stone lanes revisited

[perlmonger]

I’ve just finished rereading Titus Groan (last time was maybe ten years ago), and I’m struck at how small Gormenghast feels this time round. To me now, and explicitly in Peake’s descriptive writing of outside the castle. Outside is vital: I don’t think I registered before how important Keda was, how Flay is transformed and opened by his exile, and I’m looking forward to re-cognizing Keda’s daughter in Gormenghast with a wider perspective.

The end of Titus Alone really is foreshadowed in this first book; I suspect I’ll be confirmed in feeling the last to be the best of the three when I finally get to its end.

ETA that the central theme of the first book, if there were but a single one, is the definition of, the overture to, Fuchsia’s tragedy. And its inevitability.

Comments

[hunkymouse.livejournal.com]

For me, the "castle" has always been a distillation of the London I discovered when I left home.

All the salient parts are sort of pulled out, and crammed together, the way the underground pulls the components of London into one place, with the inbetween bits left out... and for me, it was altogether a legend of puberty and maturation, and escape.

Flay and the rest aren't "real" for me. They have the flavour of the stuff that "old people" talk about. A world which never really existed, obviously, because I wasn't there! - but which was a necessary construct to provide a framework for my live and existence.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

a legend of puberty and maturation, and escape

Yes; that's Titus' story (and that was what resonated when I first read the books as a teenager). The other threads are pulling at me more this time, though: Keda, Flay and Fuchsia, as I wrote, and Dr Prunesquallor too. Steerpike still feels like a cipher though.

a distillation of the London I discovered when I left home

Have you read Michael Moorcock's Mother London? That's a real distillation of London for me, and the strongest contender for best novel I've ever read.