6/1/2023 0 Comments Titus groan goodreads![]() ![]() They have got to the 77th earl, but electricity, motor vehicles and even guns are unknown. Or is it? This first volume has a profound sense of place (Gormenghast castle is arguably the main character and its inhabitants “could not imagine a world outside it”) but a very vague sense of time. ![]() It is usually classed as fantasy, but it is more like historical fiction, with a dash of magical realism. “It is certainly not a novel it would be found strong meat as a fairy tale… one of those works of pure, violent, self-sufficient imagination… poetry flows through his volcanic writing the lyrical and the monstrous are inter-knotted… in the arabesque of his prose… I predict for Titus Goran a smallish but prevent public… will probably renew itself, and probably enlarge, with each generation.” ![]() Writing in Tatler, novelist Elizabeth Bowen said: Peake's illustration of Titus going to his tenth birthday masque Anthony Burgess wrote that it “has the kind of three dimensional solidity which we often find in pictorial artists who take to words… illustrations would have been supererogatory” – even though Peake sketched in the margins as he wrote, and later editions were published with the pictures. The fact Peake was also an artist is evident in the special care with which he describes light (or absence of), skin and textures. How to review this weird and wonderful book? The setting, characters and plot etc are extraordinary, but it is the language that is utterly bewitching. ![]()
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