And I sympathize with readers who feel that, due to his declining health, Peake was not able to write a third novel to equal the first two in bizarre and compelling grandeur, and that it’s better just to read a duology and to ignore the third volume. Titus Alone is half as long as the first two novels in the trilogy, has fewer detailed descriptions and shorter chapters, and feels less immersive, coherent, and polished.

The added chapters develop Juno’s character, the factory, and the charade climax, but I think the original version of the audiobook is fine without them. The audiobook is the 1959 edition with 109 chapters, not the more recent and restored version from 1992 with 122. Alas that his Cheeta sounds too petulant and not malevolent enough.

His voices for Muzzlehatch and the denizens of the Under-River are engaging and savory, and his reading of Titus’ delirious ravings (in which he channels the people from his past) is inspired. Simon Vance gives a stellar reading of Titus Alone. Nevertheless, he builds relationships with various people, including the larger than life, rudder-nosed, free-spirited Muzzlehatch, the beautiful, ample, and kind Juno, his three beggar bodyguards from the Under-River (into which the failures of the world descend), and the exquisite spoiled rich girl Cheeta, whose father is a scientist who has built a factory tower with identical faces in the windows and sounds like the smell of death.

Forthright and self-centered, Titus moves through the modern world like an unstable Candide, not wanting to become tied down to places, friends, or lovers.

Titus Alone is a strange novel! Picaresque, allegorical, science fictional, and dream-like, it concerns Titus’ struggle to come to terms with Gormenghast, with his desertion and memories of it, and with his tenuous hold on its reality. After his birth in the vast, decaying castle in Titus Groan (1946), the first novel in Mervyn Peake’s trilogy, and after his desertion of it in Gormenghast (1950), the second novel, in Titus Alone (1959/1992) young Titus finds himself lost in a modern world of cities, cars, airplanes, factories, concentration camps, detectives, and even sentient spy globes (and maybe even clones), ever pursued by mysterious identical twin men in tall helmets. Is Gormenghast only the delusion of a “dotty” young man? It appears in no atlas and belongs to a past age of lineage, lords, and castles. Titus Groan and Gormenghast in the Modern World

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