Late last year, I was asked to write the introduction to Overlook Press’ new edition of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone, last novel of the so-called Gormenghast Trilogy. Considering that the first two books, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, had introductions written by Anthony Burgess and Tad Williams, respectively, I felt pretty honored to get the invitation.

Today I’ve received word that the books have actually come off the press and should appear in bookstores all across the U.S. soon. So, with the permission of Overlook Press, I’ve posted the introduction in its entirety below. After you’re done, go visit the Overlook Press web page for the book, and pick up a copy from Amazon. (Update 5/29/08: And also visit the Mervyn Peake blog, run by his son Sebastian. Sebastian was nice enough to write about this introduction there.)

Now here’s the introduction. You may notice that I’ve borrowed liberally from my blog entry about Titus Alone posted over a year ago. Page numbers refer to my Vintage Press UK edition of Titus Alone (because I don’t actually have the Overlook Press edition in my hands yet).

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Did Mervyn Peake go mad writing Titus Alone, or does Titus Alone merely predict his madness? Is it a work of dystopian science fiction, or a work of psychological symbolism? Is the book a terse masterpiece, or is it just the half-formed ravings of a crumbling mind?

What the heck is this book you’re holding?

Let’s start with the facts. Mervyn Peake was a noted artist and illustrator of children’s books who spent his formative years in China. He published the novels Titus Groan (1946) and Gormenghast (1950) to excellent reviews, though not resounding commercial success. After the failure of his play The Wit to Woo (1957), Peake suffered a nervous breakdown. Parkinson’s disease, electroshock therapy, and brain surgery would follow over the next decade. Peake spent his last years in institutions, finally passing away in November of 1968. His works would dip briefly into obscurity and academic disfavor — Kingsley Amis once famously dismissed him as “a bad fantasy writer of maverick status” — before enjoying a critical and commercial renaissance that continues to this day.

Eyre & Spottiswoode originally published Titus Alone in 1959, and the book has been the target of critical dissatisfaction ever since. It’s barely half the size of Titus Groan and Gormenghast, leading some to conclude that Peake was only half-done with it. Given Peake’s mental state at the time of publication, others have assumed that the author was in no condition to write a novel. Regardless of the reason, Titus Alone is generally considered the least of the three Gormenghast books.

Why the fuss? Well, there’s no delicate way to put it: this book is bizarre. Even by the standards of the previous Gormenghast novels (which aren’t exactly models of straightforward narrative), Titus Alone stands — well, it stands alone. Titus spends the entire book wandering through a sparsely described dream world pursued by two silent, faceless policemen. He journeys through an underground realm filled with derelicts and runaways. There’s a beggar who eats money, and a remote-controlled glass spy globe. One of the main characters spends a good deal of the book with an ape on his shoulder.

In the last words of Gormenghast, Peake writes that “Titus rode out of his world.” Who would have imagined that Peake meant it literally? Titus Groan and Gormenghast take place in some undefined location in what seems to be a pre-Industrial setting. But in Titus Alone, there are flying mechanical needles, death rays, and a factory filled with mysterious bad smells. Muzzlehatch drives a car, Cheeta rides in a helicopter, and Cheeta’s scientist father talks to his subordinates through a videoconferencing system. Crabcalf informs us that someone or something named “Molusk” has recently circled the moon. (A successor to Sputnik?) All this technology implies that the novel takes place in the near future, yet nobody Titus encounters has heard of Gormenghast. Gormenghast, a castle so enormous that you can wander its rooftops for days without seeing the end of it.

But the setting isn’t the only incongruity between Titus Alone and its predecessors. The books have vast differences in style and tone as well. Peake ambles through Titus Groan and Gormenghast with page after page of (glorious, lyrical) exposition; but in Titus Alone, he takes the linguistic express route, zipping through descriptions of even central characters like Cheeta and Muzzlehatch in a mere sentence or two. The first two books make only the vaguest mentions of a higher power; this book brims over with Biblical allusions. Titus Groan is entirely sexless, and Gormenghast approaches the subject with the utmost discretion; Titus Alone is bursting with sexuality, both expressed and repressed. (Can you imagine anyone in those first two novels saying, as Titus says to Cheeta, “let me suck your breasts, like little apples, and play upon your nipples with my tongue”?) (p. 166)

So the first question to ask is this: how much of Titus Alone is Mervyn Peake switching gears, and how much is Mervyn Peake losing his marbles?

It’s a fair question, given that so much of the novel is devoted to the question of insanity. Clearly the subject was on Peake’s mind. Titus begins to doubt the existence of Gormenghast almost as soon as he steps foot off the grounds, and his doubt is only magnified after he loses his flint. “I have nothing else to prove where I come from, or that I ever had a native land,” Titus laments. “…I have nothing to hold in my hand. Nothing to convince myself that it is not a dream. Nothing to prove my actuality.” (p. 105)

Take the hallucinatory strangeness of the novel, add Titus’s doubts about his sanity, mix in Peake’s eventual descent into dementia, and you’ve got all the ingredients for the proverbial novel of madness. Let’s not forget the fact that some of the known symptoms of Parkinson’s disease include language problems, memory loss, hallucinations, and depression. Maybe the author of the fantastic we should be comparing Peake to is not J.R.R. Tolkien but Philip K. Dick, the poet of paranoia, who believed that God sent him messages through a pink laser. It’s difficult to read Titus Alone and not think of Dick’s Time Out of Joint — also published in 1959 — which features a similarly anguished protagonist living in a dream world stitched together with carefully labeled pieces of paper.

So… case closed? Mervyn Peake went mad, and Titus Alone is just a half-finished, semi-coherent product of his deteriorating mental state, right?

Wrong. Outlandish as the novel may be, it’s also tightly plotted, thematically cohesive, vividly written, and slyly self-aware. In fact, in many ways the book not only extends the themes of Titus Groan and Gormenghast, but it challenges them and turns them on their head.

We can blame two things for the popular misconceptions about Mervyn Peake’s last book. The first is the poor editing job of Peake’s original editor. The original edition of Titus Alone omitted entire chapters and contained many dubious “corrections” that weren’t fixed until years after Peake’s death. But the second and more important reason for this misunderstanding is that the book is, by nature, incomplete. Titus Alone is a bridging novel. It’s what stands between the story of Titus’s childhood and the stories of his adulthood — stories that Peake never got the chance to write.

Titus Alone can be roughly divided into three parts: Titus’s explorations of the nameless city and his first encounters with Muzzlehatch and Juno; Titus’s sojourn through the Under-River; and his strange “courtship” of Cheeta, leading up to the final pantomime in the Black House.

Peake sets up the key metaphor of the novel early on, in Chapter 13, during the fight between Muzzlehatch’s camel and his mule. The two animals break free of their cages and set on each other with a frenzy, until they’re stopped by a naked Muzzlehatch wielding a hose and wearing a fireman’s helmet. (I did mention that the novel was bizarre, right?) Look at how Peake describes the animals’ walk back to their cages:

But the camel and the mule were anything but embarrassed. They had tasted freedom and they had tasted blood, and it was with a quite indescribable arrogance that they swaggered towards the cages, their thick, blue lips curled back over their disgusting teeth; their nostrils dilated and their eyes yellow with pride. (p. 25)

Clearly Peake’s not just talking about animals here; he’s deliberately drawing a parallel between the animals escaping from their cages and Titus Groan escaping from Gormenghast. Titus says so himself. (“Gormenghast was a kind of jail,” he tells the Magistrate. “A place of ritual. But suddenly and under my breath I had to say good-bye.”) (p. 86) And in case you missed that reference, there are several more: Titus locked in prison like “some kind of caged animal,” (p. 63) Titus asking Cheeta “Why can’t you set me free?” (p. 223), Titus “like a dancing bear on the end of a rope.” (p.171) As for the tasting of blood — wasn’t one of Titus’s last acts in Gormenghast to kill the traitorous Steerpike?

But it’s not just Titus that Peake wants to compare to an animal in a cage; these animal metaphors extend throughout the book. We’ve got characters named Cheeta, Muzzlehatch, Cusp-Canine, and Crabcalf. We’ve got characters compared to condors, crocodiles, foxes, snakes, birds, jackals, squirrels, tigers, tortoises, dogs, cats — the list goes on. At one point, while Titus is on the glass roof looking down on Lady Cusp-Canine’s party, he imagines the whole crowd as some kind of menagerie:

They were all there. The giraffe-men and the hippopotamus-men. The serpent-ladies and the heron-ladies. The aspens and the oaks; the thistles and the ferns — the beetles and the moths — the crocodiles and the parrots: the tigers and the lambs: vultures with pearls around their necks and bison in tails. (p. 38)

I tried to keep a running list of all the animal metaphors in Titus Alone, but finally I gave up and stopped counting at forty.

So in the first third of Titus Alone, our hero endlessly rehashes his escape from the prison of Gormenghast, the prison of being the 77th Earl of Groan. He soon finds himself in the dark and mysterious world of the Under-River, the symbolism of which should be obvious to anyone who’s ever taken a class in English literature. Dark passages, birth canals, furtive adolescent scrambling — you know the drill.

After his dark underground journey, in the last third of Titus Alone, Titus finally finds what he’s looking for — or at least what he thinks he’s looking for. He’s lived his entire life in the confines of Gormenghast, a place of stultifying ritual, where tradition rules for tradition’s sake and any breach of protocol is a mortal sin. What he finds in Cheeta, her scientist father, and his factory is the opposite extreme. What could be more unlike Gormenghast than a place of invention and experimentation? Peake hammers the point home by continually referring to Cheeta and the scientists in terms of newness and invention. Cheeta is a “modern” with “a new kind of beauty” (p. 160); she takes Titus to the Black House to see “a hundred bright inventions.” (p. 213) She implores him to spend one last night with her, “not in some dusky arbour where all the ritual of love drags out for hours, and there is nothing new; but in the bright invention of the night, our egos naked and our wits on fire.” (p. 194)

Yet for all their differences from the ancient, moldering castle, Cheeta and her father clearly represent a kind of evil, like the relentlessly ambitious Steerpike in the first two books. Notice that despite all the air of newness about the factory, it never seems to actually make anything; all the scientists accomplish is the destruction of Muzzlehatch’s zoo with their death ray. (You’ll remember that the forward-thinking Steerpike never accomplished much in Gormenghast either, except to burn down the library.)

It’s hard to see anything noble about Gormenghast in the first two novels. The castle never felt particularly malignant in itself, but all those centuries of relentless tradition did seem to have a malignant effect on its inhabitants. The only proper reaction to such immenseness is to close oneself off, like Sourdust and Barquentine and — well, just about every other character in Titus Groan and Gormenghast. But in the last third of Titus Alone, Peake shows us that there’s an entirely different side to the castle. As Cheeta discovers, living in the shadow of all that monumental history has given Titus a strength of character that she lacks:

From the cold centre of elegance and a life of scheduled pleasure she was now being shown the gulches of a barbarous region. A world of capture and escape. Of violence and fear. Of love and hate. Yet above all, of an underlying calm. A calm built upon a rock-like certainty and belief in some immemorial tradition.

Here, tossing and sweating on the bed below her, lay a fragment, so it seemed, of a great tradition: for all the outward movement utterly still in the confidence of its own hereditary truth. Cheeta, for the first time in her life, felt in the presence of blood so much bluer than her own. (p. 162)

Gormenghast, a place that ennobles the soul? A place that provides Titus with the foundations to survive and thrive in the world? It’s enough to make you reevaluate all of the truths you thought you knew from reading Titus Groan and Gormenghast.

By the conclusion of Titus Alone, the 77th Earl of Groan has come to a kind of acceptance with his past. He’s escaped from the prison of stifling tradition, he’s rejected the false promise of the new, and he’s confronted the demons of his upbringing and overcome them. Why, then, does Titus reject Gormenghast in the book’s final pages? Why does he turn away from the castle with a fairy-tale finality, to be “never seen by him ever again”?

Clearly Mervyn Peake was not finished with Titus Groan. We know that Peake planned to write further episodes in the saga, with tentative titles that include Titus Awakes and Gormenghast Revisited. Unfortunately all the author ever put to paper were scattered notes and fragments. I’d like to think that Titus goes on to achieve great deeds, now that he’s armed with the mighty tradition of Gormenghast but not controlled by it. What final destiny Peake had in store for him, we’ll never know.

The more I study Titus Alone, the more I realize that Peake knew precisely what he was doing with this book. Perhaps the author didn’t have the opportunity to polish his last Titus story to the same bright sheen as Titus Groan and Gormenghast. There are some individual passages that have a sketched-out or unfinished quality to them. (Who exactly is this village girl that Titus is frolicking with shortly before the book’s climax? What exactly does it mean that Juno’s hallway was “daringly yet carefully… furnished”?) (p. 66)

Still, I can’t imagine that a Mervyn Peake at the height of his intellectual powers would have produced a book much different than the one you’re holding right now. Titus Alone may stand alone, but it stands on its own two feet.

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.)