Titus Awakes

Gormenghast, Volume 4 (The Lost Book of Gormenghast)

By: Maeve Gilmore, Mervyn Peake

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy is widely acknowledged to be, as Robertson Davies pronounced, "a classic of our age." In these extraordinary novels, Peake created a world where all is like a dream - lush, fantastical, and vivid. Yet it was incomplete. Parkinson's disease took Peake's life in 1968, depriving his fans of the fourth and final volume of the series, Titus Awakes except for a few tantalizing pages, after which his writing became indecipherable. Or so it seemed.

In January of 2010, Peake's granddaughter found four composition books in her attic. They contained the fabled Titus Awakes in its entirety. Peake had outlined the novel for his wife, Maeve Gilmore, who had at last finished Peake's masterpiece.

It starts with Titus leaving Castle Gormenghast. Peake wrote: "With every pace he drew away from Gormenghast mountain, and from everything that belonged to his home. That night, as Titus lay asleep in the tall barn, a nightmare held him." Fans of Peake will delight in this new, wonderful novel, published 100 years after his birth, every bit as thrilling and masterfully written as his famed trilogy.

Listen to the Gormenghast Trilogy.©2011 Maeve Gilmore (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

the story ends,well

I am happy that the story was finally finished. Gormangast was one of my favorite series.

Don't bother

a continuation of the last novel, where Titus is a nihilist who cares about nothing, not himself, not other people, not contributing to the world, he doesn't even care about his dog, he drifts aimlessly and doesn't do anything that really captured my interest

in the first section of this book he randomly starts living with a family, sleeps with the lady, then when she has his baby he's like ugh I don't want to be involved with this, and literally runs away in the middle of the night after living with them for a year

the author keeps talking about how Titus doesn't care about anything. it's really hard to have any enjoyment of a character who doesn't have motivation. it reads like a teenage boy fantasy of having no responsibilities and still getting laid by one dimensional female characters. after he fathered a child and ran away in the middle of the night and named his dog "dog" so he didn't have to have feelings about it, I couldn't finish the second half of the book. really not anything like the beginning of the series, very very disappointing. again, I am embarrassed that an adult man wrote this book.

the language of the writing itself is good, but the characters and the plot are just awful