Mervyn May, Volume 2

Insufferable levity

Welcome to the second Mervyn May discussion post, published only two hours after I initially intended on account of being “so sleepy.” You know who may relate to that? Poor Fuschia Groan, forced to stay up past her bedtime to go Doctor Prunesquallor’s in order to get a present. Every time she announced her increasing exhaustion and irritability, I thought, that’s how I feel, except it’s the morning here.

If there was a common observation among the Mervyn May readers last week, it’s that it was initially a bit difficult to tell what the “happening” of the novel’s first act was — obviously the bird of baby Titus Groan, heir to Sepulchrave and future earl of Gormenghast, was a major event, but mostly it seemed like everyone was wandering around, telling this news to each other. Steerpike, the youngish kitchen boy who escapes the ruthless reign of Swelter, felt like the most obvious point of attachment in terms of momentum, but he was locked in a room by the servant Flay and subsequently disappeared for the rest of our reading last week.

Regardless of whether that aligned with your feelings of the first section we read, I think it’s pretty undeniable at this point that a lot of stuff is happening.

The chapters after Titus’s christening (in which baby Titus is DROPPED!) take us into what’s been my favorite portion of the book so far: Steerpike’s escape. As I wrote above, Flay locked Steerpike in a room a few days prior, but when he returned to give Steerpike his daily meal, the latter was gone. Where did he go? Well, out the window and up into exterior of Gormenghast. It’s a section like this that makes the length and density of the novel feel necessary. What “happens” when Steerpike escapes captivity? Well, he winds up climbing into Fuschia’s secret attic, but prior to that, he witnesses so much bizarre, beautiful, frightening stuff that regardless of whether these things become, I don’t know, “Chekhov’s horses wading around in a turret,” establish that the rules of Gormenghast are relentlessly unpredictable. This is not just a “castle” or a “fortress,” but an otherwise living strange thing. Beyond all that, as someone with adult onset fear of heights, I was relieved that Steerpike spent the moments after his first ascent puking. I would have been too!

here’s Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Steerpike in the BBC version, I’m “jbol” at this image of the scene we’re discussing

A lesser writer might have had Steerpike climbing around for a whole chapter, or half a chapter, to propel action forward, but instead it goes on for several chapters which let us indulge in passages like:

He had seen a tower with a stone hollow in its summit. This shallow basin sloped down from the copestones that surrounded the tower and was half filled with rainwater. In this circle of water whose glittering had caught his eye, for to him it appeared about the size of a coin, he could see that something white was swimming. As far as he could guess it was a horse. As he watched he noticed that there was something swimming by its side, something smaller, which must have been the foal, white like its parent. Around the rim of the tower stood swarms of crows, which he had identified only when one of them, having flapped away from the rest, grew from the size of a gnat to that of a black moth as it circled and approached him before turning in its flight and gliding without the least tremor of its outspread wings back to the stone basin, where it landed with a flutter among its kind.

We then — through Steerpike — catch a glimpse of the Poet and hear a bit of his recitations. The music and poetry here reminds me of Lord of the Rings, whose musical passages bored me as a kid but delighted me as an adult. The poems, in addition to the Bright Carvings, make for interesting contrast to the general awfulness of Gormenghast. In all the back and forth about what genre Titus Groan is — if it matters — it’s really the genre of it all that’s saving the text from the weight of itself, the mounting (albeit) funny dread of what all these people are plotting. If Steerpike intends to maneuver his way to the top, the glimpses of Gormenghast provide him with a sense of scale — there is so much he does not understand about this world, so much that doesn’t make sense. His reckoning and awareness of his own abilities set him apart from the staid faculty of Gormenghast, who have rarely, if ever, questioned their role or a system.

In terms of events, we see Steerpike go from the company of Fuschia and Nannie Slagg to the Prunesquallors to Sepulchrave’s sisters Cora and Clarice. It’s easy to see at this point that he is working his way up the ladder, that his intentions are not “good,” but he may be our hero, more or less (though I am rooting for Titus Groan himself, because he is a baby and why not). I found the brief description of Steerpike’s red eyes as he climbed relatively unnerving — he’s sort of like a lab rat in appearance: long, pale, close-together red eyes. I’m sure this bodes well for everyone else in the castle.

The Feud Season 5: Flay v. Swelter kicked up against towards the end of this section in a passage I found myself having to reread a few times to get the gist. Broadly speaking, watching your enemy sharpen a cleaver feels ominous… especially if he’s using that sharpened cleaver to practice chopping your own head off. Swelter is such a non-entity in the actual body of the text that it feels easy to root for Flay (#TeamFlay) by virtue of his omnipresence and bizarre pattern of speech. He’s also both full of vexations, as the book reminds us, and actively fearful for his own life, which is, perhaps in the rare case of this novel, extremely relatable.

The other central character discussed a lot last week was Keda, who like Steerpike, manages to escape her stature at one of the outer dwellers and gets to come into Gormenghast to be baby Titus’s wet nurse. Keda is melancholic — she has recently suffered the loss of her baby — and we come to learn in this new section that she had a husband and also two boyfriends she was in love with. Keda’s melancholy subsumes her — she quits her gig abruptly to go figure out what’s going on in her throuple, which more or less ends badly for everyone.

In such a character-driven work, I find that I am most surprised by my own attentiveness to different arcs and the ways in which I find myself, while reading, shifting my loyalties between characters, not unlike watching reality television, Survivor, whatever, where the circumstances shift so quickly you find yourself forced to decide between characters you’d never otherwise consider going up against each other. Whereas Prunesquallor drove me nuts in the first section, I found his levity increasingly sympathetic and enjoyable in this new section. (I like his skinny legend sister too, who is always fishing for compliments.) As Steerpike moves through these various parties, he takes advantage not necessarily of these people’s vices so much as he does their weaknesses: Prunesquallor’s levity, Irma’s vanity, Fuschia’s melancholy, Cora and Clarice’s uselessness. He’s manipulating what’s held them back to his own advantage, gathering, in turn, a bit from each of them.

That’s all from me for now; I turn the floor back over to you. Passages, sentences, characters, themes — whatever, go nuts!

How is the pacing of the reading going? Too much? Not enough? Next week we’ll read up until a chapter called “A Change of Colour,” unless everyone wants to take on a little less. I defer to the people!