Gormenghast is a suitable companion-piece to Titus Groan. The two are so alike in tone and theme, that they seem to have been written in a single burst of inspiration. Peake provides us with an extended cast of characters, this time including Headmaster Bellgrove and his professors; he follows the rise of Steerpike’s crooked ambitions to their ruinous end; and he gives us a climactic manhunt that’s every bit as insanely drawn out as the battle between Flay and Swelter from the first novel.

In fact, I think I enjoyed Gormenghast more than its predecessor. Peake’s voice seemed more assured here, and unlike the first novel, even what initially seemed like extraneous plot strands were gradually woven into the main tapestry by the end. Characters like Mr. Flay that teetered close to caricature in the first novel are here drawn more sympathetically.

But Titus Alone is a completely different animal altogether. It’s an amazing novel in its own way, but it stands completely aloof from the first two novels of the series.

Whereas Titus Groan and Gormenghast are ponderous, dense, slow-moving psychological explorations, Titus Alone is a spritely wafer of a book. Its chapters are frequently only a paragraph long, and it zips along at a pace that’s much more conducive to short attention spans. Groan and Gormenghast took place in a world devoid of all but the vaguest mentions of higher powers, while Titus Alone brims over with Biblical allusions. Groan is an entirely sexless book and Gormenghast approaches the subject with the utmost of discretion; Titus Alone is full of sexuality, both expressed and repressed. Groan and Gormenghast strolled through the narrative at a leisurely pace, often taking an entire page or two to describe a character rounding a corner, while Titus Alone gives us incomplete sketches of even major characters like Muzzlehatch and Juno (with occasionally redundant descriptions to boot).

Even more shocking is that Titus Alone appears to take place in an entirely different world than its predecessors. The only hint of time or place I could find in the first two novels was a brief reference to “the Arctic” in Gormenghast; there was no other historical or technological context to anchor the novels in any particular time or place. But in Titus Alone, Peake gives us cars, airplanes, elevators, factories, telescreens, helicopters, and glass buildings. There are jarring references to a remote controlled spy device of some sort and flying mechanical needles. It’s perhaps closer to our world than the first two novels, but not by much.

What are we to make of all this? It’s tempting to think that Mervyn Peake was simply out of his gourd by the time he began work in earnest on Titus Alone. The foreword to the revised edition speaks of Peake’s deteriorating mental state in the later stages of the draft and the necessity of editing out some of his more incoherent passages. There are multiple references to madness in the novel, and one of our protagonist’s central conflicts is to decide whether all the memories of his entire childhood (and therefore the contents of the first two novels) are simply the hallucinations of a diseased mind.

I couldn’t help thinking of Philip K. Dick’s (contemporaneous) novel Time Out of Joint, which features a similarly deluded protagonist living in a dreamworld stitched together by carefully labeled pieces of paper.

And it’s worth noting that we’re never given any external validation of the existence of Gormenghast in the course of Titus Alone. The one physical piece of evidence of home that Titus carries with him, a flint, is lost halfway through the novel, and is a perilously thin reed to hang one’s sanity on anyway. It’s notable that, while Titus is convinced he’s found his way back to Gormenghast Mountain in the book’s final scene, he chooses not to peer over the edge of the rock. He chooses not to return to Gormenghast.

I wonder how much the progress of Peake’s Parkinson’s disease influenced the subject matter of the novel. In addition to the tremors and the slurred speech, visual hallucinations are one of the classic symptoms of Parkinson’s (which I can tell you since I have a close relative who’s suffering through such hallucinations right now). Was Peake writing about himself in Titus Alone? Was he himself having trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality? Peake’s friend Michael Moorcock writes in his marvelous and touching exploration of the man’s later years that “People who didn’t know him very well often said Mervyn Peake’s books were so darkly complex that writing them had sent him mad.” Moorcock properly scoffs at this notion, but I wonder if it didn’t work the other way around: the process of mental deterioration inspired him to write a darkly complex novel about his condition.

In the end, however, Titus Alone, while concerned with questions of sanity and reality, isn’t a Philip K. Dick novel. While it does share elements in common with novels of the psychedelic ’60s, the book is ultimately more backwards-looking than forwards-looking, as Anthony Burgess points out in his introduction to Titus Groan. It’s ultimately a traditional coming-of-age story about a Prodigal Son learning to trust himself in a strange and hostile world. It’s more Cervantes than Philip K. Dick.

Unfortunately, Titus Alone was intended to be only a middle novel in a five-book series. The fourth, Titus Awakes, was barely even begun by the time Peake succumbed to his illness (and the existing fragment is available online); the proposed fifth, Gormenghast Revisited, remains wholly hypothetical. So we’ll never get to see the 77th Earl of Groan’s homecoming. Titus will always remain out there, wandering and homeless, living off his wits and questioning his place in the world.

I kind of like it that way.

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(As a small postscript, I think it’s worth pointing out that the Vintage UK set of the Gormenghast novels whose covers are pictured here contain some of the most arresting cover art I’ve ever seen. The silhouetted black birds are cleverly set on the spine of the book to indicate the number of the book in the series: one bird for the first book, two for the second, three for the third. But strangely, the interior is printed on horribly cheap paper, and as a result the type is often very difficult to read. I picked up these books in Paris, as I mentioned before, and I wonder if that has anything to do with it.)

In Franz Kafka’s eyes, at least, the castle is forever unreachable. Even though K. has been summoned by the castle itself to conduct an important land survey, he will never make it inside the castle’s gates. Instead, he will live and die at the foot of the castle, prostrate to its whims and powerless to control his destiny.

And how could one possibly imagine what awaits K. inside that castle anyway? You can’t describe the capricious will of fate in words. God doesn’t pose for snapshots.

But if Kafka never reached his castle, then Mervyn Peake (pictured, left, in 1935) surely did. Not only did Mervyn Peake reach the castle, but he wrote an exhaustive exploration of it in his novel Titus Groan (1946).

If I had heard of Mervyn Peake before, say, 2003, I knew him as an author of the macabre in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, but hailing from the other side of the Atlantic. I can’t recall ever having seen a copy of Titus Groan or its two sequels in a U.S. bookstore, though admittedly I never sought them out. But when I read that China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, and Hal Duncan all count Peake among their major influences — VanderMeer even going so far as to rank his work #2 on his list of Essential Fantasy works — I knew I had to take a peek at Peake myself.

I expected bogeymen. I expected Creeping Horrors and Blood-Curd’ling Chills. I didn’t expect Franz Kafka.

I’m unclear how familiar Peake was with Kafka, whose works really didn’t find a wide audience in the English-speaking world until the Willa and Edwin Muir translations of the ’40s. But even if there was no direct connection between the two men, clearly they were channeling the same ghosts. Titus Groan is nothing less than the extension of Franz Kafka’s vision to its chilling nadir. It’s Franz Kafka narrated by a stuffy British professor in tweed who’s long ago retreated into the bitter chambers of his imagination and shut the doors, tight.

Titus Groan chronicles approximately two years in the life of the inhabitants of Gormenghast Castle. Where is Gormenghast? Does it reside in our world? And when does the story take place? Unknown, unknown, and unknown.

Gormenghast is a world so encrusted with ritual that any hint of spontaneity has been choked away. Sepulchrave, the 76th Earl of Groan and master of Gormenghast, spends his life as a slave to a series of meaningless rites and mysteries handed down by his predecessors. Kafka’s protagonists stood timorously outside mystery’s gates, waiting in vain for a chance to enter; Peake’s protagonists inhabit the mystery, they live and breathe it, they are the mystery.

(And when you say “mystery,” don’t think we’re talking about God, as Kafka was; Gormenghast has no God. It has no magic. It’s a world utterly devoid of the divine, a world of ritual that seemingly only exists for its own sake and not for the gratification of any higher power.)

The hallmarks of what has become known as the Kafkaesque — the stultifying obsession with self, the inability to communicate with one’s fellows, the frustration with a world ruled by faceless fate, the gallows humor — can all be found in Gormenghast. But there’s a certain egalitarianism at work here that’s not found in Kafka’s work. There are no insiders and outsiders here; Titus Groan shows us a world in which everyone is a self-contained, autonomous, impenetrable unit. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa awakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect, and thus shunned by and cut off from society; Peake’s Sepulchrave lives in a world where everyone is a giant insect, where society itself is but the discordant babble of giant insects.

And so we have Doctor Prunesquallor, who communicates in enigmatic bursts of soliloquy and then provides his own laugh track. We have twin sisters Cora and Clarice, who speak to one another only for the purpose of self-examination. We have the Earl’s daughter Fuchsia, who secludes herself in a series of attics above her room that only she can find. We have the servant Flay and the cook Swelter, whose poisonous feud feeds on itself in silence over months until it reaches its inevitable murderous conclusion.

Into this world comes the Machiavellian youth Steerpike, a kitchen hand who yearns to rise above his station. And rise he does, through careful scheming that undoes countless centuries of tradition and ritual at Gormenghast, to the ruin of all (except Steerpike).

So is Titus Groan a meditation on self-improvement? A call to arms against tradition and conformity? A polemic against capricious fate?

It is, in fact, none of those things. It’s a hermetically sealed story from which no hint of a moral or message escapes. It’s a book smuggled from inside the castle itself, where we are not allowed. It’s a linguistic artifice of the highest order that’s both grindingly dull at times — Peake can spend an entire page describing the expression on a man’s face — and eminently fascinating.

One hears these words applied many times to this or that work of art, but in this case it’s absolute truth: Titus Groan is a completely and utterly unique work of literature.

Enter at your own peril.

(Further reading: Check out the official Mervyn Peake website set up by his estate. I have not yet read the second and third novels in the Gormenghast trilogy — Gormenghast and Titus Alone, respectively — as they’re still sitting in my “in” pile. Under, ironically enough, books by China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, and Hal Duncan.)