I first came upon this set of volumes (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone) when I was in junior high (or "middle school" as they call it now). I bought a new copy recently - it is out now as one huge (and expensive) paperback, with lots of forwords and afterwords and mini-bios of the author. The first book, Titus Groan, starts with the birth of the title character and ends when he is but a year old. His birth is the catalyst that changes the fortunes of every other inhabitant of the ancient and static community of Gormenghast. The theme is change wrought by nature versus the stultifyingly artificial and meaningless traditions of humanity a.k.a., chaos versus order. The Countess, Titus' mother, is an earth-goddess-like paragon of natural law who is at all times surrounded by an army of cats and an escort of birds. She is just about indescructable, but her husband, Sepulchrave, the Earl of Groan, is a neurasthenic intellectual whose only pleasure is reading. The Earl's inability to cope with the world beyond the printed page and the fanatically-ordered rituals of Gormenghast is his undoing.The second book, Gormenghast, is somewhat more conventional as it follows the childhood and adolescence of Titus. The final volume, Titus Alone, is barely held together by its slimmest of plots, and is weakened by its non-Gormenghast setting (some science-fictional country). But there are still memorable characters and situations, though the female characters are stereotypes (the good, but smothering older-woman; the evil, brittlely modern young one), but that may just be because we are mostly shown them through the eyes of the older but still-in-need-of-maturing Titus.
Gormenghast is not for everyone - not that any book is - but if you do not like rich, dense, sometimes hallucinatory prose; bizarre characters in even more bizarre situations; grotesqueness and eccentricity taken for granted; and that hallmark of British writers with pen-hands of steel, the endless descriptions of nature - then this is definitely not the work for you. But if you need a vacation from: "dry, ironic" prose; slim novellettes populated by personality sketches that put all together barely make one full-bodied proper character for a real novel; Oprah-approved tomes full of politically-correct sufferers of dull modern neuroses (instead of good, old-fashioned twisted passions); cyber-anything; and preachy allegories with cardboard figurines and plots ripped off of Das Kapital or the Bible - then I heartily recommend the Gormenghast trilogy to you.
(Note: some time back in the seventies Joyce Carol Oates put out a huge novel called Bellefleur, which was at that time compared to Peake's work. I remember I thought of reading it, picked it up, read a bit, then put it down. Americans just can't do this kind of stuff.)
Andrea Harris, 24 May 2000