Titus Awakes
Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is widely acknowledged to be, as
Robertson Davies pronounced, “a classic of our age.” In these
extraordinary novels, Peake created a world where all is like a
dream – lush, fantastical, and vivid. Yet it was incomplete. Parkinson’s
disease took Peake’s life in 1968, depriving his fans of the fourth and
final volume of the series, Titus Awakes except for a few tantalizing pages, after which his writing became indecipherable. Or so it seemed.
In January of 2010, Peake’s granddaughter found four composition books in her attic. They contained the fabled Titus Awakes in its entirety. Peake had outlined the novel for his wife, Maeve Gilmore, who had at last finished Peake’s masterpiece.
It starts with Titus leaving Castle Gormenghast. Peake wrote: “With every
pace he drew away from Gormenghast mountain, and from everything that
belonged to his home. That night, as Titus lay asleep in the tall barn, a nightmare held him.“
Fans of Peake will delight in this new,
wonderful novel, published one hundred years after his birth, every bit
as thrilling and masterfully written as his famed trilogy.
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Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Laurence Peake (1911–1968) was an English writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. The three works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death, and consequently should not be considered a trilogy. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, but his surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.
Gormenghast
Gormenghast consists of four primary books, and includes one additional book that complement the series but is not considered mandatory reads. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
