The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake

First published: 1967 (Titus Groan, 1946; Gormenghast, 1950; Titus Alone, 1959; 2d ed., 1970) and “Titus Awakes” (in The Mervyn Peake Review, no. 20, 1990)

Type of work: Fantasy

Time of work: A mythical present

Locale: The castle of Gormenghast and the surrounding countries

Principal Characters:

• Titus Groan, the heir to Gormenghast
• Lord Sepulchrave, his father
• Countess Gertrude, his mother
• Lady Fuchsia, his sister
• Dr. Prunesquallor, the physician to the family
• Steerpike, a devious and ambitious servant
• Bellgrove, the headmaster of the castle school
• Juno, Titus’ lover

The Novels

Titus Groan, the first book of The Gormenghast Trilogy, may well be the only work in English literature whose most striking character is a building—the building being Gormenghast Castle, the immensely old and inconceivably huge ancestral home of the Groans. The story of Titus, the Seventy-Seventh Earl of Groan, is one that takes an extraordinarily long time to get under way. Titus Groan starts with Dr. Prunesquallor delivering Countess Gertrude’s baby, Titus, and by the end of the book, Titus is only one year old. The hundreds of pages between the first and last paint a detailed and loving description of the setting, Gormenghast Castle, and its principal inhabitants.

Gormenghast is a place absolutely isolated from the world of the reader: No one in the story knows or much cares what is happening outside their own time-bound society. Gormenghast, for as long as anyone can remember, has been ruled by the dictates of the Ritual, a code of behavior that prescribes the daily conduct of the castle’s inhabitants, particularly that of the reigning Earl. Titus will much later rebel against the stifling demands of the Ritual. That is in the future, however, when the story begins.

The plot of the first book begins with the introduction of Steerpike, an apprentice cook when he first appears, a villain whose will shapes the early story. Unlike the other characters, Steerpike has a genuine ambition. It is small at first—to escape the domination of Swelter, the head cook—but it soon grows until he dreams of taking complete command of the castle. After escaping from Swelter’s dominion, Steerpike discovers a possible center of power in this fragmented society: He wins the trust of the feeble-minded sisters of Sepulchrave, the twins Cora and Clarice. These witless old maids are members of the Groan family, yet simpletons he can manipulate. Through them, he plots to set fire to Sepulchrave’s library when the family gathers for a ceremonial; he plans to rescue the Earl and the heir from the fire to advance himself further in their affections. The arson goes as scheduled, and Sourdust, the master of Ritual, dies in the fire. Steerpike realizes that the position is one of central importance in the castle, but to his dismay, Sourdust proves to have a son, Barquentine, who assumes the post. Steerpike then attaches himself to Barquentine as his apprentice.

As this summary shows, the plot of the first book is largely the story of Steerpike’s ambition. There are, however, a number of subplots, principally the rivalry between the head cook, Swelter, and Sepulchrave’s devoted valet, Flay. The story of their mutual hatred provides the ending for this first part of the trilogy. In a climactic duel, Flay kills Swelter; Sepulchrave banishes his servant from the castle and then disappears himself. The first book closes with the proclaiming of the infant Titus as Seventy-Seventh Earl of Groan.

The second book, Gormenghast, begins with Titus at seven. Unlike his father, Titus has had no childhood postponement from the demands of the Ritual. From his earliest years, Barquentine, master of Ritual, orders and limits his daily existence. Barquentine has no particular affection for Titus: The old man’s only loyalty is to the Gormenghast Ritual and to the duty that he serves harshly and exactingly. Under Barquentine’s control, Titus yearns for the freedom simply to do what he likes.

One of the main contrasts between the second book and the other two is that Gormenghast provides much more humor, chiefly through the subplot of Titus’ school and its masters. The headmaster, Bellgrove, and his associates are grotesques—characters exaggerated to the point of comedy in their appearances and actions. The story of Titus’ schoolboy adventures is accompanied by the romance of Bellgrove and Irma Prunesquallor, the doctor’s sister. Yet this comedy is superimposed on the sinister backdrop of Steerpike’s continued plotting.

From the moment of his burning the library, Steerpike is linked with fire. It is his principal tool, and the image with which he is most often associated. In the first book, in an odd foreshadowing of a later event, old Sourdust catches some hairs from his beard in a door. Unable to unlock the door and free himself (which would break the Ritual), Sourdust cuts off the trapped hairs and, to remove them from the door, sets fire to them. Again, an interpolated story in the second book speaks of a hollow-cheeked youth setting the beard of his master aflame. Still later, the reader is told of Steerpike not that he has several hours “to kill,” but that he has several hours “to be burned.” Steerpike’s fire, his ambition, begins to take strange forms: His domination over Cora and Clarice has degenerated into a desire for gratuitous cruelty. Telling them that there is a plague in the castle, he imprisons them in their apartment, keeping them half starved and making them literally crawl for his amusement. Eventually, in their desperation they try to kill him, and the attempt enrages Steerpike against the hierarchy of the castle, moving him to action.

He goes to Barquentine’s room, determined to kill the old man, no longer content to wait for him to die. In the struggle that follows, Steerpike sets Barquentine’s beard and clothes ablaze, but the old man seizes Steerpike in a deathgrip. Steerpike manages to jump from the window, still clutched by Barquentine, and the flaming pair fall into the castle moat, where Steerpike finally drowns Barquentine. Although badly injured himself, Steerpike manages to convince everyone that he has been burned trying to rescue Barquentine, and he finally achieves his ambition, becoming master of Ritual. When he recovers, scarred by his burns, he realizes that Cora and Clarice have starved to death, locked in their rooms.

Through all these events, Titus has been growing, and growing restless. In his play in the surrounding forests, Titus becomes acquainted with Flay, who has been living in the wilderness near the castle since his banishment, and Flay communicates his own suspicion of Steerpike to Titus. Flay’s warning adds to the dissatisfaction that Titus had focused on Steerpike, who, as master of Ritual, dominates Titus’ life. Steerpike, meanwhile, has set himself a new conquest, the seduction of Fuchsia, but this time he overreaches himself. Flay, in a moment of prescience, foresees some evil about to occur and returns to the castle. In the company of Titus and Dr. Prunesquallor, Flay follows Steerpike to the room in which lie the bodies of the twins. There, the three attempt to arrest Steerpike, but he murders Flay and escapes to hide somewhere in the enormous castle.

Steerpike’s flight is aided by a torrential rain that floods the region, turning the castle into an archipelago that can be explored only by boat; as Titus begins to take control of the plot, the images of fire give way to those of water. The unthinkable is happening: Gormenghast itself is changing, its former mountainlike solidity becoming a cluster of islands and inlets. The shape of Gormenghast is said to resemble the island of Sark, and a special allusion occurs when the characters refer to a part of the castle called “Little Sark.” The images of water, however, are not entirely life-bringing: Fuchsia, genuinely in love with Steerpike, is stunned by the revelations about him. In a moment of solitary inattention, she loses her footing and drowns in the floodwaters. Caring nothing about Gormenghast but thinking that Steerpike has killed Fuchsia, Titus tracks down Steerpike and kills him in a flooded room. With the death of this former prime mover of the plot, Titus no longer has anything to hold him to the castle. He loathes the Ritual, and his sister, to whom he was closest, is dead. He tells his mother that he is going and, despite her prediction that he will return, leaves Gormenghast.

The third book, Titus Alone, follows the picaresque adventures of Titus on his own in a society as unusual in its own way as was that of Gormenghast. Although some critics have suggested that Mervyn Peake’s failing health affected his writing of the third part, there is no abrupt change in characterization or handling of plot to suggest that its writer was unable to do what he wanted. Peake’s depiction of the city’s underground (in both a figurative and a literal sense) is especially powerful, as well written as anything in the first or second books. Even the familiar symbol of Gormenghast Castle frequently appears: To Titus’ chagrin, people in the city he finds think that Gormenghast is a myth, and Titus finds himself doubting his own sanity as he begins to wonder if Gormenghast really exists. The presence of Gormenghast, however, like a gigantic sleeping animal, is largely replaced by another menace: the omnipresent surveillance to which Titus believes himself subjected. In strong contrast to the solitude which was characteristic of Gormenghast, privacy is now hard to secure. Small flying machines observe the actions of the inhabitants of the city, and Titus himself is hounded by a mysterious pair of uniformed, helmeted figures, apparently agents of the shadowy government.

If the earlier books were the story of Titus’ youth, this is the story of his young manhood; of his first love, Juno; of his first involvements with equals in society. Again in strong contrast to the unchanging castle of the early books, Titus Alone presents a picture of a changing political scene. For the first time, Titus finds centers of authority—Law and Police—outside himself and finds that they can be masters as uncompromising as the Ritual. Titus finds himself jailed as a vagrant, thinking of his mother’s prophecy that he will return to Gormenghast, but still as changeable as water. He is paroled into the custody of Juno, a woman of substance in the city. She loves him and for a time he returns that love, yet his restlessness causes him to leave her as well. After all the adventures that follow, Titus escapes from the oppressive, stifling city and flees into the countryside. Eventually, he comes in his wandering to a place he knows: a ridge from the other side of which he could see Gormenghast. His world does exist, and with the knowledge that he is sane, he no longer has any need to return. He therefore turns away without crossing the ridge and coming in sight of the castle itself.

The Characters

As has been suggested earlier, Peake draws his characters as grotesques. It is no surprise that an artist should provide strongly visual presentations of his characters, presentations aided in most editions by illustrations by the author. Many of these characters remind the reader of the “humour” characters of seventeenth century English drama, people so exaggerated in one respect or another that the quirk becomes the personality of the character.

The main characters are highly individualized, each isolated in his or her own private world: Lord Sepulchrave, lost in his melancholy, mopes from one Ritual requirement to the next. Titus’ mother, Gertrude, lives in her rooms surrounded by the only creatures in the world that she loves: hundreds of birds (who come when she calls) and a host of pet white cats. His teenage sister, Fuchsia, spends her days playing in an attic gallery stuffed with discarded odds and ends. There is little interaction in the usual novelistic sense because the characters so seldom meet: Gormenghast offers sufficient room, both metaphorically and literally, for its dwellers to stake a claim and in which to preserve their own separate identities. Numerous descriptions of the castle depict it as an enormous structure, with wing after wing extending to the horizons, and in its vast expanse, each character is free to pursue an individual goal, no matter how odd. The desire most frequently expressed by the characters is a desire to be let alone.

Even the more minor characters are individualized to the point of caricature: Take, for example, Barquentine, who not only has a withered leg but also is so stunted that he stands only half normal size, or Dr. Prunesquallor, whose foppish manner and nervous laugh allow the reader to identify his speeches even without attribution. The names of the characters aid this method: In book 3, two characters associated throughout with animal images are the political revolutionary Muzzlehatch and his daughter Cheeta.

Flay, the majordomo, is all sharp angles and points; his knees crack like pistol shots with every step (at one point, when Flay wants to move silently, he even muffles his knee joints). His adversary, Swelter, is a character as soft and as formless as the dough he kneads. It is not surprising that most of the characters, guarding their own individuality so jealously, are preoccupied with their own desires, subordinated only (for all but Steerpike and Titus) to the traditions of Gormenghast. The castle gives them at least this: the opportunity to be themselves in whatever unorthodox directions their whims lead. Titus never perceives this unusual coupling of freedom with restriction: What is sustaining to the others circumscribes him, and he must leave the castle to appreciate what it had offered.

Critical Context

The author of The Gormenghast Trilogy spent much of his life ignored by the critics and tastemakers in several branches of art, despite his facility as a poet, a writer of prose, a painter, and a book illustrator. It was a life hampered by the irregular and insecure place of the artist in society, by the conflicts of nations, and by common mortality.

Yet it was not dull; Peake’s life was itself much like a romance, filled with the color of exotic places and with an often bizarre humor. He was born in the city of Kuling in China, where his father was a medical missionary, and he lived there until he was eleven. Some readers have suggested that Peake derived his conception of Gormenghast at least in part from his recollections of this early period. The Peakes were frequent visitors in Hankow, the capital of the province, where foreigners lived in a walled compound surrounded by Chinese workshops that produced fine porcelain. The resemblance between the castle of Gormenghast with the village of the Bright Carvers huddled against its walls and the compound in Hankow surrounded by the porcelainmakers is striking. The resemblance is there, however, only in general, because there is nothing particularly Oriental about the detail of the setting of Gormenghast, its inhabitants, or those who cluster around its walls. The Bright Carvers, artists though they are, show nothing characteristically Chinese in their way of life, their names, or their pursuits.

Whatever influence Peake’s childhood in China had on his work, it may have ultimately had a malign effect on his life: In 1917, Peake contracted a viral disease epidemic in China, one that may have been the remote cause of the nervous condition that struck him years later at the height of his production. Peake’s childhood was largely a pleasant one, however, even amid the turmoil of the Chinese political situation. In 1923, the family returned to England, where Peake was enrolled at Eltham School. Six years later, he began the course of study at the Royal Academy School in London. Never much of a student and perhaps uncomfortable with the regimen of the Royal Academy, he left before completing the course and joined an artists’ colony on the island of Sark in the English Channel. He was to return again and again to Sark, and his affection for the place showed in his writing.

In the years that followed, despite the restrictions of postwar shortages, Peake established himself as one of the foremost book illustrators in England. He wrote a play and published several books of poems and collections of drawings before developing a condition in 1957 that was first diagnosed as a nervous breakdown. By 1960, it was clear that Peake had something more lasting, perhaps an affliction such as Parkinson’s Disease, but one that developed decades after the original infection. He suffered increasingly from lapses of attention, shaking, and an inability to concentrate. He would begin a sketch for a book illustration and, while drawing, forget what he was depicting. At last, his wife was no longer able to care for him, and in 1964 he began four years in nursing homes that ended with his death in 1968. Ironically, it was during the last stages of his illness, when he was less and less in touch with the world, that The Gormenghast Trilogy was published in paperback in the United States, an event that led to the work’s becoming a cult favorite.

Peake, as a devoted husband and father, as a man with a wide circle of friends, was certainly not Titus. He was not a crusader for political causes and certainly no champion, in the ordinary sense of that word, of individualism. Yet there was something almost medieval in his unconcern with material possessions or for the rules of bureaucracy. As a man who honestly did not know that one had to be licensed to drive a car, he exhibited something of the spirit of Gormenghast’s inhabitants. He lived, almost unthinkingly, that freedom to be oneself, even to the point of eccentricity, that his characters showed in abundance. In a world that has never shown much tolerance toward individualists, the popularity of his work is a good sign.

Bibliography

Batchelor, John. Mervyn Peake: A Biographical and Critical Exploration, 1974.

Gilmore, Maeve. A World Away: A Memoir of Mervyn Peake, 1970.

Watney, John. Mervyn Peake, 1976.