It's the pictures in the mind, surely? The enormous strength of Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan is the outlandish clarity of the pictures in the mind. Damaged people, written in lush detail, and none of your twee fantasy-world book. This is the real world exaggerated a bit. The flavour of Titus Groan is in the decision to use a well-chosen vocabulary to fully bring alive absolutely everything: from a castle chef to a stone corridor. And everybody and everything are just a little bit exaggerated. They are real places, yet unusual ones, and they are real people if ones from the text-books of Clinical Psychology, or Serial Killers, or Subversive Revolutionaries, who are only slightly exaggerated. And sexual love is almost completely missing from this world. Everyone is wrapped-up in their function, their role, and they are mostly struggling.
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