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    Titus Alone
    Titus Alone
    Titus Alone
    Audiobook (abridged)5 hours

    Titus Alone

    Written by Mervyn Peake

    Narrated by Rupert Degas

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this audiobook

    Titus Groan has fled the rambling, ruined and ruinous castle of Gormenghast, desperate for a view of the world beyond. But he wasn’t prepared for this. Satellites, death-rays, sinister policemen and underworld outcasts live in a nightmarish contemporary city that feels like something by Wells, Burroughs or Philip K. Dick. Threatened and lost, he begins to miss the home he left; but surely he won’t be tempted back? Titus Alone is a completely unexpected development, its bizarre and absurd satirical vision placing the dangers of progressive modernity against the deadening force of tradition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateJul 1, 2011
    ISBN9781843795438

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    Reviews for Titus Alone

    3.5/5

    413 ratings17 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A very odd skeleton of a book. It is not nearly as fleshed out or detailed as the first two books in the trilogy. I think that had Peake not been ill while writing this, it would have been a different book indeed.

      The world Titus has found outside of Gormenghast is vaguely steampunkish in feel, though this was written decades before steampunk was conceived of. It's an interesting contrast -- Titus with his mind full of the crumbling towers of Gormenghast Castle and his traditional duties versus a more modern world full of light bulbs,elevators, helicopters shaped like fish, and cars like sharks.

      I didn't like this installment as much as the rest of the trilogy, both because of the mentioned lack of detail and because a more fractured plot.
    • 3/5
      A strange departure from the previous two book, Titus ends up in the modern world where no one has heard of Gormonghast. More aggressively surreal.
    • 3/5
      Stick with the first two, the third one’s a mess!!
    • 3/5
      hard to follow; although very interesting. rereading can make it easy
    • 3/5
      Well, I knew if I didn't read Titus Alone now, after Titus Groan and Gormanghast, I might never. Although having read it, maybe never would have been the wiser choice?[Perhaps reviewing this book is cruel? He was suffering from the onset of dementia, and another nervous breakdown.] Plotwise, Titus has left Gormanghast, and entered a strangely modern-sci-fi world, where they have cars and flying machines, and are entirely unaware of the giant crumbling castle of Gormanghast.Which is probably an interesting topic to write about. Is my greatness real, or just a dream that happened in my mind? What are my roots? Am I deluded? Are my beliefs about what I have done actually true?But Titus... just fails to click as a character for me. He feels more like a mcguffin, bounced from set piece to set piece. Most people get to know him when he is unconcious, or at least mostly fallen at their feet, and he's not usually, err, all that nice when he's awake?But whatever we're not being shown must be magnetic, because so many people in the book are drawn to him. Muzzlehatch, hides him from the police and joins in a fight on his side and kills a man for him. Juno, takes him into her house and falls in love with him. Cheeta, becomes so obsessed with him she constructs Elaborate Revenge Ploys.[Peake is not redeeming himself with his female characters here, either. The Black Rose exists merely for Titus to have to kill to protect her, and then she swoons away and dies anyway. Cheeta is painted as evil and scheming and shallow, but really, she is probably not the douchiest one in their relationship arc, which consists of Titus going 'hello! You have nice breasts' as his first words to her, then saying 'no, I don't like you, I just want to sleep with you, you're not very nice, and I must always be Free To Leave.']It feels like a book that doesn't quite work, storywise. Lots of Important Events happen offstage and are then referred to later oddly in passing, like the destruction of the zoo or blowing up the factory. There are things that feel like they are going somewhere that never do (who is the strange auburn haired man who is lurking in Juno's arbour just in case she is wandering around heartbroken and wants a new squeeze?) and things where motivations seem oddly missing (why does the state particularly care about Titus enough to send two behelmetted policeman constantly tracking him?) It feels like there is an entire story around the edges about the Evil Factory and Muzzlehatch's destruction of it, but it is so light touch as to dissolve like gossamer when you try to touch it - I have no idea why they destroyed Muzzlehatch's zoo, or what evil things they were doing the factory (other than Terrible Stench of Death and Things Muzzlehatch could Not Describe) or why they were doing them, which feels like a big gap. And I am sure the ending is Deep and Significant, but 'I am going to spend the entire book wondering if Gormanghast is real. Oh look, here is a rock I recognise, I think it is behind this rock. But I will not actually go to the rock and look at it, because I know in my heart it is real, that is all the proof I need, I am going to walk away from it again' is... well, I'm sure it is a powerful reflection on trusting yourself and not needing external conformation. But it's a bit frustrating!Ah well.
    • 3/5
      Was disappointed with the third book.
    • 3/5
      The overwhelming feeling I had when reading 'Titus Alone' was a sense of potential, potential left unfulfilled by Mervyn Peake's death. The book, as good as it is, and it's definitely worth reading by anyone who enjoyed the previous two Gormenghast novels, lacks the tight plot and claustrophobic atmosphere of 'Titus Groan' and 'Gormenghast'. This is partly because it swaps the tight, dysfunctional community of Gormenghast Castle for an unnamed city, and partly because Mervyn Peake didn't have the opportunity to carry out further work on the novel.The novel also gives a wonderful taste of what the future of the Gormenghast novels could have been like, of turning the dark, Gothic, scathing eye of the novels to the modern world. The darkness at losing what could have been unfortunately too often outweighs the darkness that the novel portrays.
    • 4/5
      I was already aware of the consensus that "Titus Alone" was widely considered a severe let-down after the first two Gormenghast books, so my expectations were low to begin with. However, despite the obvious shift from those earlier works, Peake's talent, his love of language, his creativity and his knack for unique characters still shine through, so that while a little tricky at first, I soon found myself enraptured in the story just as I had with the previous novels.

      It is hard to leave Gormenghast behind, both for Titus as well as the reader, and at first the feeling of reading a Titus novel set outside the realm of Gormenghast is a disorienting one. Peake doesn't make it any easier by setting the rest of Titus' adventures not in our own world (Wouldn't that be something, Gormenghast like some Gothic Shangri-la, a mythical kingdom lost to time and cartography?) but in a strange dystopian realm with a mix of old and futuristic technologies. Here he meets up with people who have never heard of Gormenghast and believe Titus to be mad. Though Titus finds new friends in this strange land, he also finds sinister enemies with he must contend. Though arguably not the ideal end to the series, especially since the ending leaves things open ended, it was still good to follow Titus' adventures for a little bit longer.
    • 4/5
      It is years and years since I first struggled with this one, in the Penguin Modern Classics edition. Reading it a second time, it seems like a completely different book. I don't think the text has changed - the Penguin is this Langdon Jones revised version - so it must be me, older and wiser and more indulgent. The narrative hangs together well, the characters are interesting, after two volumes of wandering around the corridors and halls of Gormenghast I felt as "dépaysée" (don't think there's an equivalent English word) as Titus venturing into this strange new world both Dickensian and Orwellian, both lugubrious and enlightening, and the ending was satisfyingly appropriate. This Folio Society edition is abundantly, even lavishly, illustrated with black and white drawings. On the negative side, some of the sentences need further polishing. For instance, there is one with several clauses, two of them beginning with "as though". But I now take back all the negative things I thought and said about this back in the 1970s.
    • 3/5
      My first impression of Titus Groan, the first part of the Gormenghast Trilogy, was that it was a deeply weird book. I was warned that Titus Alone, the third and last part, "gets even... weirder," and I'd say that's the case, and it feels very different than the other two. The first two books establish the strange world of Gormenghast Castle, a crumbling edifice that seemed timeless and hermetically sealed, a world unto itself and one that was hard to place but seemed pre-Industrial and bound by pointless ritual and Byzantine intrigues. The first book began with Titus' birth, and at the end of the last book, having grown to manhood, he's leaving the castle and abdicating his position as the 77th Earl. So gone is the warren-like castle from this book and all the characters I'd grown fond of. It's more than a bit of a shock when Titus reaches a city--one that's never heard of Gormenghast--to find it's a world that has automobiles, airplanes and elevators--and ray guns and hovering spy devices. The Publisher's Note says that Peake was already suffering from the illness that killed him when he was writing the story, and that the text had to be pieced together from a manuscript and notes--it was essentially a draft, not a polished, finished novel, and I think you can see that in reading this book. It's a lot sketchier than the other two books, with a third of the chapters less than a page, and some merely a few paragraphs, as if what he wrote was a mere outline he intended to flesh out later, and this book is half the length of the other two.Ironically I think that did pick up the pace--this was a faster read than the first two books, but not I think a better read, even if the prose was still vivid and and the imagination still prodigious as seen in creations like the Under-River. I read that Peake was among the first civilians to visit a Nazi concentration camp, where he saw inmates still too sick to be moved dying before his eyes, and I thought I could see that experience in his powerful and macabre depictions of Black Rose and "the factory." But Titus wasn't one of my favorite characters in the two earlier books--and he's utterly unlikeable here. He really doesn't connect with any of the people he meets--and neither did I. Acreblade and Cheetah aren't as fascinating villains as Steerpike, and Juno and Muzzlehatch aren't characters I grew fond of in the same way as Lady Fuchsia, Flay and Doctor Prunesquallor in the prior books. Nor do I understand in this book why so many strangers seem to be immediately taken with Titus, who is not their hereditary lord but a vagrant and a sullen young man of no extraordinary intelligence or talents or good looks. It seemed rather Marty Stu and not in keeping with the spirit of the prior books. The plot and characters, the style even, of the first two books for all their strangeness had their own internal logic, which I felt this one lacked. Which is not to say this book didn't have its fascinations and flashes of the prior brilliance, but no, I can't say I find it comparable to the fantastic first two books.
    • 5/5
      What are you, Titus Alone? Are you a gothic romance? A "fantasy of manners"? Gormenghast-visits-Vile Bodies? A bildungsroman? A psychoallegory? A parody of the first two books? A satire on a literary genre that doesn't even exist yet? A conversation piece for those interested in the remaining possibilities of le mot juste? A series of storyboards? An experiment, the artist cloaking dreams in words instead of images? A nightmare of inspiration?

      Whatever you are, it's a little bit wry but no insult to the memory of your creator to say that you're better off for being unfinished. Partly that's a result of Peake's working method, where he sketches you out scene by scene, frames to be filled in later with his heavy, lush, totally enveloping and downcrushing lushness of detail, where a flash of beauty is a flash of what it takes to remain human in Gormenghast (how silly and strange for Irma Prunesquallor, the most Gormenghasty of characters, to appear on the cover of my edition--just when everything becomes different and we set her sort aside). But now we've left Gormenghast--we are with Titus, traveling the sands of earth under our hobnailed feet, seeing airplanes and shark-cars and getting in entanglements that are ever so modern, and we are straight out of the first two books, noble, infantile, wounded, tender.

      This is a story about finding magic in a broken childhood and preserving that magic in the grownup world as strength. It reads almost like a manifesto, but one made up of images,moments, feelings so pregnant with poignancy (poignant with pregnancy?) that they spin up and around us, that, and resolve into a dew that sits poised and quivering on our shoulders as on Titus's, an invisible mantle, a reminder that our world may be garish and grotesque, and we venal and afraid, inflammations of raging ego, it and we are also majestic and magical.

    • 5/5
      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 envigorates his books. His voice and tone are unique in the English language, and his characterization is grotesquely vivid. As an illustrator, he was perhaps somewhat less precise than Dore, but more evocative than Beardsley.All in all, his life and his vision were singular, from his birth in China to his years on Sark, and finally, his slow deterioration, until he was unable to speak, and drew only clowns in profile, capped as dunces. Though many suggest this deterioration marks the perceived failing of Titus Alone, Peake would complete his final illustrations more than a year later, and not succumb to death for another decade.There were some editorial problems with Titus Alone, and though they have been mostly repaired, there are still dissatisfied grumblings about the final form. The final Titus book is not easy to come to terms with, and indeed it took long thought and consideration. However, I will not coax or argue mitigating circumstances. This book is Peake's vision, and while not as expansive or clear as the others, it stands as its own work, and completes Peake's philosophical and literary journey as well as we could wish.Peake was never one to pander. He did not write in order to please, and he certainly did not write to facilitate escapism. He may have fashioned his work by aesthetic, so to mesmerize or mystify the ear, for to tug at the mind, and certainly to tickle the eye, but he did not give comfortable or simple answers.The first two books are rather congruous, despite the subtle shifts, the advances and retreats, the many skirmishes Peake engages the reader in, only to draw back the veil before any victory or defeat could be claimed. It was not Peake's intention to stroke and comfort his readers, but to take them from highs to lows, to present them with wonder and with a vast, unconquerable world of wretched beauty.Over the long stretch of the first two books, the reader becomes accustomed to the castle of Gormengast. The reader comes to identify with Titus' everyday struggles, with the plodding tradition. Even as characters die, others take their place, filling out the ranks, bolstering the ancient walls with their very breath.There is a safety in the tradition, in the comfort of Gormenghast, and in a world that remains unknown and always outside. Like Titus, the reader imagines that the outside world must be like the inside one. It cannot be so different, after all, from this crumbling castle, this place which has become another home to legions of happy readers.But any reader content to watch it all play out so familiarly has not been paying attention, has not been listening to Peake. Though there is always a call to that comfort, that tradition, we must not forget that tradition is death, is rot, is stagnant waters.Many readers find themselves utterly thrown when they first begin to encounter the world outside Gormenghast, and realize that it is not what they expected. However, it is difficult for me to imagine how such readers could at once praise Peake for the the singular, spectacular vision of the first two books, and then become upset when he continues to expand his vision. One would imagine they would prefer that he keep writing the same old revolutionary thing he wrote last time, and not give them such an unwelcome start.Peake continues a thread of literary exploration which draws through the great epics, from Homer to Virgil, Tasso, Ariosto, and Milton, to Byron, to Eliot. Like these great works, Peake explores the role and nature of the hero, of his connection to tradition, and of the purpose chosen for him.Originally, the hero was governed by his own mind, and in Odysseus, a mind devious beyond measure it proved. However, Virgil created a hero of tradition, of Piety, and of submission. His hero grasped tradition, trusting in it to lead him. This was a message to the populace: trust in our ways, our traditions, and our Emperor to provide all that you need. While this message is useful to an empire, it is rather destructive to the individual, asking that he give up himself to the greater good.Milton eventually continues this tradition, except he promotes subservience to Church instead of Empire, though there was little difference at the time. However, as a caution, Milton included the old, violent, self-serving hero as a cautionary tale. Humility and piety are Adam's strengths, while Satan has the 'false' strengths of warlike might and unending skepticism.Many later writers, including Byron, found that the Satanic mode of heroism was more appealing to the individual, especially the iconoclast and artist who was tired of being told to 'pipe down' and 'follow orders'. Nietzsche would carry this sense of heroic individualism to the cusp, when he stated that mankind would have to demolish all tradition and create a whole philosophy of meaning for himself, a philosopher of the future known famously as the Ubermensch.Of course, there is a point when we all must question the whole of tradition, and just as we did when we first learned the art of speech, test what happens when we respond to all questions and demands with a resounding 'no!' These later rebellions, these existential crises can happen at any time, whenever we are trying to find a place for ourselves.Titus leaves home, as he must to be true to himself. He cannot honestly accept or reject Gormenghast and its tradition unless he can see it objectively, which requires that he develop a more worldly point of view. Like anyone progressing from childhood to adulthood, he questions the fundamental assumptions of his parents and teachers, and sets out on his own. And also, like any of us on the brink of adulthood, he learns that the world the adults promised doesn't really exist.The real world is stranger, more daunting, and far more vast than the 'right and wrong' of the adult, or the far-flung imaginings of the child. Even though his readers have been through this shift, and should expect it from a changing young man new to the world, Peake still manages to catch his readers off guard. Like Titus, they expect the world to be different and challenging, but like Titus, they cannot imagine how truly different it will be when it arrives.Titus Alone has a self-contained plot. It has its own allies and antagonists, its own places, its own conflict, and its own climax. They all add to Peake's running themes of change, growth, beauty, and meaning, but they are their own. However, the climax in Titus Alone is only a dress rehearsal for the true climax, which comes only at the very end, and which remains unsure until the end, as pivotal and sudden as the twelfth book of the Aeneid.This resolution is the culmination of Titus' childhood, of all his former conflicts, of his life and purpose and individuality. It is the thematic culmination of the bildungsroman of his childhood. It is the philosophical conclusion of Peake's exploration of the role of the hero, the self, and of tradition. It is also the fulfillment of his vision, his unyielding artistic drive. It is the final offering to the reader, his companion and opponent on this journey.He ends with beauty, with questions, with verve, and with a wink.It still confuses me that many readers seemed to expect Peake to follow his revolutionary works with something familiar and indistinguishable. There are many who do this, it is true. There is the revolutionary who topples the regime only to create his own. There is the mountain climber who tops Everest, and then imagines that the greatest challenge is to do so twice.You get no higher no matter how many times you climb the mountain. The true visionary adventurer climbs the mountain, and then, as an encore, paints the ceiling of a cathedral. It may not be expected, it may not please those fans who only wanted more of the same, but anything less is to admit defeat. Peake earned his laurels, and while we could hardly blame him for resting on them, he refused to.Perhaps many readers became comfortable with his rebellion, his iconoclasm. They sympathized with his rejection of tradition, but then simply made that rejection into a new tradition. Like Aeneas, they trusted in tradition, and hoped it would carry them through. However, Peake was not content to topple one tower only to build another in its place. He showed his humility and commitment to art by razing even what he built.As Nietzsche said, we must push everything, and abandon whatever topples, no matter how familiar it had become.
    • 5/5
      The much-maligned conclusion of Peake's trilogy - I liked it the best.
    • 1/5
      Reviewed Feb 2005 Horrible, horrible story. It is as if Peake had asked someone else to write it using his characters. It took forever to figure out what was going on. And even then I barely figured it out. Titus in a modern world with elevators, helicopters and chemical factories? People floated throughout the story - with no introduction - dropped out of the story (ie...Black Rose) just as suddenly. And as I predicted Titus made his way back to Gormenghast, but by being dropped by a helicopter? It was a bit like "Alice in Wonderland" meets "The Prisoner" and maybe something by the author of "Enders Game". Rambling paragraphs, meaningless characters how could anyone get through this story taking it seriously as a work of a serious author. If he didn't have the first two successful books already published I can't see anyone touching this book for print. Titus's character is seen as someone on the verge of madness, inability to plan or see obvious consequences, unable to judge other peoples characters. I wish he would have died - that way Gormenghast would have to start a new linage with a new bloodline - one without bad leadership and madness. In a nutshell this book was like Glenda the Good being put in Kansas without her powers - trying to discover who she was, running from her responsibilities. I doubt I will ever read anything as bad as this again. God help me if this isn't true. 6-2005
    • 4/5
      This third book of the Gormenghast trilogy follows the adventures of young Titus after he fled the castle at the end of book 2. I was surprised to find this as easier read that the first two books. The pace of the narrative moves forward quickly, following Titus through a series of incidents and settings. Much of what made the first two books of the series so good is still present, in particular Peake's truly inspired descriptive language and his seemingly unending ability to develop quirky, bizarre, and yet sympathetic characters. And there is something about Peake's sense of humor that really clicks with me; as I read this book I repeatedly found myself chuckling out loud. Yet much of what made the first two books magic is missing here, whether it is the inspired setting of the castle itself, or the amazing scenes that climax sections of the earlier books. It is not often that you read anything that feels truly original. It's too bad Peake never got to finish the series of books he had envisioned that would follow Titus from cradle to grave.
    • 5/5
      From the grotesque Gothic fantasy of the first two volumes we enter into a kind of science fiction, here. The story is about growing up. The treatment, episodic; Jack Vance would later explore similar soulscapes and worlds. The book is by no means as great as its two predecessors, but it is still quite good.
    • 4/5
      Absolutely brilliant writing, but it gets to be a little too much. Many long slow parts that could have been cut. Great colorful charaters, with really great names.