Titus Groan

Volume 1 of the Gormenghast Trilogy

By: Mervyn Peake

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

In Volume 1 of the classic Gormenghast Trilogy, a doomed lord, an emergent hero, and an array of bizarre creatures haunt the world of Gormenghast Castle. This trilogy, along with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, reigns as one of the undisputed fantasy classics of all time. At the center of everything is the 77th Earl, Titus Groan, who stands to inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that form Gormenghast Castle and its kingdom.

In this first volume, the Gormenghast Castle, and the noble family who inhabits it, are introduced, along with the infant firstborn son of the Lord and Countess. Titus Groan is sent away to be raised by a wet nurse, with only a gold ring from his mother, and ordered to not be brought back until the age of six. By his christening, he learns from his much older sisters that epileptic fits are "common at his age." He also learns that they don't like his mother. And then, he is crowned, and called, "Child-inheritor of the rivers, of the Tower of Flints and the dark recesses beneath cold stairways and the sunny summer lawns. Child-inheritor of the spring breeze that blow in from the jarl forests and of the autumn misery in petal, scale, and wing. Winter's white brilliance on a thousand turrets and summer's torpor among walls that crumble..."

In these extraordinary novels, Peake has created a world where all is like a dream - lush, fantastical, vivid; a symbol of dark struggle.

©1967 Mervyn Peake (P)2000 Blackstone Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"[Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience." (C.S. Lewis)

Not your average novel

Titus Groan is unlike most novels that rush to get to the end. Peake treats his story like life, that it is not so much getting to the destination that's the real goal, but the journey itself that's the real fun of it all. And what a journey it is! He writes in silvery images on moonlight that creats a portrait of fine art, not just a story.

The Gormenghast trilogy is (like Carroll's Alice in Wonderland) a satire on British society which is both funny and tragic. It explores a marvelous wonderland of its own behind the endless sprawling walls of the Groan's castle and puts the reader inside the workings of a stuffy upperclass and into the shoes of the working class peasants, all the while making us laugh at ourselves.

The Gormeghast books are a masterpiece of 20th century literature. The environment Peake creats IS the point of the story, a world that can immerse the reader and make you hope that you don't get to the end too quickly or you might miss the roses growing along the way.

Not for the faint-hearted!

This is not a book for listeners who like their fiction short and snappy. I love the richness of detail and the many-layered complexity of the Gormenghast books, but some listeners may find them slow going. This book, the first in a trilogy, certainly has more description than plot, but rewards the patient listener with subtle humor, pathos and suspense. The reading is excellent, beautifully paced and really brings the characters to life. I couldn't wait to get onto the next book.

A great and important piece of literature

Peake has created a strange and unique world: often grotesque but also intriguing, disturbing, compelling. And there is no narrator better than Simon Vance!

Poetry and Eloquence

Truly a triumph! And with such a fantastic narrator!

I had always heard of this trilogy as the books all great authors have to read, and I can see why. Peake was gifted in his craft, and his work will stand, as his described castle, endlessly.

An Epic Masterpiece

A masterpiece. Truly my favorite of the 3 book original series, and have never found a book that quite matches Titus Groan, or any other book in the Gormenghast series. Mervyn Peake was a genius, and in perusing his backlog of writings you may feel the same

So clever!

The writer's style was very entertaining, I love the depth (and lack of depth) of the characters and the immense effort used to describe even the most trivial details. This slowed down the action a little, but very fun to listen to!

A bath in Gothic prose

"Meandering purpose stalked the novel like a great huge stalking thing!"

A sumptuous feast of words. An eerily disquieting setting with heady dreams of empirical decay. Dizzying in it's acrobatic grace and daring. Very much for lovers of Poe, Gone with the Wind, lyricists, those who take pleasure in ornament and special care in the description of things. Why use 2 adjective ives when Seven will suffice? Like the use of Vance as Narrator. The guy tops his contribution to the Master and Commander audios here.

Better heard even than read

There are two abridged versions of "Titus Groan," but get the unabridged --- because the words are the point, not the plot. There is a clear plot, and the action is also clear. But it's the dark, seductive, carefully mined and honed words that matter. Robert Whitfield is a brilliant reader, and like the best readers he plainly actually understands this book better than I did the first time I read it, and can communicate that understanding. "Titus Groan" is a parody, harsher than Dickens, perhaps Thackerian would be fair. The parody attacks useless, empty traditions of class-based aristocracy, and on its own terms, not the terms of any sort of from-below social revolution such as communism. The parody is funny, incredibly: wait for the climax at the end when the baby Titus goes through the ceremony of "earling" and casually disposes of all the elaborate symbols of his office.

The hero, Steerpike, is an anti-hero, even a villain. But that's nothing: all the characters, 100%, are anti-characters. There is not a straight type that we expect among them. The doctor may be the only one with a good character, and possibly Mrs. Slag and Fuchia the sister, but all of them are not merely eccentrics, they are grotesques. I don't see how anyone could have done Prunesquallor the doctor better than the reader Whitfield read him. That was a difficult challenge for an actor-reader, but he achieved it, delightfully.

The action and the plot are vivid and murderous and also grotesque. The famous setting, the many-storied stone castle that goes on for miles and miles and miles as its own self-contained world, is so original that it has been used by others: perhaps by C.S. Lewis in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," as the professor's house, and certainly by Tad Williams in his brilliant "Otherland." as one of the virtual sci-fi worlds the characters find themselves inside.

This book is worth reading before you hear it. Note the carefully ominous word choice: the words are invariably the ones that would unsettle us. On the next order of composition, the phrases are dire even when their individual words are blameless. I assume Peake was a fan of Lovecraft, but this is not an exercise in the supernatural or in horror from the outside. Gormenghast Castle is its own world and if there is horror, no one there notices, because that is how they expect to live. I highly recommend this brilliant book with Whitfield's illuminating reading.

Dark other-world

I first read this work by Mervyn Peake many years ago, and it (together with the other two volumes of the Gormenghast trilogy) made a lasting impression. The trilogy is strongly influenced by the darker elements of Dickens, Kafka, Lewis Carroll and the Brothers Grimm. It is tempting to mention Tolkien and C S Lewis as well, but the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Narnia series both commenced publication a few years after Titus Groan, although the publication of volumes in the three series then overlapped. The period from 1946 to 1959 was certainly an extraordinarily productive period for the genre. The Gormenghast books are illustrated by the author. These drawings are unavoidably missing from the audio version, which is a pity, as they are superb and do much to establish the heavy atmosphere of the story. Robert Whitfield as narrator does a good job.

Weird and Wonderful

Despite 30+ years of reading almost exclusively in the Fantasy genre, I only recently discovered the Gormenghast series while researching works considered the “most important” in the genre. After reading that this series is an overlooked gem from the time of Tolkien, and an important part of the genre, I decided I had to try them and wow! What a bizarre and enjoyable pocket dimension of beautiful weirdness this series is!

I was expecting an epic fantasy, what I found was a series of books that defy easy classification, as well many conventional storytelling techniques. These series has absolutely amazing, lush prose. Some sentences are a paragraph long, yet don’t seem like they could have been written any other way. The language used is deft, inventive, and boldly unique. It’s alternately beautiful, grotesque, satirical, and silly - yet consistently compelling.

There are no true main characters, only a collection of highly memorable (weirdo) characters with personalities as odd as their names. While there are broad story arcs that conclude by the end of the second book, the story meanders constantly to odd side stories, some without real resolution. The whole mess would seem to collapse under the weight of its own weirdness, but the books somehow form a coherent whole.

The series is typically considered “Gothic Fantasy”, though there aren’t many of the usual Fantasy ingredients present. There are a few mysterious moments that could be considered magical, and the castle Gormenghast itself certainly fits the mold of the classic “Castle the size of a City” trope, but otherwise the series seems to mostly be categorized as Fantasy because no one knows where else to put it.

Apparently folks like to argue about which is better: LOTR or Gormenghast. The comparison seems meaningless, as they are dramatically different. I wouldn’t say Gormenghast is any “better” or “worse” than Tolkien, they’re just too individually unique to compare fairly. Tolkien is more approachable, Peake is more.... weird and beautiful.

I will say that the first book in the series, Titus Groan, is in my opinion better than the second book, titled Gormenghast. Titus Groan was weird and perfect, whereas Gormenghast felt a little like the author was indulging himself. Both books certainly ramble off onto weird paths, but the first book was interesting throughout, while the second introduced new characters that simply distracted from the main cast and weren’t as interesting. The second book also has several stories that seem to have led nowhere, whereas the first book was more tightly plotted, though I use the term “tightly” in the loosest way possible. (Ha, see what I did there?)

I have to give the caveat that I did not read the third book. I’ve heard that it is drastically different and inferior to the first two, likely due to the authors poor health while writing it. The second book is a good place for the story to end, so I chose to stop there.

If you’re looking for something weird, wonderful, and thought provoking, this series is as timeless as Tolkien, but waaay weirder.