Gormenghast

First, let me say that I have no objections to purple prose as a general rule. Some of my favorite books have been overly florid meandering messes that never seemed to go anywhere. That said, it just doesn't work here for me. This book attempts to combine a tiny bit of actual plot with absurdly long passages where everything but the plot is described using a metric ton of simile and metaphor, much of which makes absolutely no sense.

This was at least my 3rd or 4th time attempting to read this book. It's supposed to be so great that I was determined to get through it. The previous attempts, I barely made it a few pages in before abandoning it. This time, I continued to plow through it for over 4 months off and on, hoping to eventually hit on what made other people rate it so highly. Around 75% of the way in (Kindle version) the pace picked up a bit and reading got easier for a while, but around 90% it dropped back into the pace and style that dominated the first three-quarters of the book. I never did find any sort of standout gem to make me understand what is supposed to be so great about it.

The point of the book seems to have been to describe a collection of oddball characters living in and around a rundown castle the size of a city. To me, it felt like most of the characters were basically just one-dimensional caricatures. They all just have one emotion and one purpose. Otherwise they just all served as props to hang "weird" traits on to add to the feeling of strangeness. The only character that was even given the slightest bit of personality was the villain and his only variation from your everyday standard villain was that his motivations were shown instead of being presented as being evil for the sake of being evil.

I will note that I'm an extremely visual reader. When I read, I see vivid images of what I am reading. As with many of the books I've given low ratings, this one gave me very little imagery. It's a bit ironic given that the book is probably 90% descriptions and 10% plot but the way things were described with the odd metaphors just didn't work for me. It probably didn't help that he would spend entire pages describing a single object. My mental picture of Gormenghast castle and its surroundings is, at this point, very patchy and dark. There are a few spots that I can visualize well, but it doesn't feel like a richly fleshed out world to me at all.

The only reason I'm giving this two stars instead of one is that 15% of the book toward the end that's perfectly readable. I think that Peake would have done well to write like that all of the time, but if he had, probably the entire series would have been contained in a single book. I have no intention of torturing myself with the other books in the series - it hasn't managed to draw me in the way some other series with a slow start have. I can't really recommend it for anyone else's reading but as we can see, there are plenty of people who enjoy it, so YMMV.

This is another book (trilogy) that I have long meant to read and, finally, I have read the first book, Titus Groan. This covers the events from the birth of Titus, to his becoming 77th Earl of Gormenghast, just after his first birthday.

The pacing of the book feels quite slow, initially, and does take some getting used to. But the atmosphere is incredible and as the manipulative Steerpike navigates his way upwards through the House of Groan, I founds myself utterly sucked into the story.

Obviously, I have only read one novel out of three so far, but if the trilogy continues like this I shall be rating it 5 stars and pushing it at everyone I encounter.

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Unfortunately, however, the following two novels were a lot less satisfying. With Gormenghast, the second novel, Peake introduces an expanded cast of characters without really (in my view) having a clear idea of either backstory or motivation. The result is that far too often I had a sense of someone turning up to nudge the plot along and then wandering off again. This is especially noticeable in the final chapters which have a strong sense of clearing the decks so that the next novel can be started.

And it's in the next novel -- Titus Alone -- that things really start to fall apart. Without the presence and rituals of Gormenghast Castle, the weaknesses of the plotting start to become painfully apparent.

The result is a rather disjointed novel in which scenes that should have felt heavy and inevitable now feel inconsistent, incoherent and driven primarily by narrative convenience.

Titus Groan, the first novel, is well worth reading but the rest of the trilogy is best ignored.