KIESCHE@RU-BLUE.ARPA (06/19/84)
A recent inquiry was posted re TITUS GROAN. This is indeed part of a trilogy. The full trilogy is: TITUS GROAN GORMENGHAST TITUS ALONE All three are by Mervyn Peake. They were available several years back from Ballantine/Del Rey. I'm not sure of their current print status... I recommend them highly, they are very moody and atmospheric books. My personal favorite is the middle book, Gormenghast.... Frederick Paul Kiesche III -------
janney@unm-cvax.UUCP (06/21/84)
As long as we're discussing Mervyn Peake, I'd like to mention that there are two different versions of the last book Titus Alone, one more incomplete than the other. Peake intended to write 5 or 6 books, but he suffered a stroke and was unable to complete Titus Alone. The Ballantine edition, the one most generally available in this country, is Peake's typewritten first draft. There is another version, published by Penguin in England and recently available in hardcover in the US, that incorporates his hand- written revisions to the first draft. You can recognise this version because it has a preface by Langdon Jones. It doesn't add a lot of new material but it is much more coherent. Good stuff.
moret@unmvax.UUCP (06/26/84)
I highly recommend the Penguin edition--and not just for the reasons
discussed by Jim Janney. Each book in the trilogy is also a substantial
work, and it pays to have a quality paperback, that won't disintegrate
from repeated readings.
To my mind, the best volume is the first (Titus Groan); it includes
absolutely fantastic descriptions of the fortress (Gormenghast), with
an atmosphere unequalled in fiction anywhere and some very humorous passages
about education. The main characteristic is the style: the author's prose
is *very* sophisticated, although sometimes a bit heavy or germanic.
I found myself re-reading the same few pages several times over, just
to savor the richness of the prose.
The second volume is less polished; the style is less consistent and the
atmosphere somewhat lacking. Towards the end of the second volume,
the author starts on a wholesale campaign of (literally) character assassination
which continues in the third volume. The third volume is definitely hasty,
as would be expected given the circumstances under which it finally appeared.
As to whether this is SF... There is no futuristic or historical pretense,
nor is it close to fantasy; it is just good (speculative?) fiction.
Bernard M.E. Moret (505) 277-31{31,12}
Dept. of Computer Science, U. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131
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