Titus Alone
The Gormenghast Trilogy, Book 3

Illness prevented Mervyn Peake from developing the last part of his trilogy to the full scale but anyway the idea of the novel is clear. Titus Alone is morbidly surreal and it is most hopeless – there is no light in the end of a tunnel. And Titus Alone is the most psychedelic tale. At last Titus is at......more

-I'm going to just come right out and say it: Mervyn Peake is the greatest writer of the English language the world has ever known. There. I said it, and I can't take it back. It's out there now, floating on the interwebs, for the world to disagree with. But at this point, I don't care if the world......more

Titus Alone has the charms and eccentricities, the verbal and visual beauties of its two formidable predecessors, but it is only about half as long as they are, with extremely short chapters, and it lacks their concentrated richness, their depth and perspective. Is it a radical departure, a sleeker,......more

Mervyn Peake was, by all accounts, a powerful presence, an electric character, and a singular creative force. While Tolkien's poetry is the part everyone skips, Peake's invigorates his books. His voice and tone are unique in the English language, and his characterization is delightfully, grotesquely......more

I waffled a little bit between three and four stars, but in the end Peake's use of language won over the rather odd plot departure in this third book. I didn't mind that Titus was a stranger in a strange land or that he has apparently skipped far into the future where he's among moderns with airplane......more