Mervyn May, Volume 4

Barquentine is unaware that there have been grave and sinister happenings in the Castle on this historic morning.

#MervynMay has come to a close!! Can you believe it? What are we going to do with the rest of the summer knowing that the titular Titus Groan has become the Earl at the tender age of one? Well — more on that soon, but first let’s hear from Fran Magazine favorite, Mr. Flay:

His loyalty to the castle, too deep for him to question, was his heart’s background: to all that was implied by the broken line of the towers. With his knees drawn up to his chin he pored upon that skyline as he sat at the base of an outcrop of rock among the trees. At his side lay the long sword he had sharpened. The sun was going down. In another three hours he would be on his way, for the sixth time since his banishment, to the cloisters had had known since his youth. To the cloisters in whose northern shadows was an entrance to the stairhead of the wine vaults and the Kitchens. A thousand recollections attached themselves to these cloisters alone. Sudden happenings — the awakening of ideas that had borne fruit or had withered as his touch — the memories of his youth — of his infancy even, for a brightly colored vignette at the back of his skull recurred from time to time, a vignette of crimson, gold, and grey. He had no recollection of who it was how led him by the hand, but he recalled how, between two of the southerly arches, he had his guardian were stopped—how the air had been filled with sunshine—how a giant, for so he must then have appeared to the child, a giant in gold had given him an apple, the globe of crimson which he had never released from his mind’s empiric grasp, nor the grey of the long hair that fell across the brow and over the shoulders of his first memory.

This is what we call a ‼️ KEDA MOMENT ‼️ Not exactly, maybe, but I was surprised to see the dreamlike structure of some of those outside of the castle moments bleed into Flay’s psyche — though Peake waits until Flay has been banished to open up his psychology. Of all of the big events in this last quarter of the book, the bizarre, violent conclusion of Flay and Swelter really moved me, mostly in the sense that Flay is incapable and unwilling to walk away from what is happening. Gertrude banishes him for doing animal abuse by throwing at cat against Steerpike — while Fran Magazine does not condone the harming of animals, it did feel briefly nice to see Steerpike knocked off balance for a second — and he is given, to some degree, a total out. Poverty, sure, and an unknown life and role beyond Gormenghast, and the ability to drop his feud with Swelter, but he simply doesn’t want to. His loyalty to the castle, as Peake writes, was “too deep for him to question.”

This final section of the book is most plot-heavy, but it reads, to me at least, a lot like the first act of the book. There’s a drifting sense of discomfort, and rather than the rat-tat-tat of events and plotting in the middle section — the Prunesquallor moments — everything and everyone has a unnerving stillness despite all of the rapidly occurring bad events. The castle — and its occupants — are disintegrating in real time, but it’s not a crumble, it’s a melting, eroding type of destruction.

To go over some general plot, we lose Sepulchrave to madness and/or owls, we lose Swelter to Flay, and we lose Keda to profound melancholy. Titus Groan is made baby Earl — love that! — and Steerpike is his version of Flay, but more of an advisor. Barquentine, Prunesquallor — these are my guys and they are doing awesome. Fuchsia and Slagg — we’ll see. I was surprised to see less and less of Fuchsia as the book went on. There is a vague structure here that allows Steerpike to move through characters and abandon them when they are no longer useful to him, but I do feel like the little flirtations between Fuchsia and Steerpike may get picked up again in future books. But who knows! Not (yet) me.

Lots that occurs during this final section is truly unnerving — though it has a title that makes me LOL in the abstract, “The Dark Breakfast” brims with tension and unease. I love that idea that Barquentine, who woke up like one week before all of this started happening, is so completely out of the loop and can’t really figure out if things are bad or this is just always what everything is like — kind of both. We didn’t really discuss this last time even though I made a huge bullet point in my notes but one of the most striking aspects of this final section is a tense shift that occurs from past to present. After the breakfast, the tense moves back into past. This makes a little sense to me, given we jump into Flay’s recollections about the past following his banishment after he does TW animal abuse, and that time starts to move both quickly and vaguely at that point. But I’m curious to know what everyone made of those present-tense chapters, if the dramatic pace of the book felt as though it sped up, or if we are intended to find that style a little more urgent. As a rule I tend to hate present tense (first person, that is) because it can often be so shitty, falsely adding tension, but here I mostly found it unsettling, like not knowing what you might see as you round a corner.

At the lakeside ceremony for Titus’s Earling, we hear from the Keda’s baby — crying across the lake. For those who wondered whether Keda would play a bigger role throughout the novel, in terms of plot, I wonder if this eleventh hour call from her child might prove to be some kind of foreshadowing for future books.

Beyond that, we end Titus Groan how we started, back with Mr. Rottcodd, whom no one has told about all the stuff that’s happened during the time in which we last saw him. He’s not really onto it, but he knows something is up: “Accustomed as he was to silence, there was something unique today about the emptiness. Something both close and insistent. And as he pondered he became aware of a sense of instability — a sensation almost of fear — as though some ethic he had never questioned, something on which whatever he believed was founded and through which his every concept filtered was now threatened. As though, somewhere, there was treason.” Well — good inkling!

I only just finished reading last night before bed, and so my thoughts on the “what it all means” of Titus Groan feel a bit distant and foggy. To me, the most striking element of the novel is its relationship to nature and industry, and the ways in which the staid tradition of politics and family exist outside of nature, do not bend to it or indulge in it. Any time we see someone step outside the world — or house the world within Gormenghast (room of spiders, roots) — we enter a kind of fugue state. It feels fitting that predators housed in and around Gormenghast — cats, owls — are used for violence, which is, to some degree, in their own nature but manipulated for the use of those inside it. That the Hall of Bright Carvings, where we begin and end, is full of zoo-like animal art pieces suggests that all of these people live on the damn moon, so to speak, and can never fathom what it will be like to feel close to sensations like these. Not even Rottcodd understands what he gives up by being inside Gormenghast, though perhaps he has a sense. The Steerpike of it all feels like the most traditional part of the novel, but his nihilistic scheming is compelling in that we don’t yet know the limits or where or why it’s all moving in that direction. He’s not really The Strangers-ing them (because he can, and they’re home); his grasp at power is more about knowledge and control than it is power and riches.

There was no Middlemarch 2, but there are two more books in the trilogy. I’d love to read these and discuss with you guys, though summer is a crazy time and I have some other books to read in a more immediate sense. Therefore, I suggest the following timeline:

• Gormenghast discussion post: last week of July

• Titus Alone discussion post: last week of September

• IDK time after that: maybe we watch the bad miniseries; TBD

This gives everyone two months each for the remaining books, though if you want to just read ahead, I’m not going to stop you, I don’t even know where you live.

charles stewart

Brendan recommended the Backlisted episode on the trilogy, which I believe has some light spoilers for future books but otherwise features what is a promising discussion of the novels. I got about fifteen minutes in yesterday before getting on one of those trains where the conductor’s announcements just sound like extremely loud static and had to turn off all extraneous sound lest risk the chance of having some kind of sound-induced aneurysm. But today will be normal (something I say to myself every day). If people have found other worthy readings on Titus Groan, feel free to share. I loved the analysis of some of Peake’s poems in this review by Michael Wood for LRB. Thank you for for all of your great comments and points of discussion and moments of JBOL. #MervynMay forever!!!!