Empty Bottle

England the first modern country, yet it felt so old. All those aristocrats in charge; a successful world war, a socialist party peopled with peers. And Big Ben: a 20th-century democracy run from a building closer to a medieval church. All appeared so sturdy. A Middle Ages, whose buttresses, industry and commerce, seemed built for millennia. Perhaps only a mad genius could detect it was about to fall. Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan. The 1950s: a new world is born.

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Our hero is a baby, whose sole substantive action is to throw away the sacred symbols of Gormenghast. Titus the heir to an estate that appears about to fall; only the magic of ritual keeping it intact. This novel an account of a sudden dissolution from within, when a clever outsider - Steerpike - rises to a speedy influence; his will to power exposing its fragility. Ancient walls held together by rotten timbers. Already Lord Sepulchrave, the seventy-sixth Earl, has fallen. Titus Groan will not follow in his tired ways. He a herald of the future.

Gormenghast is ripe for change. The Earl, lacking his own will, is a slave to ritual; most of his time given over to rites whose meanings have long been lost. The spirit that once animated place has vanished, its life reduced to mere mechanical routine. Even the Earl’s relaxation - to spend hours in his library - partakes of the same inertia: he revels in a past that has no impact on the present. A tradition and its history are coming to an end; Gormenghast suffering the effects of an entropy that has voided its rulers of energy. With Lord Sepulchrave there is nothing left. The most powerful person in the castle is Sourdust, the antiquarian, who is responsible for all the minutiae of ritual, which he expects to be copied to the last semi-colon and comma. This world to be reduced to the signs on a page; an exact copy of a past that has been fixed forever between two hard covers. Life trapped inside dusty volumes. But even Sourdust must lose his power. Life not cannot forever mimic the printed word. Not even a book can remain the same for eternity.

Sourdust was shocked. His mouth worked at the corners. His old, fissured face became a fantastic area of cross-hatching and his weak eyes grew desperate. Attempting to lower the heavy volume to the table before the christening bowl where a space had been left for it, his fingers grew numb and lost their grip on the leather and the book slid from his hands, Titus slipping through the pages to the ground and tearing as he did so a corner from the leaf in which he had lain sheathed, for his little hand and clutched at it has he had fallen. This was his first recorded act of blasphemy. He had violated the Book of Baptism. The metal crown fell from his head. Nannie Slagg clutched Fuchsia’s arm, and then with a scream of ‘Oh my poor heart!’ stumbled to where the baby lay crying piteously on the floor.

A vivid scene, like so many in this novel, which signals that the worship of the past is over. The old way of life cannot go on and - Steerpike is like woodworm in those rotten timbers - even the Groans are starting to feel it. Something has gone wrong, things are changing, but they don’t know quite what; their own inertia, an inability to overcome the past’s tyranny, has taken away their initiative; they cannot grasp their predicament, which is outside their comprehension. Helpless in the face of change. Easy meat for a chancer like Steerpike. When the library burns, taking Sourdust with it, the omens are overwhelming. Lord Sepulchrave succumbs to madness. Even so, the antiquarian is resurrected in the form of Barquentine, who, as zealous as his father, enforces the same old routines. But baby defeats him.

They cannot adapt to changing conditions. They lack the experience of action to protect themselves from action-men like Steerpike, whose energy and youth is attractive to most of the family. Alas, Fuchsia, a romantic who loves the rootedness of Gormenghast, those peculiarities that grow with history, is also attracted to Steerpike. Watching him swim across the lake she feels all the lightness and elasticity of a liberty freed from the past’s load. If someone so enamoured of the past…. All through this novel we expect a collapse. When the castle empties for the Earling of Titus, we think the castle itself, held up perhaps by the presence of its many members, will fall down under the weight of its own decay. It is not to be. The castle remains. The rituals carry on as normal, though there are less of them - their removal to wait until Titus’s maturity. We are on the edge of a momentous cataclysm. We hear the trumpet call, but the walls stand firm.

It takes time to destroy an ancient institution. We predict its fall in the second volume; Titus to take up a new kind of kingdom. Steerpike is the agent of this change, but Titus is the harbinger; and in a world of ritual and signs it is the latter that carries most significance. Titus is the beginning of a new Groan era, after the exhaustion of the first. He himself puts an end to it.

A hush most terrible and unearthly had spread and settled over the lake, over the woods and towers and over the world. Stillness had come like a shock, and now that the shock was dying, only the white emptiness of silence remained. For while the concluding words were being cried in a black anger, two things occurred. The rain had ceased and Titus had sunk to his knees and had begun to crawl to the raft’s edge with a stone in one hand and an ivy branch in the other. And then, to the horror of all, had dropped the sacrosanct symbols into the depths of the lake.

Will he be strong enough to defeat Steerpike, who has insinuated himself in the castle, and has become Barquentine’s apprentice? An irony painful and fatal for this family and its tradition. Such an accomplished and power-hungry young man isn’t going to merely follow the rules, even though this would give him enormous influence, for that would restrain his freedom - nothing must prevent the exercise of his own mind and will. Steerpike is no éminence grise, who exercises power by playing the servant to lord or king. He wants more than that! Only the liberty of ruling is good enough for him.

I have been carried off the cliff-edge of speculation.

Steerpike is the polar opposite of Lord Sepulchrave; a young man unburdened with history, he thrives on improvisation and risk. Where the one is heavy with the past the other has the lightness of a continual present. In a different world - our’s for example - Steerpike would be a beneficent character, but here, where change is rejected, his talent for thought and action have all the feel of the black arts, as he manipulates others to his will; first Doctor Prunesquallor, later and more hideously the Aunts, whom he tricks into burning down the library, and who he then tyrannises with guilt. In a static land, where tradition is strong but benign, the agent of change is a bad man: because he has to destroy what exists, and what exists is other people, their memories, associations and all the good actions they perform day after day. To change all this is to destroy a world. 

Steerpike is the epitome of the instrumental intellect, able to master both the technical details of ritual and the thoughts and emotions of other people. He is a formidable character; also a fake, a social chameleon, able to insinuate himself into any company.

Then came Steerpike’s stroke of genius. He saw that there was no object in pressing his falsehood any further and, making a bold move into the unknown he leapt with great agility away from the basin, his face now thick in lather. Wiping away the white froth from his lips, he channelled a huge dark mouth with his forefinger and posturing in the attitude of a clown listening he remained immobile for seven long seconds with his hand to his ear. Where the idea had come from he did not know, but he had felt since he first met Fuchsia that if anything were to win her favour it was something tinged with the theatre, the bizarre, and yet something quite simple and guileless, and it was this that Steerpike found difficult. Fuchsia stared hard. She forgot to hate hm. She did not see him. She saw a clown, a living limb of nonsense. She saw something she loved as she loved her root, her giraffe leg, her crimson dress. 

‘Good!’ she shouted, clenching her hands. ‘Good! good! good! good!’ All at once she was on her bed, landing upon both her knees at once. Her hands clasped the footrail.

A snake writhed suddenly under the ribs of Steerpike. He had succeeded. What he doubted for the moment was whether he could live up to the standard he had set himself.

He saw, out of the corner of his eye, which like the rest of his face was practically smothered in soap-suds, the dim shape of Lady Fuchsia looming a little above him on the bed. It was up to him. He didn’t know much about clowns, but he knew that they did irrational things very seriously, and it had occurred to him that Fuchsia would enjoy them. Steerpike had an unusual gift. It was to understand a subject without appreciating it. He was almost entirely cerebral in his approach. But his could not easily be perceived; so shrewdly, so surely he seemed to enter into the heart of whatever he wished, in his words or in his deeds, to mimic.

Clever but empty. In an odd way he resembles the present Gormenghast: an impressive architecture but a void within. The difference is that in Steerpike the emptiness of spirit, which in the castle produces mechanical routine and inertia, is transmogrified into a relentless energy; the source of all destruction.

Fuchsia is the imagination. A brilliant character in her own right, she intuits the evil in Steerpike but lacks both the will and the analytic intellect to expose and defeat him. She also suffers the weakness of all artists and aesthetes: an inability to act, preferring the sensuous joys of contemplation. And the imagination can love anything. Fuchsia’s aesthetic soul warms to the virtuoso talents of a man so different from any she has previously encountered. Then there is his youth, that naked body swimming across the lake…. The imagination can make a virtue of anything, and is often attracted by that which is new and strange. This can be self-defeating. The imagination’s natural habitat is Gormenghast, its long tradition and gradual decay an incubator of associations which create their own romance. The fall of the castle a disaster for the artist, who’d lose a world rich in thought and fantasy. The artist cannot help herself. There is something in Steerpike that appeals. Despite all its attractions tradition enervates, the imagination wishing to be free of its claustrophobia. It yearns for a change. Gormenghast cannot rely on Fuchsia to save it.

A sign of the future might be Flay. Banished from Gormenghast by Lady Gertrude - he threw one of her white cats at the cook Swelter - he finds a new freedom in the woods and mountains, where he learns to act for himself. A creature of routine and servitude finds that he can look after himself, and enjoy it.

Titus has entered his stronghold.

What exactly does Mr Peake mean? We pick up the next volume to find out.

Review: Titus Groan