Reading fantasy

Arundel Castle quadrangle, from an old postcard

In a sense all fiction is fantasy, isn’t it? Derived from Latin phantasia, ‘fantasy’ comes ultimately from the Greek word φαντασια, ‘imagination, appearance, apparition’, formed from a verb meaning ‘to make visible’. When we write we create images in the mind of the reader, ‘phantoms’ of what might be real but isn’t; indeed, even non-fiction is always a construct which, while trying to reflect reality, necessarily creates an illusion seen from the particular point of view of the writer.

Nowadays, though, fantasy is genre-specific: it implies magic, imagined new worlds, new eras, often contingent on our own but having no true existence. Sometimes literary snobs call their preferred fantasy ‘magic realism’, as if a different label fools anyone, but of course magic realism is fantasy, pure and simple. Fantasy is often dismissed as not only essentially unreal but also escapist, for people who can’t accept how the world actually is or even was. A shame, this, as fantasy fiction has a way of commenting obliquely on ‘real life’, by which I mean the life of our imagination through which we mediate all that we experience.

How do you read fantasy? Do you race through it for that sense of brief escape? Do you obsess about it, write fan fiction around it, role-play parts in costume, communicate with like-minded individuals and treat the key characters as if they are, indeed, real people? Or do you approach each work as a piece of literature and accord the author a bit of respect for their role as demiurge in the creation of a new world?

As befits the name

Before I get round to posting a review of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan — which, by the by, I’m enjoying immensely and have nearly finished — I thought I would share with you a few posts dealing with aspects of this first book of the Gormenghast trilogy. Aspects that include time, place, structure … and names.

In times past I used to peruse New Scientist at friends’ or at the doctors’ for the exciting ideas thrown up in all the sciences, however much or little I understood the ins and outs. A thread which was covered in the 90s was the concept of nominative determinism — the idea that people’s names, particularly their surnames, were a factor that predisposed them to follow a particular occupation. Some of these names — Cook, Butcher, Archer for example — would have been borne by some male ancestor who had that job, but many seem to be just puns, curiosities that go into that section of the universal memeplex labelled ‘Ain’t Life Odd?’ You know, a vicar called Vickers, or a poet called Wordsworth.

But fiction has the propensity to be stranger than fact.

Imagining Gormenghast

Four Chinese boys standing in a gateway, Kuling, Jiangxi, China, ca.1900-1932 (Wikimedia Commons)

As I hurtle towards the final pages of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan I have not only been delighting in his panoply of curious names for individuals: I have also, as countless others have too, been captivated by his seemingly detailed descriptions of Gormenghast Castle, so much so that I have been trying to draw up a ground plan of the buildings and surrounds. But, as others have no doubt also discovered, amongst all the circumstantial descriptions, perambulations and measurements the gargantuan edifice remains disturbingly ghostly and mirage-like. All I can offer at the moment are a few thoughts, based on notes taken from the text and from odd research — including from Mervyn Peake: Two Lives (Vintage 1999), which comprises Maeve Gilmore’s A World Away (1970) and Sebastian Peake’s A Child of Bliss (1989).

Uncertainty principles

The roofless keep of Dinefwr Castle, Carmarthenshire, Wales

This is the third and last interim post about Titus Groan before I publish my review. This discussion will circle around certain patterns that I’ve detected in the novel, though whether they’re patterns which Mervyn Peake intended or merely the phantasms of my fevered mind I’ll leave for you to judge.

Peake himself was born on the ninth day of the seventh month, in a year — 1911 — which featured double digits. Was this what encouraged him (around 1940, when his first son Sebastian was born to Maeve Gilmore) to put the titular hero’s birthday as “the eighth day of the eighth month, I am uncertain about the year”? The 8th of August is the day before and a month after Peake’s own birth.

Is there any significance to this? Possibly. I think that there is a kind of duality to much of Titus Groan which the eighth day of the eighth month in a way prefigures. Let me give you some examples.

Gormenghast reimagined

John Rutter’s Delineations of Fonthill and its Abbey (1823)

William Beckford (born 1st October 1760, dying in 1844 at Bath) is a truly quixotic character, notorious in the Georgian period and worth more than the brief notice I am giving of him now. I find however that he and I have, in a manner of speaking, crossed paths in the past, and you might be interested in the context of our latest encounter.

I have been making my slow and steady way through Elizabeth Mavor’s The Grand Tour of William Beckford preparatory to reading Beckford’s own novel Vathek (1782). I’ve had the novel in a compendium of three Gothic novels for a while, though had read only Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) up to now.¹

However, with Halloween and Christmas coming up I thought I might tackle at least one of the remaining two complete novels, Vathek of course and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). This last, as some of you may know, was Polidori’s plagiarising of Lord Byron’s tale which itself had emerged from the ghost story challenge — which had already culminated in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Vathek, however, was different from the other stories, modelled as it was on the tales in the collection we know as The Arabian Nights.

But I also knew that William Beckford was as famous for another enterprise he’d indulged in, and the arrival of the September issue of the magazine Current Archaeology was a timely reminder.

Wouldst thou read riddles?

Gormenghast Castle (image: Mark Robertson)

Titus Groan
by Mervyn Peake
(illustrated by the author).
Introduction by Anthony Burgess 1968.
Mandarin 1989 (1946)

So many insightful words have been uttered, printed, and shared about Titus Groan — and indeed about the trilogy as a whole — that it does seem pretentious to add any analysis and critique to what is simultaneously another entry in the long roll call of Gothick novels and a piece of baroque writing so individual it almost feels sui generis.

It is easy enough to attempt timelines, construct genealogies, discuss names or seek parallels with Gormenghast Castle in real-life edifices which the author may have himself experienced — in fact I have already done so — but much harder to do full justice to Peake’s vision of a crumbling structure peopled by inadequate and grotesque individuals who, nevertheless, deserve some sympathy, and to measure the beauty of the language he uses to describe it all.

I shall therefore restrict myself to giving random impressions of the work especially, as having left some time lapse after completing the work — to marinate, I tell myself — I’m finding the clear-cut outlines of the narrative blurring and fading.

Peake Gothick

Moat at Raglan Castle © C A Lovegrove

I’m currently revisiting Gormenghast Castle – in the form of the second part of the trilogy chronicling the last of the Groan dynasty. Gormenghast is yet another instalment that encourages the reader to linger and relish successive vignettes, and I’m taking my time.

As with Titus Groan I’m drawn, weakly struggling, into the web Mervyn Peake has woven; and as with that title I’m (re)engaging with the distinctive names which so conveyed the grotesque nature of the castle’s denizens and the decayed atmosphere of the sprawling structure.

In a similar fashion I started (in this post) to jot down the peculiarities of Gormenghast itself and to consider from where Peake may have drawn inspiration. But right now I want to add a few extra observations in preparation for a summative piece when I’ve completed Gormenghast, and before I eventually move on to Titus Alone, and then Titus Awakes.