Mervyn Peake and Maeve Gilmore - Titus Awakes

review by Malcolm Martland

Mervyn Peake was born in China in 1911 to British parents. He trained as an artist and had a career in painting and illustration. He witnessed some horrors during World War II during which time he applied unsuccessfully to become a war artist. The Channel Island Sark was his home on and off before and after the war. He suffered from mental illness and in later years Parkinson's disease. His life experiences undoubtedly coloured the narrative of his books.

From the Back Cover
With every pace he drew away from Gormenghast mountain, and from everything that belonged to his home...

In Titus Awakes the 77th Earl of Groan, leaves the crumbling castle of Gormenghast and finds the larger world even stranger than his birthplace. Confronted by elemental and human threats - snowstorms, shipwrecks and attempts on his life - Titus' bravery is tested and he must fight to free himself from the claims of his past.

Peake began this fourth and final volume of the Gormenghast stories but died having only written a few pages. Using notes and the fragments he left behind, his wife, the writer and painter Maeve Gilmore, has created a richly imagined sequel that fans of Gormenghast will delight in.

My review
It is probably 30 years since I read Mervyn Peake's trilogy, Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone which were written in the 1940s and 50s. These novels tell us of the birth, childhood and finally the setting out on his own of Titus Groan, 77th Earl of Gormenghast. Gormeghast is a huge castle run with the greatest inefficiency by a whole army of retainers and bound by ancient and strict rules.

The original trilogy had a completeness of its own, this new work written mainly by Mervyn Peake's wife from fragments left by the author, while continuing in a very similar style seems to break very little new ground to me. Titus wakes in a freezing cold shed in the middle of winter, tended for by kindly but foreign villagers. They are also caring for a girl similarly suffering from hypothermia. Titus recovers, grows in strength, helps the community, gets the girl pregnant and leaves. A loyal dog from the village follows him and becomes his protector. There then follows a sequence of events in which Titus is kidnapped by bandits, held captive by militia, working as a model in an artists' commune, a mental hospital attendant, and being cared for in a monastic order before he finally realises his final destination.
I was disappointed, this just seems to be a bit more of the third novel Titus Alone, the bits the author left out with an alternative ending. I felt the original ending was significant and complete, unless you are an avid addictive Mervyn Peake fan I would not recommend this work as I feel it detracts from the original.
Malcolm Martland, broadcast on RadioScilly 107.9 FM 1 September 2011