Told in a rhetorically elaborate, densely pictorial language, the story of Titus's birth and childhood in Gormenghast Castle is fundamentally the story of a coming-of-age: it is a genuine Bildungsroman, the story of the growth of a soul. The sequence must be thought of as sui generis, though it would signal a critical failure, on the parts of critics of the fantastic in literature as a whole (those interconnected realms that John Clute has suggested might be called Fantastika for short), to stop there. Although couched in a language which might point towards Fantasy, it contains no fantasy elements though redolent of a Dying Earth venue in its sense of belatedness and in the person of Titus's father – a fidgety, crotchet-ridden, Entropy-exuding manic-depressive aristocrat whose like has haunted the Far Future worlds of writers from M John Harrison to Richard Grant – the first two volumes cannot be thought of as sf.

But, although the existing trilogy, variously identified as the Gormenghast or Titus Groan sequence and on one occasion assembled as The Titus Books (omni 1983 vt The Gormenghast Trilogy 1991), was never in its author's mind a complete entity – an appendage, Boy in Darkness (in Sometime, Never, anth 1956, ed anon 1976 chap), is in fact quite detached from the whole – it remains a series of texts whose cumulative power is remarkable, and the definition of which in generic terms is loaded with difficulties. This sense of the shape of the sequence is confirmed by the 1991 critical edition of the three novels, in which Titus Alone (as coll 1991) edited by G Peter Winnington includes the surviving pages of 'Titus Awakes', the incomplete fourth volume of the sequence. Gormenghast ( 1950) is closely linked to that first volume, but it is clear that Peake never intended to compose a trilogy per se Titus Alone (cut 1959 reconstructed from manuscript by Langdon Jones 1970) – a text the author was unable to take beyond draft form due to the onset of the disease which killed him – ends at a point that Peake did not intend as a definitive terminus. He was initially better regarded as an artist than as a writer and, although he had published several volumes of Poetry during and after World War Two, the poetic density of Titus Groan ( 1946) was unexpected.

(1911-1968) UK poet, artist and author, born in China, where he lived until he was twelve in a missionary compound, embedded into a land as strange to Western eyes as the country surrounding Gormenghast.

Groan mervyn peake novel