Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast is one of those series I've been meaning to read for ages and never quite got round to! I'm delighted to welcome Pathfinder author Angie Sage to the blog today to talk about the first book, Titus Groan.
I read the first
book from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast world when I was nineteen. I still have my
copies of all three books: Titus Groan,
Gormenghast and Titus Alone and I notice they cost fifty-five
pence or eleven shillings. It was 1971, still in old money to decimal
changeover. I love these echoes of the past...
I had just
finished the Lord of the Rings series
and was looking for something to fill that empty feeling you get when you leave
a book-world that has become almost real. My father told me about Mervyn
Peake—he was a big fan of his writing—so I went to Foyles in Charing Cross Road
and blew fifty-five pence on Titus Groan.
And then, like the anti-hero Steerpike, I climbed into the Castle of
Gormenghast and never quite found my way out again.
It was the poetry
of Mervyn Peake’s language that first drew me in, and the physical presence of
the castle of Gormenghast itself kept me there. The castle was so very strange
and yet it also felt familiar. It seemed to be a combination of all the dreams
of places I had ever had, and I recognised it at once. There were so many
amazing images: the four acre stone sky-field on the roof, ‘where clouds moved
through it invisibly’, the white horse and its foal swimming
in a distant water-filled tower, the enormous tree that grew from the wall
where two old ladies took their tea, and the sheer massive, decrepitude of the
place. It was truly somewhere to become lost in. Which I did.
The book was inhabited
by a variety of strange, intricately described characters, all of whom were
living lives prescribed by the rituals of the castle. I think my only
reservation about Titus Groan
would be that I never found a character to identify with. They were oddly removed,
as though the castle itself had taken too much of them. But this is only
something I realise now. At the time it didn’t worry me, I was lost in
Gormenghast, wandering through the lives of those who lived there, allowed to
observe. And I never did find anywhere quite as rich to visit again.
I forgot about
Titus and his strange castle for years, or I thought I did. But it lodged in
the back of my mind and became, without me realising it at the time, a kind of
template for Septimus Heap. And
because of this I have never quite dared re-read it, until now. So when I
picked up Titus Groan once more in
order to write about why I had loved it so much, I did so with with a certain
trepidation. It was not just the fear of finding that an old love no longer
burns as brightly as it once did, but also because I was a little afraid of how
much of Gormenghast had found its way into Septimus
Heap.
I was relieved to
find no more than echoes. But echoes there are…
But that’s it, as
far as I can tell. There was no Marcia Overstrand lurking in the Castle of
Gormenghast, for which I was thankful. And I suspect they were too.
When I finished
reading Titus Groan just now, I
realised that it was like meeting a very old friend. There are happy familiarities
that you slip back into, but life has moved on, and there were things in Titus Groan that I looked for and did
not find. But I got to wander through the Castle of Gormenghast once more and
it was magnificent. As ever.
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