What I'm reading: Titus Groan

I've just decided to keep a list of everything I read this year on a page on this blog - there's the link to it, over on the right. It really is just a list - it could get completely out of hand if I were to try and comment on everything I read. So I'll be strict. A list it is.

But I have to say that I've just finished Titus Groan, which I bought because there was so much written about it last year, and I coveted the new illustrated edition. Having bought it, I persuaded my friends that they should read it too, so that we could discuss it in the pub.

So I owned a new hardback book (a rare event indeed), and had committed to read it by this Saturday, when we're all getting together to talk about it. And I have to admit that had I borrowed the book from the library, and never mentioned it to anyone else, I probably wouldn't have finished it.

It reminds me of those worlds we used to create as children out of mud, and sticks, and leaves - complex landscapes with houses, castles and rivers, through which we would move our little plastic people - cowboys and indians, soldiers, knights - making them fight, track each other, sleep and die, on a whim. Peake's characters feel no more real to me than our plastic knights with their broken swords. He almost entirely reveals their character through their names and physiques (Swelter, the vastly overweight cook; Flay, the dried up twig of a servant) - apart from a joyous and surprising interlude mid-way when several characters are given internal monologues. They're as quickly tidied away again, and we're back to characters being moved about the castle and landscape, their author's fingers only just invisible.

And blimey, it's over-written - here's one small example, from two thirds through the book, as Keda walks through the landscape:

Between the path she walked and the range of mountains was a region or marshland which reflected the voluptuous sky in rich pools, or with a duller glow where choked swamps sucked at the colour and breathed it out again in sluggish vapour. A tract of rushes glimmered, for each sword-shaped leaf was edged with a thread of crimson.

It's magnificent in a way, but there's only so much of this dense, adjective-strewn writing that I can take (or enjoy, at least), and this is the way Peake writes almost all of the time.

And yet I'm glad I perservered. It's been an experience. It was like going back to live again in my childish worlds where the physical landscape had a huge and unknowable strength and power and potential for magic and surprise. Where an earl could perfectly reasonably turn into an owl. Where a tower could be evil. Where a doctor absolutely should be called Prunesquallor. I'm not sure I'm ready for part two yet, though. I've promised myself a nice little short story or two first. Preferably of the lean type.