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    Titus Groan
    Titus Groan
    Titus Groan
    Audiobook (abridged)5 hours

    Titus Groan

    Written by Mervyn Peake

    Narrated by Rupert Degas

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Deep in the labyrinthine corridors of Gormenghast Castle, a child is born. Titus, 77th Earl of Groan, is heir to arcane and all-embracing rituals that determine the activities of everyone from Lord Sepulchrave, his father, to the vast cook, Swelter, and the irrepressible Dr Prunesquallor. But not the steely and devious Steerpike, who will lie, cheat and even murder to get on. One of the greatest feats of sustained imaginative writing, the world of Gormenghast Castle is brilliantly realised in this darkly fantastic novel. Its rich description and vivid characters make it one of the most enduringly popular works of the 20th century.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateFeb 1, 2011
    ISBN9781843795414

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    Reviews for Titus Groan

    4/5

    1,023 ratings51 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Please note: This is an abridged version! As I was listening, it seemed very light and short compared to the books that I had first read many years ago. There were many details missing, and many of the best parts omitted completely.
      Skip this and find the unabridged version!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      It is a rare thing indeed to enjoy a book so much not only for the story but also for the magnificent use of language with which it is told.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A weird and atmospheric story. Poetically gloomy, not like much else I’ve ever read.
    • 5/5
      A castle populated with a joyously intricate vocabulary that describes characters like no other...explodes as one reads along with this classic fairy tale told in a new way. And the words alone are so wonderfully florid that it could get you to reading the book another time just to glory in the prose. Peake is obviously in love with the English language and he makes us fall in love with it too. A book that should be allowed to breathe and then sipped at as one allows the words to spin their web.
    • 1/5
      It’s an abridged version. You lose many details and commentaries, and therefore some of the references become non-sequitur.
    • 5/5
      Awesome!
    • 3/5
      Narrator was Very good, kept me engaged. Good dedication to voices.
    • 5/5
      This series messes with your head. I found myself most fascinated by the bad guy, while the good guys are either boring, insipid, or both, a little like Thackery's Vanity Fair.``
    • 4/5
      Utterly masterful narration, truly brilliant. I have read this book before but never listened to it. The narration really brings the story alive. It’s a bizarre and fascinating set of characters in a strange world. Definitely recommend.
    • 3/5
      It is important to realize that this is an abridged version. Having already read the novels several times over the years I was quite disappointed to have the amazing prose and true grotesque nature of the castle and the trials of Titus reduced to plot. If you enjoy these versions get your hands on an unabridged recording or read the novels for an incredibly rewarding literary treat.
    • 5/5
      This really is an exceedingly verbose book, woven from figured cloth, embroidered, beaded, appliqued, embroidered some more, resulting in a mad tapestry of convoluted, highly descriptive, poetic prose. It is not for the faint of heart. Do not try to read in short bursts, definitely keep this one for bedtime, rainy afternoons, long train journeys. It is an experience.
    • 3/5
      Titus Groan features incredible language and tremendously unusual and interesting characters. The setting- a vast, gloomy castle bound up in ancient and obscure traditions- is also a highlight of the book. Unfortunately, the story moves along very slowly, and there isn't much action. Though I enjoyed Peake's poetic descriptions and Halloween imagery, in the end I decided the book was a bit too boring to convince me to read the rest of the trilogy.
    • 4/5
      Wonderful.
    • 4/5
      For not having magic spells and an epic plot, Peake makes his characters and setting feel more larger than life and fantastical than most Fantasy. It's testament to his skill at characterization and simply just the way he uses language.
    • 5/5
      upon first hearing i got really confused by all the voices but decided to stick with it and now realise why so many people simply rave about this. it really is like nothing else. the author has created an entire universe of decay, tradition, gloom and bizarre characters. really looking forward to the next book.
    • 4/5
      I finished off this book a few days ago. I still can't quite decide what I think of it. It's very Gothic and has a subtle sense of humor. There's lots of really great things I like about it - great characters and fantastic descriptions of things (particularly the characters). But at the same time, there's a whole lot of needless repetition, especially in speech. Characters say things over two or three times in quick succession, sometimes in different words, others in the same words. It doesn't really get in the way of reading - it works the majority of the time, but it doesn't work often enough that I feel odd about endorsing the book. And yet, how can I not get wholeheartedly behind the characters? I'm planning on reading the entire trilogy for the challenge, though, so maybe my feelings will sort themselves out by then.
    • 5/5
      This was a great performance I wish I’d realized earlier on that it is ABRIDGED though. Luckily I was trading off reading and listening
    • 5/5
      As good as it was years ago. Well worth revisiting.
    • 4/5
      It's always amused me that the book called Titus Groan is mostly about Gormanghast, with very little about Titus, and the book called Gormanghast is about the coming to adulthood of Titus Groan.To be honest, both books seem like halves of a single whole, so the main review is under Gormanghast.
    • 5/5
      I'm not going to attempt to give any synopsis or really critique this book. I'm just going to tell you why I loved it.

      This book isn't for everyone. It especially isn't for the reader of typical mainstream popular fantasy.

      There are no Mary Sue characters. All the characters are flawed and weird and not easy to relate to. There is no formulaic plot; the plot itself is rather elusive, beyond symbolic commentary on ritual and dynastic rule in stasis. With a few exceptions, all the characters in Gormenghast are pretty old and not very attractive, charming or rational.

      There are no teenage badass characters who save the world from ultimate evil in a spastic series of non-stop action scenes.

      Best of all, no characters were involved in a love triangle with two super hot and lustful fae.


      That's why I loved this book.

      A slow and heavily atmospheric tale, this book is best read at a slow pace, so that it can be savored and appreciated for what it is.
    • 5/5
      This novel, the first in the Gormenghast trilogy (though a fragment of a fourth volume has recently been completed), details the events of a year in the fantastic castle of Gormenghast, from the birth of Titus, 77th Earl, through to shortly after his first birthday. Gormenghast castle forms a self-contained community, within which members of the Groan dynasty live, die, go mad, commune with birds and act out arcane rituals. They are attended by a retinue of servants and retainers, with their own agendas of ambition, revenge, hate and love. At best, these characters are a little fey, or what my mother would have called "affected"; the worst of them are seriously deranged, hideously deformed grotesques, or both.The events of the novel form a backdrop for the ambitious rise of the kitchen boy Steerpike. He is best described as an anti-hero; he plots and connives to exploit any advantage he can find for his own advancement; though not every misfortune that falls to other occupants of the castle can be laid at his feet.If that was all there was to 'Titus Groan', then this wouldn't be such a tour de force. This is not a book to read for excitement or unexpected turns of the plot. But the language! Peake's powers of description make this book essential reading. The castle of Gormenghast becomes a character in itself, with halls, stairways, turrets, corridors, high windows, battlements, a Library, a Tower of Flints, a Hall of Spiders, a Great Kitchen, a Room of Cats and a Hall of Bright Carvings, to name but a few. And Peake has no less an apposite turn of phrase when describing his characters; though in case the words were not enough, he also prepared sketches of many of them.(The edition I read, part of a 1992 omnibus volume, is plagued by misprints and some strange textual contractions: "along corridor" instead of "a long corridor" is a prime example of a common error, repeated so often throughout the novel that I began to wonder if it was a transcription error from manuscript to print. Other errors are also sprinkled liberally through the text.)The setting is so resonant that I have coined the word 'Gormenghastly' to describe any excessively eccentric stately home, though there are none in real life that can come close to Peake's vision. Many have eccentric contents - a Cabinet of Stones here, a Corridor of Lizards there, perhaps a Courtyard of Dead Poets. But none combine all these things in one place, in one vast structure the size of a small town. because whatever you have seen in real life, it cannot compare with Gormenghast itself, "the main massing of the original stone".
    • 5/5
      Like reading a long, detailed episode of The Twilight Zone, directed by David Lynch. Only better, because of the astonishing prose by the author. Sentences you almost chew to get the full impact. An unexpected gem.
    • 3/5
      The story of Titus' birth, and the readers are brought face to face, with the huge decaying castle and the odd personalities that live there. while not greatly to my taste, yet the scene is well set for the rest of the trilogy of "Gormenghast."
    • 4/5
      This was not at all what I was expecting, but it was very good. Titus Groan is a wonderfully weird story about a giant castle (so big that some inhabitants are completely forgotten about by others) filled with delightfully weird, eccentric characters blindly following centuries of complicated rituals. Action unfolds slowly as we get to know richly drawn characters in this atmospheric, brilliantly written fantasy.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book but I will admit it is not going to be for everyone. It moves at a languid pace. The words are as important as any story that is going on. For me it was a lot like reading an over the top fantasy novel that Dickens might have written. Only Dickens made his writing more accessible.

      I can see the roots of a lot of writers I really like in this book though (China Mieville for instance). I am glad I finally read it and will work my way through the other books but this is going to be a series I will not read straight through.
    • 4/5
      I don't think I'd like it now, but I'd have given this a 5 when I read it.
    • 4/5
      The story itself was not amazing or even all that compelling, I admit, but the language and images Peake created with it are what make this work so incredible. I'm happy I finally encountered it.
    • 5/5
      I stayed up until midnight to finish the last 250 pages. I was just hooked and couldn't put the book down.I've wanted toread the Gormenghast trilogy since I saw the 6 hour (?)miniseries a couple of years ago. The miniseries had the feel ofa movie made from a book (or books) in the same way that theHarry Potter movies do. It seemed that a lot of details were beingleft out to keep the pacing good on the assumption that peopleinterested in watching had read the book(s) and could fill in thedetails from memory.I'm pleasantly surprised at how good the book is. The focus ison how strange and stilted culture can become when it is nolonger allowed to progress. So much of the plot is centeredaround the description of the decaying castle.There's a scene where the library is torched. The library hadbeen the one place where the 76th Earl of Gormenghast felt atall at home and was at all human. I think any avid bookcrosserwould find meaning in this short passage.Then there is the title character. Poor little Titus! I really feel sorryfor him in this first book. One comment though about Titus. By the end of the book he's just over a year old but he isn't depicted well. Perhaps the lack of love in his early life stunted him or perhaps the stilted dialogue style of the book is the reason for Titus remaining mum.
    • 4/5
      This is a hard book to digest and a hard book to review. My first impressions was that is was a fantasy set in a medieval realm (think Lord of the Rings) but the book is definitely much more strange and complex. Set in Gormenghast castle, the world is filled with rituals and traditions that have been passed along generation to generation without question and have smothered creativity and created a stilted and dull society. There are no handsome swashbuckling knights or beautiful princesses, but there is a huge cast of very well-described and VERY bizarre characters. And there are heroes and villains, but without spoilers, I'll just say that the heroes and the villains are not who I expected them to be.

      Although the plot of the book is not a breakneck-paced adventure, it is interesting. But the real gem hidden in this book is the amazing descriptions. There was one scene of a dinner, but rather than describe all the attendees by what they are wearing or eating, the narration takes place under the table and characters are described by how their legs jiggle or wave back and forth, or even inappropriately search out someone else's leg. Very interesting book.
    • 5/5
      Another book, like Sea of Poppies which is a set up for the rest of the trilogy. We meet the fascinating characters of Gormenghast whose lives revolve around ritual so much so that most seem to pull back from personal relationships into art or nature in order to sustain their concentration on the senseless ritual that keeps their society functioning. From the burning of artwork to the deaf Grey Scrubbers, to the Machiavellian Steerpike, the creaky Flay, the Countess with her white cats and wild birds, petulant Fuchsia, pitiful Nannie Slagg, owl-like Lord Sepulchrave, tittering Doctor Prunesquallor and the needlessly haughty sister Emma and twins Cora and Clarice culminating in the "Earling" of little Titus, Peake's characterization and world building keep the reader engrossed and delighted.