“Titus Alone (1959), the third and final novel featuring Titus Groan by the British author and artist Mervyn Peake. These works are now often referred to as the Gormenghast trilogy. The two prior novels, Titus Groan (1946) and Gormenghast (1950), are rightly hailed as classics of fantasy, gothicism, and midcentury literature writ large”
“Peake’s contemporaneous literary admirers, his disciple Michael Moorcock recounts, included Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and Anthony Burgess”
“His association with the fantasy genre is more recent, and stems from publishers’ hunger for English fantasy trilogies following the global success, in the 1960s, of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–55)”
“Peake’s series, retroactively regarded as a “trilogy,” offers an unsettling gothic shadow to Tolkien’s more sunlit work, and Adam Roberts has called both series “arguably the most important Fantasy works published in the twentieth century.””
“Set against Tolkien’s moral simplicity and hard-fought heroism, Peake became the figurehead of an alternative, darker fantastic tradition: fewer elves, more owls; fewer battles, more murders; less myth and legend, more Shakespeare and Dickens”
“Later writers in this Peakean tradition include Moorcock, Angela Carter, China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, and Susanna Clarke”
“Peake’s masterfully eerie Titus books have their own, deeply Gothic absence: Titus Alone is widely considered both a failed novel and a failed conclusion to the series, especially when the grouping is understood as a trilogy”
“medical professor Demetrios J. Sahlas offered the sensitive posthumous assessment that Peake suffered not from Parkinson’s but from “Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB).””
“Titus Alone is generally treated as a failed attempt at a third Gormenghast novel, damaged irreparably by Peake’s diminishing faculties”
“It is not only the formal aspects of Titus Alone that are discontinuous with Titus Groan and Gormenghast. Titus Alone also departs from the medieval-meets-Victorian setting of Gormenghast Castle and sends the young aristocrat, Titus, into a world sometimes called science-fictional, but which might better be considered a modernist fantasy: the geography is unknowable and the cities unnamed, but the technologies Titus encounters are—excepting some chillingly futuristic surveillance tech—recognizably 20th-century”
“It is no stretch to suggest modernist influence in Peake’s work: Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader (1925) was an acknowledged inspiration during the writing of Titus Groan”
“Moorcock led the campaign to rehabilitate Titus Alone after its brutal initial reception, casting himself, along with the composer and writer Langdon Jones, as the defenders of Peake’s literary honor”
““Peake seemed to regard evil and tragedy as a tangible force,” Jones writes, “and [Titus Alone] reflects a struggle that was taking place in reality, when Peake himself was facing a horror more dreadful and more protracted than that endured by Titus, and to which, after ten years, he succumbed.””
“To appreciate and apprehend Titus Alone honestly, I thus suggest that we need to hold two complex positions simultaneously. First, the third entry is certainly the least impressive of the Titus novels. Those who find it a shadow of the novel Peake might have written—if unaffected by dementia, by The Wit to Woo’s commercial failure, and by tortuous, ineffective shock therapy—are most likely correct”
“But second, and perhaps moreover, not all of Titus Alone’s reputation for failure comes from its author’s neurological condition. Some of it derives, simply, from the fact that Mervyn Peake wished to write a different book from the one that fans of the soon-to-be-established genre of Tolkienian fantasy might wish to read”