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Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

by Mervyn Peake

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read in July 2024

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Vi said: " “But haven't all ambitious people something of the monstrous about them?”

Titus Groan opens on a room full of wooden statues, with one caregiver charged with the single task of sweeping them daily. The dust falls off the statues and on the pavement. N “But haven't all ambitious people something of the monstrous about them?”

Titus Groan opens on a room full of wooden statues, with one caregiver charged with the single task of sweeping them daily. The dust falls off the statues and on the pavement. No one is tasked to sweep the floor, so no one does.

The ritual, senseless and empty, is replicated tenfolds around the castle of Gormenghast, property of the Groan dynasty, and spans into a web of rigid traditions the inhabitants must respect to the T, lest offend centuries upon centuries of history. The characters, trapped within the walls of a castle whose architecture recalls Piranesi’s paintings, are wooden statues themselves, impossibilitated to move outside of the borders the rituals and their shared history have paved for them: those who remain unaware of their entrapment, like the overly-zelous servant Flay or the imperious Countess Gertrude, live their lives dutifully, if not serenly. Those, instead, with a higher degree of sensitivity (though not awareness), as the Count Sepulchrave and his daughter Fuchsia, struggle against the constraints within their own mind, finding consolation -respectively- in books and reveries. All of them, though static and deeply farsesque, vibrate with the delightful vitality of the best Dickensian characters.

But change —this obscure, feared, mischievous phenomenon so long kept away from Gormenghast— has entered its wall under double form. First, the birth of the dynasty’s heir, Titus Groan, just an infant for the entirety of this book, destined to become the 77th Count Groan at his father’s death. Secondly, the escape from the kitchen of a servant, 17-year-old Steerpike, and his subsequent physical and metaphorical rise to power: determined to make a name for himself by any means necessary, Steerpike — lovechild of Julien Sorel and Richard III — uses his cunning intelligence and his patience to water the seeds of discord already planted within the walls of Gormenghast and slowly takes possession of the castle —and the people within it.

Bitterly hilarious and grotesquely tragic, Titus Groan (book 1 in the Gormenghast trilogy, published in 1946) is a novel that reeks from the best influences of British narrative, while adding a penchant for the absurd that makes the reader consider both the stratifications of class and the meaninglessness of life, if unquestioned. And it is indeed from the questioning of this (any?) status quo that the story begins, the castle suddenly alive as its immutability is called into question, while most characters simmer in a profound sadness they are hardly able to understand. And as we watch Steerpike make his way with remorseless manipulation, arson and murder, but also show a genuine, boyish glee for his accomplishments (sliding down a banister, jumping in the rain or just laughing himself to sleep), we cannot but remember the considerations Flay himself made, at the beginning our story:

«It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.» ...more "

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— Feb 04, 2026 12:02PM

Jul 05, 2024 02:26AM · see review