Reading A Fantasy Masterpiece As “Literature”
Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan
What makes a piece of fiction fantasy? What makes a piece of fiction “literary”?1 These were some thoughts I had in mind as I read Mervyn Peake’s monumental 1946 fantasy classic Titus Groan, first in his Gormenghast trilogy of novels. I found myself looking to genre to orient myself because I don’t think I’ve quite read a book like it. Before getting into genre stuff, I’ll try to describe the book.
The first thing I noticed about Titus Groan is that it is brilliant on the sentence level. When one is in the midst of it, it feels mainly like an exercise in grotesque character work and circuitous, baroque subplots. Insofar as it has an overarching plot, it presents the destructive rise of an amoral social climber during the first 18 months or so of the life of the eponymous character.
From the vantage point of the novel’s totality, the themes that emerge are change and continuity. The book’s first two thirds are spent building an intricate picture of the day-to-day life of the noble Groan family who rule Castle Gormenghast—or perhaps are themselves ruled by it and its traditions—and their various servants. The final third tears down the regularity of this life in an ambiguous way that changes some of the personnel but seems to suggest that life in Gormenghast marches on despite these changes.
Before I started Titus Groan, I read a reflection on the Gormenghast series by Premee Mohamed. In it, she does a good job situating the series in the context of modern speculative fiction but I came away wondering what the series was about. “It’s uh… well, it’s tricky,” she writes. I fear I’m going to leave the reader of this missive with a similar feeling because Titus Groan resists summarization.
I could dive into descriptions of its weird characters and provide strange episodes from the story. I’m not sure this would accomplish much other than lengthening the present writing and taking some arbitrary snapshots of the novel. If you want to read something artistically challenging and bleakly hilarious, I suggest picking it up to see for yourself.
Let’s turn to genre. My weakness as a commentator in these matters is that I have little theories but I don’t have much theoretical background. In search of some scaffolding, I consulted Wikipedia. This is, of course, risky business but I think there’s something to be learned from what the people (whoever they are) are putting out there.
Mervyn Peake’s Wikipedia entry describes him as one of the “Big Three” of secondary world fantasy alongside Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien. The nature of a project like Wikipedia is such that one can’t expect a consistent viewpoint from entry to entry. So it’s not a huge surprise that the entry on fantasy fiction makes no mention of Peake.2
Indeed, Titus Groan is much more different from Howard and Tolkien than they are from each other. I would not recommend this book to someone on the basis of them liking Howard, Tolkien, or “secondary world fantasy.” This is a circa 124,000 word novel in which only one person gets run through with a sword. Contrary to the Wikipedia description of fantasy fiction, Titus Groan does not make use of the supernatural.
What I am driving at here is that I think many people tend to think of fantasy fiction as mainly encompassing adventure stories with supernatural elements. There is peril, danger, and death in Titus Groan but it is not an adventure story. It’s more focused on people’s ways and idiosyncrasies than it is on any kind of plot. The main tool of the fantasist it uses is a secondary world.
This use of a secondary world and the historic convention of referring to Titus Groan as fantasy leave me comfortable enough using that adjective to describe the novel. And yet I found myself pondering if this helps us understand what the book does. As I considered this question, I began to think about literary fiction.
Now I don’t have as strong a grasp on literary fiction as a genre as I would like to. At my hazard, I again turned to Wikipedia. Here’s what it has to say:
Literary fiction, mainstream fiction, non-genre fiction, serious fiction, high literature, artistic literature, and sometimes just literature, are labels that, in the book trade, refer to market novels that do not fit neatly into an established genre. . .or, otherwise, refer to novels that are character-driven rather than plot-driven, examine the human condition, use language in an experimental or poetic fashion, or are simply considered serious art.
(Retrieved April 1, 2025. Emphasis in the original. References omitted.)
Titus Groan does all of what follows “or, otherwise” above. I haven’t done my due diligence to determine whether or not it is considered “serious art” (spurious concept that that is), though I think it ought to be considered such if it is not already. No one is going to mistake this book as a casual read.
The foregoing should have provided me with enough runway to get to one of my own little theories. I think fantasy has something in common with literary fiction that science fiction does not. If fantasy succeeds it does so on the level of craft. The writing has to be good and it has to evoke something—probably something emotional—in the reader. In this spirit, I think it is reasonable to think of Titus Groan as both fantasy and literary fiction. This double designation might help the reader understand what the text is doing.
Whatever Titus Groan is, it succeeds at the elaborate tasks it sets out to accomplish. What are these tasks? To quote Mohamed again, “It’s uh… well, it’s tricky.” The result of this tricky business is a novel that is startling, funny, dark, and demanding. This is a book I want to advocate for.
Please forgive my scare-quotes here and in the title. I am trying to keep my genre claws from coming out while writing this piece and will refrain from putting scare-quotes around these words moving forward. My point in using scare-quotes here and in the title is that I’m referring to something more narrow than literature and the literary when I use these words here and elsewhere in this piece. In actual fact, I view literature and the literary as an expansive field of human endeavor that includes the genres of science fiction and fantasy that I write about in this newsletter.
The Wikipedia entries linked in this paragraph were accessed April 2, 2025.
Just bought the trilogy this week. I’m eager to give it a try this year. Thanks for supplying a helpful introduction to it.
I joined Substack to find kindred spirits to read and chat with. A piece struggling with Titus Groan? Subscribed.