I got tremendous pleasure finishing Mervin Peake’s enigmatic fantasy series. I was warned that the last volume would be a disappointment, but when I got around to it, I did not think it so. It’s true that it has a significantly different “feel” from the first two, and shifts focus to other matters. Peake was near death, and quite ill, when he wrote it, so it contains some lapses in style and internal inconsistencies. But it does not merit the scorn it faced on publication, or the dismissal it gets from fans of Gormenghast. Titus, who is more or less a place-marker in the imagistic maze of the first volumes, acquires much more of an internal voice Titus Alone. The issues and imagery of this volume curiously anticipate the cyberpunk and steampunk styles of a half century later.
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