Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books are among my all-time favorites — lush, weird, and full of unforgettable characters locked in a near-operatic conflict of competing passions and duties. As fans of the series know, Peake’s degenerative illness cut this amazing series short, and quite possibly radically influenced the tenor of the third book, Titus Alone. For those initiate in its strange wonders, Gormenghast remains one of the great what-ifs of fantastic literature — if Peake had produced the multi-book cycle he had intended, would it have given us a new model for the fantasy epic?
Sadly, we’ll never know, and fans have long resigned themselves to accepting that three books is all we get. Until now. Found by Peake’s son in the attic of his mother’s home, Titus Awakes was handwritten in several notebooks by Peake’s wife, Maeve Gilmore. It continues the story of Titus based on the vague outline left by Peake (familiar to many readers as an appendix of Titus Alone), and takes it in new, unexpected directions.
Read the Telegraph article ‘New Gormenghast novel found in attic‘ for a fuller story.
I’m very excited by this. I don’t see it in the same vein as the resurrecting of old literary corpses such as the stunt with the latest Vladimir Nabokov ‘novel,’ or the retread recycling we’ve gotten with the worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert. Peake often collaborated with his wife, and it seems a natural and poignant thing that she would continue the journey of Titus when her husband no longer could — that she did, it seems, bring the Titus story to a conclusion in a very personal way that melds the imaginary worlds of Peake with the reality of his passing.
