“ ‘… but I will first of all ask you a question: who has the undisputed control over Gormenghast? Who is it who, having this authority, makes no use of it but allows the great traditions of the castle to drift, forgetting that even his own sisters are of his blood and lineage and are entitled to homage and - shall I say it - yes, to adulation, too? Who is that man?’
‘Gertrude,’ they replied.
‘Come, come,” said Steerpike, raising his eyebrows, ‘who is it who forgets even his own sisters? Who is it, your Ladyships?’
‘Sepulchrave,’ said Cora.
‘Sepulchrave,’ echoed Clarice.”
To quote the film du jour, COME ON!! that’s a fucking Simpsons gag!
Much as I enjoy Gormenghast as a built environment for this fiction to muck around in I love when a plot emerges that complicates and clarified. Burning a library: isn’t this one of the worst crimes that we, educated and conscientious readers of fiction, can imagine? But at the same time Peake sets up Steerpike’s plot so that in a real way his actions are defensible and perhaps even correct. What is the accumulated knowledge of Gormenghast good for? It doesn’t seem to have brought any happiness to Sepulchrave, who spent much of his time there, and Sourdust the librarian isn’t the keeper of the books so much as he is a member of the Firm, executing and controlling the customs that keep this dismal hierarchy in place. Why not burn it all up?
(Steerpike the naive revolutionary is one of the many delights of this section: he imagines somehow that he will get to ascend to Sourdust’s position as the keeper of customs, but is unaware that the position will be inherited by Sourdust Jr., another old man barely distinguishable from his father. Steerpike is a fascinating creature of ambition, but he’s also an impulsive youth who is not as smart as he thinks he is.)
- The architectural theme rears its head again with Sepulchrave’s madness: he perches himself on the mantel like an owl, or like one of the Bright Carvings. Without the books to search for his purpose, he recedes even further into the environment.
- What do we make of the odd, chaste flirtation between Fuchsia and Steerpike? I think Steerpike would like to think he’s seducing Fuchsia, but sex doesn’t really seem to be on his mind, whereas she has a childlike view of his staged chivalry: he seems like one of the characters from her stories, so she now gravitates more to him because he begins to feel familiar — but flees again when their differences emerge. He has no game, I fear.
- I think understanding how Keda’s story relates to the rest of the novel is probably the key to whatever Peake’s central concerns are, but I’m still working through that myself - look forward to everyone else’s thoughts.
The Keda stuff is baffling to me also but I enjoy reading it (unlike Clare - btw I also like the Leftovers and am fine if Keda's plot is now just, like, listening for a bird with her dad) but those long stretches do have me feeling like I'm holding on for dear life outside of rapidly chatty disintegration of the Groan household.
I think Steerpike's seduction is mostly reactive - certainly there's a lot that he's engineering but I think more than many, he's letting her seek him out (even as he joined her for a walk out on the grounds, he's otherwise deferred to her with mild provocation here and there). His unwillingness to have game feels like a symptom of multitasking (relatable) - but I also wonder if some of this comes out of just being the two youngest people around besides a literal baby.
re Keda -- I think you're dead on that she's key to "whatever Peake's central concerns are," and also right that those concerns have not yet totally come into focus. What sticks out to me is that this book starts out in the Hall of Bright Carvings, and that she is our only narrative connection to the carvers themselves. And even if the carvers have their own rituals and drama, those things aren't playing out with the same kind of high-key hysteria that's going on in the Castle. More importantly, the carvers seem to be the only characters in the book who produce anything of actual value. As fun and interesting as everything happening in the Castle is, it's also kind of morally meaningless (What does Steerpike actually aspire to? What is the function of Lord Sepulchrave? What do any of these characters feel for one another apart from hatred, jealousy, or bemusement?). But in the Keda sections there is real feeling, real consequence. It feels like she has the sense of the moral universe, even if no one else does. And while it's still hard to see exactly how this will connect to anything happening in the castle, I think the shift in Peake's tone in these sections is key.
first of all i must say i do not give an f about “keda” and her Leftovers-esque turn—you don’t get to tell her about sad!
jbol moments of the week:
1. this is how i talk: “If the name of the room was unusual there was no doubt about its being apt. It was certainly a room of roots.”
2. self-explanatory: “The spectacle of a half-nude, dripping Steerpike both repelled and delighted him. Every now and again Steerpike and the Doctor could hear an extraordinary moaning from the floor above.” #ZweigMoment
3. fran talking about ben and me: “He did not want them sitting bolt upright on the edge of their beds all night staring at each other, with their eyes and mouths wide open.”
4. “‘Fancy such an ignorous question! I am taking his little Lordship, you big stupid!’”
I'm on a tight deadline this week and will mostly stick to reading everyone else's (far more insightful) comments, but I will say that if you want to get my attention heading into the homestretch of a book, a sudden and jarring shift to the present tense will do the trick. Looking forward to seeing where this all goes. (Also, anyone else dying to get their hands on a copy of Andrema's collected poems?)
!!! that tense shift is easily one of the most arresting things in this book so far for me, after maybe the descent into horror of the arson scene. fantastically lyrical bit in there between Flay/Swelter as a bonus ("never was there held between four globes of gristle so sinister a hell of hatred", a weapons-grade sentence for rolling around in yr mouth)
I loled at this exchange between Steerpike and Fushcia this week:
"It's all right for our friend rattle-ribs: not much life left inside him, anyway."
... "Why must one try and be respectful to old people when they aren't considerate?"
Anyway, the burning of the library sequence is marvelous, and probably the longest sustained sequence of any kind we've come across in the book so far? Still gets split up into a couple chapters, but the initial chaos is I think in one unbroken ten page bit.
I, too, cannot think of a better name for a character than Barquentine, but his entrance into the novel got me thinking about the way this text engages with class. Peake writes that there's pretty much always someone in waiting for every job, someone who's spent their whole life as an apprentice, waiting for the mentor to die so that they can take up the mantle. And it is funny and ironic of course that Steerpike has not thought of this and is thus disappointed to discover that Barquentine exists and is well enough to handle his dad's old gig. But it makes me think again about the visual metaphor of Steerpike on top of the castle, looking out on that endless gray nothingness stretching in every direction (someone else pointed to this last week). Where are you going? Why are you climbing? What is any of this for? It's not just that there's no class mobility, or that the only person who break into the next social class has to be unusually gifted. It's that even when you find yourself in the upper echelon there's still not any room for you.
right - for all that the Groan family has planned out their whole future decades if not centuries, they're still caught off-guard by any disruption to that which the plan exists to accommodate. Why save all the money if you're not going to spend it in an emergency, etc.
yr reading on class here feels spot on to me. wondering now if Keda is meant to read this way as an inverse to Steerpike, in a sense- she's unwittingly knocked down a social peg by the death of her husband, eventually finding herself existing almost outside of society entirely after Those Boys kill each other (not even her brief apprenticeship to the castle seems to be able to lift her, it's sort of omnipresent to the point of irrelevance to her society i guess?) in contrast to Steerpike's active climbing and murdering etc
I think my favorite part of this section was the “grotto scene,” funny to read, to me, because I could imagine how a scene like this would play out in a more contemporary “trope-y” version of this story. Our two somewhat main characters, who I suppose are love interests, to a degree (though Peake is often on the verge of steering away from this entirely), find themselves alone in a wood, one of them injured, relying on the other to bring them to a safe place and patch them up. There are a few lines in here that are, by now, total clichés ("Keep still." "Don't be heroic."), as well as the requisite passage where Fuchsia has her internal monologue about Steerpike’s physique: “He was holding her; she was in his arms; in his power. His hard arms and fingers were taking the weight at her thighs and shoulders. She could feel his muscles like bars of metal.” It’s giving Sarah J. Maas! What’s next, a “there’s only one bed” scene between Flay and Swelter??? Obviously Peake is doing something different here than what we’d expect, since this is not much of a love story and these characters are decidedly un-sexy, but so funny to read something that feels so familiar in a book that otherwise is totally unlike anything I’ve ever read.
I'm lol - I think in post-Challengers world it is nice to come into this book a few days every week and read something decidedly not even remotely horny, not even in a fun grotesque way. As always I am thinking about Phil's thoughts about this existing in sort of like, opposite side of fantasy spectrum as something like LOTR and how this just zigs and zags where a more conventional thing might go for something more capital-r Romantic or capital e-Epic. These are just dirty little freaks doing their silly dirty shit. Crine at Flay and Swelter doing enemies to lovers... that's what Ao3 is for, I guess!
Don’t mean to always make it Keda Korner over here (and I do feel a bit bad that I’m vibing the most with her sections, considering how distinct they are from the rest of the story), but what am I supposed to do with a chapter titled “Knives in the Moon” besides adore it? As if that weren’t Northman-coded enough (though it can’t quite top “The Night Blade Feeds” as far as chapter titles go), Mervyn doubles down with a naked blade battle. “He was not only fighting with an assailant who was awaiting for that split second in which to strike him dead, but he was stabbing at a masterpiece—at sculpture that leapt and heaved, at a marvel of inky shadow and light.” Stabbing at a masterpiece, indeed
I also liked the chapter detailing Steerpike’s methodical, Mike Ehrmantraut-esque plan for his big book-burn-apalooza. In general, I’m fascinated by the idea of Steerpike as a chaotic ghost in the machine vs. the clockwork tradition of Gormenghast. Not sure who I really favor in that contest, but it’s Real Hoops either way.
(I LOLed at Fuschia telling him, “Follow me, if you want to. I know a cave.” And the sight of a little Steerpike chest sure did send a whole bunch of people into a tizzy, speaking of #ZweigMoments)
(*DUNE: MESSIAH SPOILERS*) Sorry to go back to this again, but at the risk of stretching the Keda/Paul Atreides comparison past its breaking point, they do both seem to fancy dramatically disassociating in the face of the horrors their prescience has wrought, ultimately foreseeing (and enacting?) their own removal from the board🤔 If only Braigon or Rantel’s knife could’ve chipped and shattered, RIP kings
Keda's sections and almost her whole life avoid a literalness otherwise at play in Gormenghast itself. Not to say this thing isn't rich with allegory in general, but you can't really one-to-one a lot of what's happening to her, it's purely existential and horrible and natural in a way that an industry and a monarchy can't allow room for, all considered.
I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I think you nailed it. Her stuff is so much more abstract and elliptical than most of the castle goings-on, and it feels pointed that it's all taking place outside of (and in some ways, in direct counterpoint to) Gormenghast
I've been casting around for comparisons to Steerpike and he reminds me of another character from Breaking Bad—Jesse Plemon's increasingly depraved Todd, another upstart good at ingratiating himself with powerful people who is probably a psychopath. (Too bad Plemons is now aged out of Steerpike range.)
I think you're dead-on about the Todd comparison - Steerpike's indifference about Sourdust's death really underlined the coldness underneath all his flattery. I don't know if he has the right level of greasy swagger, but I can almost picture Plemons' one-time co-star Kodi Smit-McPhee pulling the role off
The introduction of Barquentine is easily the best thing that happened to me in the past week, even more than the premiere of Megalopolis. Something about him moves me deeply, the way he springs into action to take his father’s place, and his desire to have his father’s funeral be Just So, and the very human comedy of him accepting a cat skull to be used in lieu of his father’s actual skull.
I am moved by Keda but I am also like. Can we get on with it? So I was thrilled by Clare’s reaction. Girl move on teas
Loved the image of baby Titus in his mother’s bosom while being rescued from arson.
The idea of a “grotto” is fascinating to me and had me googling “what exactly is a grotto” while stoned off my gourd at 1:00 on Sunday night. Like I have never considered a grotto outside of Legend of Zelda playings but now I remember—they are a real phenomenon in nature!
I simply love this book because I am someone who thinks a lot about power, the English royals (past and present), the Catholic Church, Charlemagne, the Roman Empire (don’t ask me how often), and considering how individuals can (or can’t, as it were) effect change on such systems is something I can’t spend enough time on. I WILL be reading the following novels expeditiously…
A section about all our characters (or at least many) fundamentally changing due to their respective traumas!
-The Early and his new madness / possession
-Fuschia being forced to grow up some after the library burning and witnessing her father's transformation.
-Sourdust literally dying (RIP)
-Keda's lovers killing each other and her subsequent journey/sickness.
-Steerpike seems to be getting a bit cocky in his plotting but also seems to be losing his grip on his influence in the process (the twins, Fuschia, all seem a little skeptical)
One of the things that I keep enjoying is that the purpose of the Earl/Groan family is to just perform trivial "rituals" like the going up and down the stairs and carving the half moon every 6 months. I can't help but feel like Peake is trying to comment on the inconsequential meaning of nobility. These people are born into this place of privilege to do what? Perform unnecessary acts of ritual just because someone at some point said they were important? Steerpike's equality monologue seemed to get to this too, although his desire to elevate to a place of privilege also seems to make him a bit of a villain too.
Yes, his equality bit - obviously in tandem with burning the library - is where he fully starts to emerge as evil. It's clear that he doesn't think equality is important! But sharing this with the members of the Groan family does seem to upset their balance a little, to even consider for a second that there's another kind of system that could mean something to them. RIP Mervyn Peake you would have loved the death of Queen Elizabeth etc.
I can’t remember if this started happening in this week’s reading but I don’t think I’m really spoiling anything - like many things in Titus Groan, I found everyone complaining about how annoying Barquentine’s crutches are both extremely funny and very cruel.
forgot to add the main citation that came to me this week during Sourdust’s funeral which reminded me of the reverend Smith’s sermon from Wild Bill’s funeral in Deadwood 1.05:
“"Saint Paul tells us: By one’s spirit are we all baptized in the one body…For the body is not one member but many… He tells us, The eye cannot say unto the hand, 'I have no need of thee.' Nor again the head to the feet, 'I have no need of thee.' Nay, much more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble, and those members of the body which we think of as less honorable, are all necessary. He says that there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care, one to another, and where the one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.”
In Deadwood this citation to 1 Corinthians is one instance of Milch’s thesis for the show, that all residents of Deadwood are part of the civilizational organism; I like relating this to Gormenghast as another spatial/societal construct where all its members, each with their assigned roles, seem possibly on the verge of some transition whether they realize it or not.
I'll offer my own IJBOL moment of the week:
“ ‘… but I will first of all ask you a question: who has the undisputed control over Gormenghast? Who is it who, having this authority, makes no use of it but allows the great traditions of the castle to drift, forgetting that even his own sisters are of his blood and lineage and are entitled to homage and - shall I say it - yes, to adulation, too? Who is that man?’
‘Gertrude,’ they replied.
‘Come, come,” said Steerpike, raising his eyebrows, ‘who is it who forgets even his own sisters? Who is it, your Ladyships?’
‘Sepulchrave,’ said Cora.
‘Sepulchrave,’ echoed Clarice.”
To quote the film du jour, COME ON!! that’s a fucking Simpsons gag!
Much as I enjoy Gormenghast as a built environment for this fiction to muck around in I love when a plot emerges that complicates and clarified. Burning a library: isn’t this one of the worst crimes that we, educated and conscientious readers of fiction, can imagine? But at the same time Peake sets up Steerpike’s plot so that in a real way his actions are defensible and perhaps even correct. What is the accumulated knowledge of Gormenghast good for? It doesn’t seem to have brought any happiness to Sepulchrave, who spent much of his time there, and Sourdust the librarian isn’t the keeper of the books so much as he is a member of the Firm, executing and controlling the customs that keep this dismal hierarchy in place. Why not burn it all up?
(Steerpike the naive revolutionary is one of the many delights of this section: he imagines somehow that he will get to ascend to Sourdust’s position as the keeper of customs, but is unaware that the position will be inherited by Sourdust Jr., another old man barely distinguishable from his father. Steerpike is a fascinating creature of ambition, but he’s also an impulsive youth who is not as smart as he thinks he is.)
- The architectural theme rears its head again with Sepulchrave’s madness: he perches himself on the mantel like an owl, or like one of the Bright Carvings. Without the books to search for his purpose, he recedes even further into the environment.
- What do we make of the odd, chaste flirtation between Fuchsia and Steerpike? I think Steerpike would like to think he’s seducing Fuchsia, but sex doesn’t really seem to be on his mind, whereas she has a childlike view of his staged chivalry: he seems like one of the characters from her stories, so she now gravitates more to him because he begins to feel familiar — but flees again when their differences emerge. He has no game, I fear.
- I think understanding how Keda’s story relates to the rest of the novel is probably the key to whatever Peake’s central concerns are, but I’m still working through that myself - look forward to everyone else’s thoughts.
The Keda stuff is baffling to me also but I enjoy reading it (unlike Clare - btw I also like the Leftovers and am fine if Keda's plot is now just, like, listening for a bird with her dad) but those long stretches do have me feeling like I'm holding on for dear life outside of rapidly chatty disintegration of the Groan household.
I think Steerpike's seduction is mostly reactive - certainly there's a lot that he's engineering but I think more than many, he's letting her seek him out (even as he joined her for a walk out on the grounds, he's otherwise deferred to her with mild provocation here and there). His unwillingness to have game feels like a symptom of multitasking (relatable) - but I also wonder if some of this comes out of just being the two youngest people around besides a literal baby.
re Keda -- I think you're dead on that she's key to "whatever Peake's central concerns are," and also right that those concerns have not yet totally come into focus. What sticks out to me is that this book starts out in the Hall of Bright Carvings, and that she is our only narrative connection to the carvers themselves. And even if the carvers have their own rituals and drama, those things aren't playing out with the same kind of high-key hysteria that's going on in the Castle. More importantly, the carvers seem to be the only characters in the book who produce anything of actual value. As fun and interesting as everything happening in the Castle is, it's also kind of morally meaningless (What does Steerpike actually aspire to? What is the function of Lord Sepulchrave? What do any of these characters feel for one another apart from hatred, jealousy, or bemusement?). But in the Keda sections there is real feeling, real consequence. It feels like she has the sense of the moral universe, even if no one else does. And while it's still hard to see exactly how this will connect to anything happening in the castle, I think the shift in Peake's tone in these sections is key.
i agree he has no game.... but Fuchsia is playing !!
first of all i must say i do not give an f about “keda” and her Leftovers-esque turn—you don’t get to tell her about sad!
jbol moments of the week:
1. this is how i talk: “If the name of the room was unusual there was no doubt about its being apt. It was certainly a room of roots.”
2. self-explanatory: “The spectacle of a half-nude, dripping Steerpike both repelled and delighted him. Every now and again Steerpike and the Doctor could hear an extraordinary moaning from the floor above.” #ZweigMoment
3. fran talking about ben and me: “He did not want them sitting bolt upright on the edge of their beds all night staring at each other, with their eyes and mouths wide open.”
4. “‘Fancy such an ignorous question! I am taking his little Lordship, you big stupid!’”
I love "you big stupid!" - stupid as noun is always yay to me.
I don't either, but the chapter where her lovers brawl was my favorite in the book
oops - called out the exact same #ZweigMoment before I read your comment! But if that's not a sure sign that this guy has Zweig energy...
I'm on a tight deadline this week and will mostly stick to reading everyone else's (far more insightful) comments, but I will say that if you want to get my attention heading into the homestretch of a book, a sudden and jarring shift to the present tense will do the trick. Looking forward to seeing where this all goes. (Also, anyone else dying to get their hands on a copy of Andrema's collected poems?)
omg I forgot to mention this - I had it in big underline in my notes but skipped right over. What a crazy shift!!!
!!! that tense shift is easily one of the most arresting things in this book so far for me, after maybe the descent into horror of the arson scene. fantastically lyrical bit in there between Flay/Swelter as a bonus ("never was there held between four globes of gristle so sinister a hell of hatred", a weapons-grade sentence for rolling around in yr mouth)
I loled at this exchange between Steerpike and Fushcia this week:
"It's all right for our friend rattle-ribs: not much life left inside him, anyway."
... "Why must one try and be respectful to old people when they aren't considerate?"
Anyway, the burning of the library sequence is marvelous, and probably the longest sustained sequence of any kind we've come across in the book so far? Still gets split up into a couple chapters, but the initial chaos is I think in one unbroken ten page bit.
I, too, cannot think of a better name for a character than Barquentine, but his entrance into the novel got me thinking about the way this text engages with class. Peake writes that there's pretty much always someone in waiting for every job, someone who's spent their whole life as an apprentice, waiting for the mentor to die so that they can take up the mantle. And it is funny and ironic of course that Steerpike has not thought of this and is thus disappointed to discover that Barquentine exists and is well enough to handle his dad's old gig. But it makes me think again about the visual metaphor of Steerpike on top of the castle, looking out on that endless gray nothingness stretching in every direction (someone else pointed to this last week). Where are you going? Why are you climbing? What is any of this for? It's not just that there's no class mobility, or that the only person who break into the next social class has to be unusually gifted. It's that even when you find yourself in the upper echelon there's still not any room for you.
right - for all that the Groan family has planned out their whole future decades if not centuries, they're still caught off-guard by any disruption to that which the plan exists to accommodate. Why save all the money if you're not going to spend it in an emergency, etc.
yr reading on class here feels spot on to me. wondering now if Keda is meant to read this way as an inverse to Steerpike, in a sense- she's unwittingly knocked down a social peg by the death of her husband, eventually finding herself existing almost outside of society entirely after Those Boys kill each other (not even her brief apprenticeship to the castle seems to be able to lift her, it's sort of omnipresent to the point of irrelevance to her society i guess?) in contrast to Steerpike's active climbing and murdering etc
that Keda's time at the castle means nothing really feels like where the book starts to crack wide open (in the best possible way)
I think my favorite part of this section was the “grotto scene,” funny to read, to me, because I could imagine how a scene like this would play out in a more contemporary “trope-y” version of this story. Our two somewhat main characters, who I suppose are love interests, to a degree (though Peake is often on the verge of steering away from this entirely), find themselves alone in a wood, one of them injured, relying on the other to bring them to a safe place and patch them up. There are a few lines in here that are, by now, total clichés ("Keep still." "Don't be heroic."), as well as the requisite passage where Fuchsia has her internal monologue about Steerpike’s physique: “He was holding her; she was in his arms; in his power. His hard arms and fingers were taking the weight at her thighs and shoulders. She could feel his muscles like bars of metal.” It’s giving Sarah J. Maas! What’s next, a “there’s only one bed” scene between Flay and Swelter??? Obviously Peake is doing something different here than what we’d expect, since this is not much of a love story and these characters are decidedly un-sexy, but so funny to read something that feels so familiar in a book that otherwise is totally unlike anything I’ve ever read.
I'm lol - I think in post-Challengers world it is nice to come into this book a few days every week and read something decidedly not even remotely horny, not even in a fun grotesque way. As always I am thinking about Phil's thoughts about this existing in sort of like, opposite side of fantasy spectrum as something like LOTR and how this just zigs and zags where a more conventional thing might go for something more capital-r Romantic or capital e-Epic. These are just dirty little freaks doing their silly dirty shit. Crine at Flay and Swelter doing enemies to lovers... that's what Ao3 is for, I guess!
Just checked and I regret to inform everyone here that there is both Gormenghast-Vikings Omegaverse fanfic and Gormenghast-Homestuck fanfic.
ur kidding me..
Don’t mean to always make it Keda Korner over here (and I do feel a bit bad that I’m vibing the most with her sections, considering how distinct they are from the rest of the story), but what am I supposed to do with a chapter titled “Knives in the Moon” besides adore it? As if that weren’t Northman-coded enough (though it can’t quite top “The Night Blade Feeds” as far as chapter titles go), Mervyn doubles down with a naked blade battle. “He was not only fighting with an assailant who was awaiting for that split second in which to strike him dead, but he was stabbing at a masterpiece—at sculpture that leapt and heaved, at a marvel of inky shadow and light.” Stabbing at a masterpiece, indeed
I also liked the chapter detailing Steerpike’s methodical, Mike Ehrmantraut-esque plan for his big book-burn-apalooza. In general, I’m fascinated by the idea of Steerpike as a chaotic ghost in the machine vs. the clockwork tradition of Gormenghast. Not sure who I really favor in that contest, but it’s Real Hoops either way.
(I LOLed at Fuschia telling him, “Follow me, if you want to. I know a cave.” And the sight of a little Steerpike chest sure did send a whole bunch of people into a tizzy, speaking of #ZweigMoments)
(*DUNE: MESSIAH SPOILERS*) Sorry to go back to this again, but at the risk of stretching the Keda/Paul Atreides comparison past its breaking point, they do both seem to fancy dramatically disassociating in the face of the horrors their prescience has wrought, ultimately foreseeing (and enacting?) their own removal from the board🤔 If only Braigon or Rantel’s knife could’ve chipped and shattered, RIP kings
Keda's sections and almost her whole life avoid a literalness otherwise at play in Gormenghast itself. Not to say this thing isn't rich with allegory in general, but you can't really one-to-one a lot of what's happening to her, it's purely existential and horrible and natural in a way that an industry and a monarchy can't allow room for, all considered.
I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I think you nailed it. Her stuff is so much more abstract and elliptical than most of the castle goings-on, and it feels pointed that it's all taking place outside of (and in some ways, in direct counterpoint to) Gormenghast
I've been casting around for comparisons to Steerpike and he reminds me of another character from Breaking Bad—Jesse Plemon's increasingly depraved Todd, another upstart good at ingratiating himself with powerful people who is probably a psychopath. (Too bad Plemons is now aged out of Steerpike range.)
That is a great comparison... Plemons really only aged out of playing a young adult like five years ago... we got so close.
I think you're dead-on about the Todd comparison - Steerpike's indifference about Sourdust's death really underlined the coldness underneath all his flattery. I don't know if he has the right level of greasy swagger, but I can almost picture Plemons' one-time co-star Kodi Smit-McPhee pulling the role off
The introduction of Barquentine is easily the best thing that happened to me in the past week, even more than the premiere of Megalopolis. Something about him moves me deeply, the way he springs into action to take his father’s place, and his desire to have his father’s funeral be Just So, and the very human comedy of him accepting a cat skull to be used in lieu of his father’s actual skull.
I am moved by Keda but I am also like. Can we get on with it? So I was thrilled by Clare’s reaction. Girl move on teas
Loved the image of baby Titus in his mother’s bosom while being rescued from arson.
The idea of a “grotto” is fascinating to me and had me googling “what exactly is a grotto” while stoned off my gourd at 1:00 on Sunday night. Like I have never considered a grotto outside of Legend of Zelda playings but now I remember—they are a real phenomenon in nature!
I simply love this book because I am someone who thinks a lot about power, the English royals (past and present), the Catholic Church, Charlemagne, the Roman Empire (don’t ask me how often), and considering how individuals can (or can’t, as it were) effect change on such systems is something I can’t spend enough time on. I WILL be reading the following novels expeditiously…
once Clare compared (com-CLARED??) Keda to the Leftovers I was like omg.... drag me (show that moves me greatly but I am also like move on teas)
A section about all our characters (or at least many) fundamentally changing due to their respective traumas!
-The Early and his new madness / possession
-Fuschia being forced to grow up some after the library burning and witnessing her father's transformation.
-Sourdust literally dying (RIP)
-Keda's lovers killing each other and her subsequent journey/sickness.
-Steerpike seems to be getting a bit cocky in his plotting but also seems to be losing his grip on his influence in the process (the twins, Fuschia, all seem a little skeptical)
One of the things that I keep enjoying is that the purpose of the Earl/Groan family is to just perform trivial "rituals" like the going up and down the stairs and carving the half moon every 6 months. I can't help but feel like Peake is trying to comment on the inconsequential meaning of nobility. These people are born into this place of privilege to do what? Perform unnecessary acts of ritual just because someone at some point said they were important? Steerpike's equality monologue seemed to get to this too, although his desire to elevate to a place of privilege also seems to make him a bit of a villain too.
Yes, his equality bit - obviously in tandem with burning the library - is where he fully starts to emerge as evil. It's clear that he doesn't think equality is important! But sharing this with the members of the Groan family does seem to upset their balance a little, to even consider for a second that there's another kind of system that could mean something to them. RIP Mervyn Peake you would have loved the death of Queen Elizabeth etc.
I can’t remember if this started happening in this week’s reading but I don’t think I’m really spoiling anything - like many things in Titus Groan, I found everyone complaining about how annoying Barquentine’s crutches are both extremely funny and very cruel.
Barquentine coming out the gate being one of the funniest guys in the last half of the book... it's very yay to me
forgot to add the main citation that came to me this week during Sourdust’s funeral which reminded me of the reverend Smith’s sermon from Wild Bill’s funeral in Deadwood 1.05:
“"Saint Paul tells us: By one’s spirit are we all baptized in the one body…For the body is not one member but many… He tells us, The eye cannot say unto the hand, 'I have no need of thee.' Nor again the head to the feet, 'I have no need of thee.' Nay, much more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble, and those members of the body which we think of as less honorable, are all necessary. He says that there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care, one to another, and where the one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.”
In Deadwood this citation to 1 Corinthians is one instance of Milch’s thesis for the show, that all residents of Deadwood are part of the civilizational organism; I like relating this to Gormenghast as another spatial/societal construct where all its members, each with their assigned roles, seem possibly on the verge of some transition whether they realize it or not.