stone lanes revisited

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.