Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

(Headspace!Titus: Why are you using *that* icon?
Ref: Because I really need to make one of you.)

So! as many of you know, one of my most anticipated book purchases this year was the "lost" Gormenghast book, "Titus Awakes", which Mervyn Peake's widow Maeve Gilmore completed, based on one completed chapter and some notes which Peake had left, including a list of one-word elements he hoped to include, ranging from "Snows Mountains Lagoons" to "Angels Devils" and "Mermaids Pirates".

The story begins with Titus dreaming of Gormenghast as snow covers a barn where he's taken shelter. When he awakens, a large white dog creeps in and offers him comfort, shortly to be followed by some mountain villagers who take him in and nurse him back to health. Despite their kindness, Titus maintains a slightly cold detachment from them, determined not to let himself be held down by anything that could jeopardize his hard-won freedom. In time, he moves on, the white dog trailing his feet, as he wanders a landscape much more pastoral than the hyper-technical world he'd encountered when he first left the bounds of Gormenghast. He encounters a range of characters, from vagrant thieves, to a snarky and self-sufficient female painter, to a gang of would-be anarchists with an eerily familiar leader, to a portly dilettante poet who might be Swelter's twin. Flitting through the narrative is a mysterious artist through whom Titus learns of different kinds of love, and who might provide the wandering young earl with a place to call home...

The book is quite obviously mostly Maeve Gilmore's work, and I can hear the literary purists mewling about that already. She might not have full command of Mervyn's word painting and verbal gymnastics, but she has a firm grasp of the characters and the ideals, that of the search for freedom and a sense of self and of home. Her style is something of a balance between the weighty, fittingly static text of the first two books and the clipped, hectic feel of the third book. I have a feeling some parts could have been fleshed out more, and there are times when it seems like she was trying to fit in as many of the some four-dozen tropes Mervyn intended to use, but I'm not going to complain: I'm just glad to have this coda to a series that I've rediscovered and become so very fond of.

Why yes, it's another Gormenghast ramble: I guess this is my latest Aspie fixation, and it's certainly a rich one...

One of the latest in a series of packages of things bough via Amazaon showed up today, bringing a collection of short stories by Mervyn Peake, including most prominently "Boy in Darkness", a kind of side-story to the Gormenghast novels. There's an interesting point which Maeve Gilmore (Mrs. Mervyn) makes in the preface:

"[N]o book, however long, can possibly chronicle every incident in its character's life. There are many events, and adventures or meetings with people which take place outside the book, just as we, however close we are to our families or friends, can only know a small part of what makes up other people's lives."

You could definitely use that as an apologia for fanfiction writing. We fanfic writers are merely writing the bits that the canon creator didn't write, didn't think to write, or decided not to write. There's apparently a notebook in which Peake had jotted a bunch of ideas for Gormenghast, which never made it into the bricks, including the possibility of making the Steerpike/Fuschia pairing fully canonic (up to and including SP impregnating Fuschia, which leads to her suiciding; I can't help wondering if the "SP as a Groan bastard" theory which mini-series canon strongly yet subtly supports is in there as well, because if it isn't, it was a lost opportunity on Peake's part since it puts the story into the same league as Greek tragedy). Which leads me to add that I'm poking at a pair of very short "missing scene" fanfics: one which explains why Fuschia in her mid-twenties is described as "no longer a virgin" (ie. I reveal who her lover/bed-buddy is; not telling till I post it) and the other is a rather tragic sketch set after her suicide, in which Prunesquallor has to do a post-mortem examination.

Also, I have (technically) finished reading the bricks! Though I had a moment of "Hey, wait, what?" when I happened to open the omnibus and find that "Titus Alone" was several chapters longer than my stand-alone paperback edition (the Ballantine paperback from the 1970s). I was more than a little irritated, since I don't tend to like the edited version of anything. However, it turns out the edits were made in order to make the narrative more coherent. Which lead me to think, "Okay, I can get that from an editorial standpoint, but from a thematic and creative standpoint, it kind of goes against the grain of a world where madness and eccentricity dominate and where things losing their meaning is the order of the day."

I have to admit, I rather liked "Titus Alone", not quite as much as the first two books, but I still enjoyed it immensely. And as I move toward intro'ing one version of Titus Groan at a Certain Mansion, I'm thinking of making some strong references to elements in it, although his entry point will be coming at the end of the books/end of the mini-series, since I'm combining book and mini-series canon (it's sort of book continuity with the trappings of the mini-series, thus he won't be expecting an Evil Albino when he meets our SP).