This year I resolved to read more classic science fiction and fantasy, hopefully making a dent in that stack of books I really should have read by now. Mostly because they should be good books, but also to be better informed about my genre and its history. I decided that this meant reading six science fiction and six fantasy books written before 1980 by authors that were completely new to me.
Since I feel weird saying I’m “reviewing” giants like H.G. Wells and T.H. White, let’s just say these will be my reactions to books that have shaped the science fiction and fantasy genres in one way or another.
Up this month is Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, first published in 1946.
Titus Groan (1974)
Written By: Mervyn Peake
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 543 (Mass Market Paperback)
Series: Book 1 The Gormenghast Trilogy
Publisher: Ballantine Books, Inc
Why I Chose It: This is supposed to be some of the escapist fantasy published after World War II, but it appeared before Tolkien, and I thought it would be an interesting look at how fantasy has evolved over the years.
The premise:
As the novel opens, Titus, heir to Lord Sepulchrave, has just been born. He stands to inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that form Gormenghast Castle. Meanwhile, far away and in the kitchen, a servant named Steerpike escapes his drudgework and begins an auspicious ascent to power.
Inside of Gormenghast, all events are predetermined by complex rituals, the origins of which are lost in time. The castle is peopled by dark characters in half-lit corridors. Dreamlike and macabre, Peake’s extraordinary novel is one of the most astonishing and fantastic works in modern fiction.
Spoiler Free.
Discussion: All right, confession time. This review is going to be pretty short because I did not end up finishing this book. For the first time in this Resolution Project, I failed. Miserably. That’s not an idle comparison since I hate failing and it just about kills me to give up on any book.
But every time I tried to put my feelings about this into words, all I could come up with was “pulling teeth”, and in the end I couldn’t figure out why I was torturing myself. I do feel like this is an important work, and it was pretty painful to give up on it. But not as painful as it would have been to continue.
I just could not handle the description. Entire chapters, pages and pages, detailing places and people I couldn’t bring myself to care about yet. I’m sure Peake was setting up something truly epic by giving us a deep, personal look into every person living in this dark and foreboding castle. But it felt like wading through miles and miles of mud. Really boring mud.
Boring mostly because, as far as I could tell, nothing was happening. I gave this book a hundred and thirty pages and four days of my life and in that time I got through the title character’s birth. That’s it. Literally, a hundred pages into the story – what there was of one – everything stops to say “this is what happened to the characters on the day Titus was born.” One hundred pages. One day. The book is over five hundred pages long and I didn’t think I could sit through another four days of this newborn’s life. Especially when all anyone was going to do was talk about it.
I’m sure it was a stylistic choice since I’ve been reading much older novels without any trouble, but I had a hard time with the dialogue. It was roundabout and confusing and every character took three pages to convey one idea. It just made me want to yell, “talk like a normal person!” I had to spend so much time interpreting what they were saying that I couldn’t even begin to appreciate what was being said or how it pertained to what was going on.
In Conclusion: One day I would like to go back and try to make it through this classic. Maybe when I have more time, and I can take it in stages knowing I will have to work at it. A lot of people seem to enjoy it. But right now, Titus Groan just did not work for me.
Next month I’ll be reading Foundation by Isaac Asimov, first published in 1951. I’ve never read any Asimov before so I’m excited to try it.
The prose in this book is just wild. It’s nearly hallucinogenic in the obsession with details. In some ways it reminds me of stream of consciousness, except exactly the opposite? If that makes any sense? S-O-C is obsessed with the inner life of a character and this is obsessed with the characters moving through their world in excruciating detail. I got through the first book, skimmed into the next two, and decided I couldn’t do it. I feel like Peake’s definitely had an influence on SF writers though, like China Mieville.
There was a TV Mini-series (Gormenghast) made in 2000, and I thought that would be much more accessible. Spoiler! It wasn’t! It only highlighted how very peculiar the characters and their dialogue were.
Someday I’ll read the third: at least to see the true weirdness of everything. That this whole story apparently takes place in the “modern” world, and Titus wanders out of Gormenghast to deal with motor cars and helicopters and magical scientists…. So yeah, it gets weirder, apparently.
I tried this in the flurry of fantasy ‘classics’ that came out on the coattails of LoTR popularity in the ’60s. Never made it to page 10. Same for Gormenghast, Worm Ouroboros, Lord Dunsany, and other precursors to Tolkien.
Oh, I’m so glad I wasn’t the only one. I really thought it might be me.