Books like Titus Groan

What an odd fantasy! No swords, no sorcery, no elves, no thieves, no imaginary beasts, no multiple planes of existence . . . nothing but a cavernous castle peopled by eccentrics with Dickensian names (Sepulchrave, Prunesquallor, Swelter, Flay) whose lives are determined by centuries--perhaps millenia--of complex rituals. Although the people themselves seem to be British, the enormous burden of tradition under which they labor seems Asiatic in its detailed intensity, and it is instructive to learn that Peake spent his formative years in China, not far from the Imperial City.This is superior fantasy, but like The Worm Ouroboros it is not immediately accessible. Peak was a painter, and as a writer he exercises his painterly imagination by creating scenes--particularly his major ones, like the death-duel of Flay and Swelter--as if each moment were a tableau, part of a series of individual canvases. The reader is then faced with the duty of internalizing each of these stationary images, combining them into a progression, and then animating them--sort of like ruffling the pages of a cartoonist's flip book--in order to release the cinematic power of the scene. For someone like myself who possesses a third-rate visual imagination, this requires re-reading certain passages more than a couple of times.I must admit, though, that Peake's approach has a certain cumulative power. It serves to preserve these odd, angular characters of his like flies in amber, trapped forever in their traditions like individual frames in an epic film, circumscribed by the labyrinthine spaces of the monstrous castle that is Gormenghast.