Titus Groan & Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake Free Audiobook

Written by Mervyn Peake
Read by Michael Williams / Full cast
Format: MP3
Abridged

A couple of versions of Mervyn Peake’s ‘Titus Groan’ and ‘Gormenghast’ here, all from cassette releases that have never resurfaced as CDs or digital versions.

The first version is the BBC radio dramatization (by Brian Sibley) from 1984. The cast includes Freddie Jones, Eleanor Bron, David Warner and Sting. Two 90-minute plays, chopped into halves of 45 minutes each to fit on the tapes.

The second lot is the abridged Penguin Modern Classics audiobooks from the late 1990s, read by the British actor Michael Williams. They run about six hours each. These were kind of immediately redundant since they were released in the dying days of cassettes and at the same time as an unabridged release by another publisher. So they’re quite obscure, but I like Williams’ voice (he was a great Dr Watson on BBC radio too) and always enjoyed them.

I notice from the comments that some people seem not to know what these books are and who Mervyn Peake was. Apologies – apparently they aren’t as famous as I thought. Maybe it’s a UK vs. US thing. They’re quite literary British fantasy fiction, written in 1946 and 1950. The books take place in Gormenghast itself, which is a massive castle essentially the size of a city, populated with Dickensian grotesques. Titus Groan is the nominal protagonist, younger brother of Fuchsia Groan, and the son and heir of the 76th Earl of Groan, Lord Sepulchrave. The books begin with his birth and follow him through gothic dramas and political machinations to his late adolescence. ‘Titus Groan’ is the first book and ‘Gormenghast’ its sequel. They’re arguably as much about the antagonist, Steerpike, and his attempted rise to power as they are about Titus himself. Steerpike’s story is complete in these two books, which are both brilliant.

Peake was an English author, artist and poet. He intended the adventures of Titus beyond the castle to be a much longer series, but he was profoundly affected by his experiences in WWII and his physical and mental health deteriorated to the extent that he died at the age of 57 before completing the third book, ‘Titus Alone’. That one was assembled by editors and published posthumously (first in 1959 and again in altered form in 1970). Peake’s wife Maeve Gilmore wrote a fourth book, ‘Titus Awakes’ (published 2011 but written in the ’70s), based on a further fragment left by Peake.