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)

A great book ,no cliches, worth the effort

I completely understand why a lot of readers would give this book a low rating. Many readers, and especially readers of fantasy, get very comfortable with the presence of cliches, and this book just doesn't give them any. Titus Groan doesn't have a grand good vs evil narrative, there is no sword play, nor wizards, nor damsels in distress, nor teenager-saves-the-world narrative. You get none of the usual formulas. The action is sparse, the language is thick, and the world is just sort of weird. It's not something that an average teenage fantasy fan will enjoy.

With that said, Titus Groan is a fantasy masterpiece. In its weird way, it's every bit as rich as Tolkien or Rowling. The characters are bizarrely entertaining, and the challenges they face are, if not quite the all-encompassing fight for civilization, nonetheless poignant and intriguing. As strange as the novel is, it feels more real than most fantasy.

Titus Groan is a novel without a contrived road-map, and it is as much high literature as it is fantasy. Good literature is challenging: it forces you to think, and if you engage in it, it is far more rewarding than a thousand sword and sorcerer novels. Readers who think in cliches will either fail to understand the novel or will grow frustrated at the meandering plot. But for those who like a challenge, who enjoy reading about a fantastical world for its own sake, and who have an attention span that hasn't been crippled by frenetic, pop-culture oriented fantasies, this book is well worth it. It's strange and rich and utterly unlike anything you're ever going to see again. It's beautiful.

Excellent narration

Robert Whitfield brings this story to life. Peake's genius is the description of the eccentric; but his language can heavy and pace slow at times. Whitfield's reading more than makes up for this shortcoming, and completely kept my interest even when Peake's writing by itself may not have.

Wildly different from other fantasy novels

Almost entirely comprised of dialogue and descriptions, I found this book to be challenging to follow at times. But, the writing is absurdly delightful and well worth the difficulty.

one of my favorite authors

Sadly he has so few books, had he lived longer who knows what great things this remarkable mind would have given us.

Where has Mervyn Peake been all my life!

What a wonderful discovery! The descriptive language stopped me in my tracks! Thank you, Neil Gaiman, for the reference. I'm on to Book 2!!

Wonderfully descriptive and dark

I read this many years ago and found it was easier at times to read then to listen to. One gets lost in Peake's prose. Still, if you have a lot of time on your hands it is a great listen.

I could not wait for it to end

I love Simon Vance but even he couldn't make this book palatable. The author was great on descriptions.
I could picture every step, and every expression, maybe too much so..it dragged on and on. There were way too many side stories that weren't making sense, at least to me.

Distilled dullness

I legitimately do not understand how this story would appeal to anyone. Every moment of this story teeters on fantastical before stubbornly remaining mundane. There is an aloof flock of cats, one would expect them to do something exceptional or exert some kind of influence, but no, it's just cats. The countess attracts birds and always gossips with them, the birds never talk back, they're just birds. There are hidden spectacles that inspire forgotten rituals and supernatural scenes, they are mentioned once and then promptly forgotten. And this is just the world, almost every character is equally dull. They all are quite two dimensional, scenes never culminate in any growth or surprise, just attitudes bouncing off each other, usually resulting in nothing. It doesn't help that these people suffer from a chronic lack of consciousness. I swear at least half the dialog in this book is characters failing to understand each other or attempting to be understood. A common dialog will go something like this
"the countess has stolen our birds"
"who?"
"the countess"
"what about her?"
"she stole them"
"what?"
"our birds"
what about them?"
ad infinitum. It doesn't help that hardly any characters are likable. They are all described in completely unappealing terms and speech as if the author was personally insulted by the Groan family. The cook is personified as a mobile mass of corpulent dough. The countess' weight is described using every word in the dictionary except fat. The Count is a perpetually sad introvert. The nanny is a mentally impaired midget who frets over literally nothing. The doctor patronizes every other character. The only character described even the least bit attractive is afflicted with a bane that causes her to prematurely age before the book is complete. The only characters I sort of liked were the head servant for having a halfway interesting personal story and the aunts because of their downright comical openness about murdering their step sister.
I have enjoyed books that I couldn't care to finish more than this one. I only persevered out of a morbid curiosity that this was an exceptionally dramatized shaggy dog story. And I was sort of right. The first and last chapters follow a museum curator who is largely forgotten by the castle. In the beginning he is informed that the titular character Titus Groan was born and in the last chapter he watches Titus be crowned earl one year later, being shocked that an entire year went by with zero human contact and wondering if he missed anything. I can confidently tell you Rottcodd, no, you didn't miss anything.

not great

I really did not like this book. All the characters are crazy and it is quite hard to relate to any of them. I got half way through the book and still have no idea what the plot is/will be. I don't know if I will make it through the second half.

As good as "Lord of the Rings"? Buyer beware.

I am an avid reader. I have a major in literature. I can only think of one other book I did not finish. That being said, I cannot get into this book. How others compare this to "Lord of the Rings", I do not know. Maybe something in the 2nd half is worth the purchase. I just can't get there. I understand that character development is essential in the Fantasy Genre but this is too much. Do you really need to use 4 to 6 adjectives to describes every stone, blade of grass, and hair follicle mentioned in the book? In Summary: Too Slow!