woman whose bedroom is always full of wild birds and who also keeps a multitude of white cats who have a special room all to themselves, and her daughter, Titus' sister Fuschia, who is furtive and sly and reacts even more oddly to the odd encounters she has with others than the rest of them do. And tiny Nanny Slagg, skinny Irma Prunesqualor and her prominent rotating hipbones (given an independent life and movement all their own in true decadent fashion), and Titus' mysterious wet nurse, Keda, who barely appears in the castle before she's out of it again having seemingly unconnected adventures in what world there is outside the crumbling castle. I feel I don't understand her presence in this novel at all, but think that somehow her brief sub-plot is maybe going to become more important in the rest of the series? At any rate, I can't imagine the very deliberate Peake including a figure like Keda merely for background detail. 

I'll find out soon enough. Gormenghast, the next in the series, is already queued up on Audible, though it isn't Vance narrating for some reason...

Five out of five disembodied red eyeballs.

*There is one servant, assigned to a very specialized part of the castle, who finds, towards novel's end, that he hasn't seen another human being for almost two years!

**The character names in here are on the nose and off the hook to a one.

***I'm pretty sure even the last of the Komnenos Dynasty would have considered the burden of ceremony and form at Gormenghast to be onerous.