“…and that the pages that are heavy with words shall be bent in and over him, so that he is engulfed in the sere Text…”

Titus is literally in the text, wrapped in an ancient tome for his christening. I too am in the text. In Mervyn Peake’s “Titus Groan.” And for the first time in sometime I am in a text that exists outside of other texts.

Engulfed as I have been in the 16th and 17th centuries, I’ve been in a world of referants. Quixote reads the books of chivalry, Pentagruel quotes the works of Erasmus, and Hamlet references the plays of Johnson. The world of Gormenghast is another matter: time-less, place-less, it brings its own library of works, it’s own literary legacy, and the author of all is Peake. Gormenghast seems to even have it’s own religion, though one based more on archaic secular tradition than any deity. So that even the word christening feels odd when broken into its component parts. For in this world, there was no Christ. No, this is a world without Shakespeare (poor and as unthinkable as that would be). And yet it isn’t. Pyke is not an author without Shakespeare, nor without the Bible.

This is not a profound revelation. And Pyke not the first author to invent his own library to forsake all others. But as a reader it’s a startling discovery to make.