Titus Alone by: Mervyn Peake

 

Titus Alone was one of the final works of Mervyn Peake to be published within his lifetime.  Published in 1959, the last decade of Peake’s life was one of illness and hardship.  He showed signs of early onset dementia and received rounds of electroconvulsive therapy and in the late years of his life lost his ability to draw which is a shame in and of itself.  It’s almost important to understand this if you’re going to approach Titus Alone, because as a novel it feels almost unfinished.  Gone are the lengthy descriptions and surreal prose, and in its place the novel is an incredibly short, nightmarish fever dream of a book following Titus outside of Gormenghast.  It’s only about 220 pages in length, making it the shortest of the trilogy and as such there is something about the book that feels thin.  Peake’s usually expansive prose is stripped down to several short sequences exploring several ideas of Titus’ futile journey of self-discovery now that he has gotten what he wants.  He is out of Gormenghast, the people outside of the castle have never heard of the place and don’t believe this delirious boy could possibly have such an archaic title as an Earl.  Much of the novel is delirious wanderings on the part of Titus as the stark medieval fantasy gives way to a technological fantasy in such an odd way, Peake clearly wishing to comment on the then modern, industrialized society, butt sadly the meandering doesn’t really allow for this to work.

The meandering really means that the general characterization of Titus Awakes suffers greatly, despite being short it becomes a nearly incomprehensible book.  It feels as if Peake turned in a first draft in places, his naming convention of characters is still there but of the new characters only Muzzlehatch and Cheeta are the two that stick in my mind as memorable, and even then there isn’t much physical description of what they look like.  The industrialization commentary feels as if Peake saw Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings anti-industrialization and decided to write something showing a more positive, progressive side of society: Titus Alone attempts to continue the takedown of tradition and rituals which were part of what made Titus Groan and Gormenghast so fascinating, but the ideas are just not thought out nearly as well as they could be and because it is so short it’s a difficult book for me to really discuss.  It’s not a bad book, whenever Titus is allowed to be the focal point the book is brilliant and has some of Peake’s most interesting work of the trilogy and it is such a shame that he was unable to continue with Titus Awakes (there is a fragment that his wife completed after his death and was eventually published in 2011).  It’s an underwhelming but perfectly fine final installment despite Peake’s health clearly interfering with the ability to make it as rich as the previous two installments.  5/10.