Titus Alone

There are are some fantastic concepts in the third Titus book - the modern setting is the first surprise, but it's nothing like our real world. Peake had illustrated an edition of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", and here we have a sort of urban dreamscape which Titus has entered mysteriously and can't quite wake from. It never feels like science fiction, although from habit I imagined it to be a sort of alternative future of the sort you might get from a SF writer.

Unfortunately, Peake's florid descriptive power from the previous two books is not quite working here. Having fled Gormenghast, the adult Titus is a bit of a self-obsessed arsehole, and not at all like Alice. Her commentary about the way things become curioser and curioser is not the sort of thing Titus offers us as we follow him on his sojourn of discontent. In fact he's generally an entitled royal turd and a sex pest who ought to be charged with assault for some of his nasty groping and harassment. The supporting cast of Juno and Muzzlehatch never quite come to life like the human menagerie in the preceding two books.

The story and its meaning are also somewhat untethered. New, surreal landscapes and a whole population of characters appear suddenly like a dramatic edit in a Stanley Kubrick movie, and their thematic relevance to Titus and his sojourn is subtle, or perhaps left to the reader to decide. The loneliness of Titus is self-imposed, although he might be forgiven for his almost solipsistic approach to life because of his traumatic childhood in Gormenghast. His surly rejection of human companionship is countered by the devotion of his guardian Muzzlehatch, his ex-lover Juno, and a comic trio of eccentric beggars who appoint themselves as his bodyguards.

I found the climactic confrontation at the end of the book to be quite satisfying. Even though it threatens only psychological peril, it is still an engaging conflict.

"Titus Alone" was worth the effort, but didn't dazzle nearly as much as the two novels which preceded it. It's got factories, futuristic cars, and drones like you might encounter in an Iain M Banks novel, so don't think for a second you will be getting elves and wizards just because this series is usually categorised as "fantasy". All three books really are in a genre of their own.