
I'm gradually working my way through Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, often at the rate of a paragraph per sitting, because Peake's richly visual prose rewards slow reading, and because I'll only be able to read the books for the first time once so I want to make them last. This year would have been Peake's hundredth birthday, so it's a good time to get them finally read. I should really have done this in my teens, so that I might have better appreciated, for instance, David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Lynch's vividly weird, disconnected characters owe more than a little to the vengeful dwellers of Castle Gormenghast. Doctor Prunesquallor and Cora and Clarice Groan would have fit right in at the Great Northern Hotel. Why is the first novel named Titus Groan and the second Gormenghast, and not the other way around? I don't know, but I hope to understand by end of Titus Alone. Part of the centenary celebrations will be the release of an unpublished fourth novel, Titus Awakes, begun by Peake and finished by his widow Maeve Gilmore.
[Review: Titus Groan: deft. Gormenghast: deft. Titus Alone: daft. It seems there is no good reason why the titles of the first two volumes are reversed. I suppose it's just one of those things that happens, and then it's too late to fix it. There are perhaps two good pages in the third volume.] D