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No footman, only an old lady who smells
Oct. 3rd, 2022 11:55 amI watched the BBC adaptation of Gormenghast after several years of never quite letting it get to the top of my Netflix DVD queue, and while I wasn’t completely certain I liked it, it was so weird that I became very curious about the books it was based on. To that end I invested in a copy of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan, the first book in the Gormenghast trilogy, to see if it was really as strange and Gothic as everyone said it was.
First off, strange it certainly is. The strangeness is highlighted by the fact that it is very, very slow–slow in ways that books straight-up are not allowed to be slow anymore, and even slow in ways that had gone fairly out of fashion by the time Peake was writing in the ‘40s and ‘50s, although maybe less so in fantasy writing than in other genres. This is also one of those odd sorts of books that is classed as fantasy because it’s a fully separate world, but in which that world existing is really the only speculative element–neither magic nor any particularly advanced technology are featured.
The world, despite its lack of overtly fantastical elements, is certainly eerie. The tiny kingdom of Gormenghast consists in its entirety of a few parts, apparently wholly isolated from the rest of the world–there are the woods and crags of Gormenghast Mountain; there is the enormous rambling complex of walls and halls that is Castle Gormenghast; and there are the Bright Carvers, a community of subsistence farmers in mud huts clustered like barnacles outside the castle walls (and sometimes up onto the castle’s outside walls). The Bright Carvers have exactly one artistic obsession among the lot of them: carving ornate wooden statues and painting them (hence their name).
Life in Castle Gormenghast is mostly a series of incredibly tedious and formal rituals that the Earl and sometimes other folks are obliged to take part in. The Earl, Sepulchrave Groan, is obedient enough to these rituals, because he suffers from an intense depression that constitutes about 90% of his personality and the rituals give him something to do to occupy his mind from how miserable he is. When he’s not doing rituals he’s hiding in the library. The Earl’s wife, Countess Gertrude, is mainly concerned only with her cats and her birds, and the one thing she and the Earl have in common is taking this whole traditions of the line of Groan thing seriously enough to produce an heir. The birth of the heir, the titular Titus Groan, seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast, is the inciting incident of the novel, which covers roughly the first two years of his life, during which he is mostly a set piece and object of attention for the various weirdos who inhabit the castle.
The main plotline involves the machinations of 17-year-old runaway kitchen boy Steerpike, who is able to machinate much more than any 17-year-old ought to be able to, partly by being very duplicitous and calculating but also because he is fortunate enough to be surrounded largely by total idiots. The characters who are not total idiots–which are mainly Dr. Alfred Prunesquallor, and, on the rare occasions she can be bothered to pay attention to anything involving humans, the Countess–eventually become a bit suspicious of him. The Earl’s first servant, Flay, also doesn’t like Steerpike very much, but in his case it has more to do with the Earl’s relentless devotion to hierarchy than actually suspecting him of anything other than having ideas above his station, and being tainted by his former association with the head cook, Swelter–Flay’s nemesis–even if he did run away.
The Swelter/Flay enmity involves them interacting less than half a dozen times, but for all that it takes up quite a bit of page space, since most of it is one or the other of them ruminating and/or plotting and/or stalking the other. Due to the dense and atmospheric style of the book I completely missed it the first time something actually Happened and had to go back and reread the paragraph. This is not a complaint; I wasn’t paying nearly close enough attention. It does ultimately wind up in a rather magnificent swordfight in the Hall of Spiders, but the path it takes to get there is long and winding and full of quietly weird shit like Flay wrapping up his knees in padding so that his knee joints don’t crack when following Swelter around in the gloom for the final showdown. These clicking knee joints had been a major part of his physical characterization for most of the preceding 350 or so pages.
Basically every character in the story has a weird Dickensian sort of name and is described in terms that make them sound like a grotesque; even the fifteen-year-old Lady Fuchsia Groan, an isolated daydreamer with long black hair, who it sounds like could have been pretty enough, is described mostly in terms of her bratty mannerisms and awkward body language. Everyone also talks oddly; most of the characters have their own very specific ways of talking oddly, but at the end of the day basically the only people in the castle who can answer a question straightforwardly are Steerpike, who is usually lying, and the Countess, who frequently doesn’t bother, but who values the skill highly enough to berate Nannie Slagg about it. I would say that everybody in this castle is insane except that one of the major plot threads involves somebody going full-bore thinks-he’s-an-owl insane, and so it is established that there is a difference between actual psychosis and just the kinds of personalities that are allowed to exist in a place as dysfunctional as Castle Gormenghast.
The language in this book is archaic enough that it sent me repeatedly running to the dictionary (or at least to Google; I don’t have any paper dictionaries anymore); some of this is because I have learned to distrust “learning” descriptive language from context, as this has betrayed me many times in my youth (the shock when I learned what actual shape an “aquiline” nose was! The bafflement upon discovering what “hooded” eyes were on makeup YouTube! The continuing annoyance at authors of all stripes’ insistence upon treating “olive” as a tone rather than an undertone!) but some is because they were genuinely fun words (can I remember any of them now? No, but I can check my search history). (OK, it appears I looked up: spilth, dace, dewlaps, crapulous, mouched, jarl, verandah, welkin, lambent, spindrift, calid, propinquital, and recrudescent. Also “querail” but that turned out to not be a real word.)
I don’t really quite know what else to say about this book. It was the slowest wild ride I’ve ever been on. It’s not like it was that hard to figure out what was happening, it’s just that what was happening was both very strange and described at the speed and lightness of molasses, and also mostly happening inside the heads of some very eccentric people. I will absolutely be reading the sequel as soon as I can justify another book purchase.
First off, strange it certainly is. The strangeness is highlighted by the fact that it is very, very slow–slow in ways that books straight-up are not allowed to be slow anymore, and even slow in ways that had gone fairly out of fashion by the time Peake was writing in the ‘40s and ‘50s, although maybe less so in fantasy writing than in other genres. This is also one of those odd sorts of books that is classed as fantasy because it’s a fully separate world, but in which that world existing is really the only speculative element–neither magic nor any particularly advanced technology are featured.
The world, despite its lack of overtly fantastical elements, is certainly eerie. The tiny kingdom of Gormenghast consists in its entirety of a few parts, apparently wholly isolated from the rest of the world–there are the woods and crags of Gormenghast Mountain; there is the enormous rambling complex of walls and halls that is Castle Gormenghast; and there are the Bright Carvers, a community of subsistence farmers in mud huts clustered like barnacles outside the castle walls (and sometimes up onto the castle’s outside walls). The Bright Carvers have exactly one artistic obsession among the lot of them: carving ornate wooden statues and painting them (hence their name).
Life in Castle Gormenghast is mostly a series of incredibly tedious and formal rituals that the Earl and sometimes other folks are obliged to take part in. The Earl, Sepulchrave Groan, is obedient enough to these rituals, because he suffers from an intense depression that constitutes about 90% of his personality and the rituals give him something to do to occupy his mind from how miserable he is. When he’s not doing rituals he’s hiding in the library. The Earl’s wife, Countess Gertrude, is mainly concerned only with her cats and her birds, and the one thing she and the Earl have in common is taking this whole traditions of the line of Groan thing seriously enough to produce an heir. The birth of the heir, the titular Titus Groan, seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast, is the inciting incident of the novel, which covers roughly the first two years of his life, during which he is mostly a set piece and object of attention for the various weirdos who inhabit the castle.
The main plotline involves the machinations of 17-year-old runaway kitchen boy Steerpike, who is able to machinate much more than any 17-year-old ought to be able to, partly by being very duplicitous and calculating but also because he is fortunate enough to be surrounded largely by total idiots. The characters who are not total idiots–which are mainly Dr. Alfred Prunesquallor, and, on the rare occasions she can be bothered to pay attention to anything involving humans, the Countess–eventually become a bit suspicious of him. The Earl’s first servant, Flay, also doesn’t like Steerpike very much, but in his case it has more to do with the Earl’s relentless devotion to hierarchy than actually suspecting him of anything other than having ideas above his station, and being tainted by his former association with the head cook, Swelter–Flay’s nemesis–even if he did run away.
The Swelter/Flay enmity involves them interacting less than half a dozen times, but for all that it takes up quite a bit of page space, since most of it is one or the other of them ruminating and/or plotting and/or stalking the other. Due to the dense and atmospheric style of the book I completely missed it the first time something actually Happened and had to go back and reread the paragraph. This is not a complaint; I wasn’t paying nearly close enough attention. It does ultimately wind up in a rather magnificent swordfight in the Hall of Spiders, but the path it takes to get there is long and winding and full of quietly weird shit like Flay wrapping up his knees in padding so that his knee joints don’t crack when following Swelter around in the gloom for the final showdown. These clicking knee joints had been a major part of his physical characterization for most of the preceding 350 or so pages.
Basically every character in the story has a weird Dickensian sort of name and is described in terms that make them sound like a grotesque; even the fifteen-year-old Lady Fuchsia Groan, an isolated daydreamer with long black hair, who it sounds like could have been pretty enough, is described mostly in terms of her bratty mannerisms and awkward body language. Everyone also talks oddly; most of the characters have their own very specific ways of talking oddly, but at the end of the day basically the only people in the castle who can answer a question straightforwardly are Steerpike, who is usually lying, and the Countess, who frequently doesn’t bother, but who values the skill highly enough to berate Nannie Slagg about it. I would say that everybody in this castle is insane except that one of the major plot threads involves somebody going full-bore thinks-he’s-an-owl insane, and so it is established that there is a difference between actual psychosis and just the kinds of personalities that are allowed to exist in a place as dysfunctional as Castle Gormenghast.
The language in this book is archaic enough that it sent me repeatedly running to the dictionary (or at least to Google; I don’t have any paper dictionaries anymore); some of this is because I have learned to distrust “learning” descriptive language from context, as this has betrayed me many times in my youth (the shock when I learned what actual shape an “aquiline” nose was! The bafflement upon discovering what “hooded” eyes were on makeup YouTube! The continuing annoyance at authors of all stripes’ insistence upon treating “olive” as a tone rather than an undertone!) but some is because they were genuinely fun words (can I remember any of them now? No, but I can check my search history). (OK, it appears I looked up: spilth, dace, dewlaps, crapulous, mouched, jarl, verandah, welkin, lambent, spindrift, calid, propinquital, and recrudescent. Also “querail” but that turned out to not be a real word.)
I don’t really quite know what else to say about this book. It was the slowest wild ride I’ve ever been on. It’s not like it was that hard to figure out what was happening, it’s just that what was happening was both very strange and described at the speed and lightness of molasses, and also mostly happening inside the heads of some very eccentric people. I will absolutely be reading the sequel as soon as I can justify another book purchase.