A light to strangle infants by
Mar. 31st, 2023 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileDespite being told that it was nowhere near as good as its prequels, my completist ass picked up Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone, the third book in the Gormenghast trilogy. It’s a lot shorter than the other two, which is probably just as well, because truly, it isn’t as good! Like, it wasn’t bad, and it was certainly just as weird, but it wasn’t as rich, and the atmosphere was very different–less Gothic and more a sort of absurdist sci-fi, Ozian flavor, but not for children (i.e. it’s got too many tiddies in it for Oz).
Having run away from Gormenghast, Titus finds himself in a strange and unnamed city, where he is promptly arrested for vagrancy and meets a variety of very strange people, one of whom is a nice lady named Juno who saves him from the Kafkaesque mercies of the court. The other most important figure who winds up on Team Titus (more or less) is Muzzlehatch, a weird old guy with a car and a zoo full of wild animals, who is also coincidentally Juno’s ex. Muzzlehatch provides Titus with the information needed to escape some scrape or other through a demimonde called the Under-River, where we meet, you guessed it, a bunch more weird absurd characters. Upon resurfacing from the Under-River a fevered Titus gets rescued by a young lady named Cheeta, the daughter of a renowned scientist who runs a factory where he does some kind of unspecified death ray science. Cheeta is mostly characterized as being very smart and very small. She falls in love with Titus, and when an un-fevered Titus turns out to not really like her but he does want to bang her, she is very insulted and her love turns to hatred and she embarks upon a complicated revenge plot to drive him mad, which I admit I have some sympathy for (I realize it is perfectly morally neutral to find someone hot even if you don’t like them that much, but for God’s sake, don’t tell them that). Nobody in the book talks or behaves remotely like a normal human being. Inexplicably it is still compelling. Honestly I really just don’t know what to make of this one.
Having run away from Gormenghast, Titus finds himself in a strange and unnamed city, where he is promptly arrested for vagrancy and meets a variety of very strange people, one of whom is a nice lady named Juno who saves him from the Kafkaesque mercies of the court. The other most important figure who winds up on Team Titus (more or less) is Muzzlehatch, a weird old guy with a car and a zoo full of wild animals, who is also coincidentally Juno’s ex. Muzzlehatch provides Titus with the information needed to escape some scrape or other through a demimonde called the Under-River, where we meet, you guessed it, a bunch more weird absurd characters. Upon resurfacing from the Under-River a fevered Titus gets rescued by a young lady named Cheeta, the daughter of a renowned scientist who runs a factory where he does some kind of unspecified death ray science. Cheeta is mostly characterized as being very smart and very small. She falls in love with Titus, and when an un-fevered Titus turns out to not really like her but he does want to bang her, she is very insulted and her love turns to hatred and she embarks upon a complicated revenge plot to drive him mad, which I admit I have some sympathy for (I realize it is perfectly morally neutral to find someone hot even if you don’t like them that much, but for God’s sake, don’t tell them that). Nobody in the book talks or behaves remotely like a normal human being. Inexplicably it is still compelling. Honestly I really just don’t know what to make of this one.