Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake

And so I've come to the last of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, Titus Alone. In the end of previous book Titus leaves Gormenghast to find himself, and in this book he meets a lot of people on his journey while still being quite alone. It all starts in a very intriguing way when Titus stumbles into a nameless city - but unlike age old Gormenghast, this is a modern city with cars and planes and skyscrapers. In fact for a while the book changes genre altogether: it becomes dystopic science fiction with it's floating surveillance devices and a twisted dark underground world.

The book is very episodic - Titus moves from place to place, from person to another, from lover to hater. He doesn't make friends but evokes strong emotions - maybe it's the way he keeps telling everyone that he's the 77th Lord of Gormenghast which kind of alienates them. Or makes them fall in love (or in lust) with him. Most of the time he's acting like a 5 year old, and you just want to slap some sense into him - but in many ways he is very young and very immature because of the way he's been brought up in Gormenghast.

It's not a very good book. It's important part of the Gormenghast trilogy, but it's not a polished or well planned or whole as the other two books. And although Peake always planned to write a fourth book (so that the whole story arc would take Titus from cradle to grave) this book had a wholesome ending to the saga. There are many parts of the book that I thought were unnecessary or shoddy, but then those gems, oh those moments where Peake gives his all, they make it all worth it.

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