Titus Awakes

Foreword

THE GORMENGHAST TRILOGY was not envisaged as a trilogy. There was to have been a fourth book in which Titus Groan, having left his own domain of his own volition for the first time, knowing that he could not return, entered a world where he was unknown, young and alone. The life he found outside the castle was indifferent to him; there were echoes from his childhood, and the flint he carried with him gave verisimilitude, if to no one else, at least to himself.

Gormenghast was not a dream. The world he encountered outside was not a dream, and the world that had been engendered by the first three books was to encompass the vastness of life. A picaresque tale that was so bloody, and so enormous in its vision, that only a man who had that boldness and that vision within his grasp could manipulate it.

I am about to try to take Titus Alone into that world. The first pages will be those that were tortured into life by the man who struggled with his failing brain, and his failing hand to conjure up so enormous a task.

Maeve Gilmore, 1970