In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess’s interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess’s list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

In this episode, Graham Foster explores the mysterious castle of Gormenghast, the setting of Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, with writer and editor Rob Maslen.

Titus Groan begins with the birth of an heir to Lord Groan, the ruler of the castle of Gormenghast. As baby Titus comes into the world, the castle is beset by scheming and violence, primarily at the hands of Steerpike, an exceptionally clever, but malevolent, teenager. As he manipulates the other residents of the castle, his plotting threatens the traditions and rules that govern life within its walls, bringing madness and death to the Groan family.

Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in China, where his father was a medical missionary. After returning to England in 1922, he studied at the Croydon School of Art and the Royal Academy of Art. After building a reputation as an artist and illustrator during the Second World War, he published the novels that make up the Gormenghast Trilogy between 1946 and 1959. He died in 1968.

Rob Maslen is Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow. In 2015 he founded Glasgow’s MLitt in Fantasy, the first graduate programme in the world specifically dedicated to the study of fantasy and the fantastic, and from 2020 to 2022 he served as Co-director, with Professor Dimitra Fimi, of the Glasgow Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. He has written three books: Elizabethan Fictions (1997), Shakespeare and Comedy (2005), and The Shakespeare Handbook (2008), and has edited Mervyn Peake’s Collected Poems (2008), as well as co-editing  Mervyn Peake’s Complete Nonsense (2011). He has published many essays on early modern literature and twentieth-century fantasy and science fiction. He blogs at The City of Lost Books.

Books mentioned in this episode

By Mervyn Peake:

• The Drawings of Mervyn Peake (1949)
• Gormenghast (1950)
• Titus Alone (1959)
• Mervyn Peake: The Man and his Art (2008)

By others:

• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759-67)
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)
• Peter Pan/Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie (1911)
• Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
• The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
• In Parenthesis by David Jones (1937)
• The Aerodrome by Rex Warner (1941)
• The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola (1952)
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954-5)
• The Famished Road by Ben Okri (1991)
• Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (2000)
• Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeanette Ng (2017)
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020)
• Babel by R.F. Kuang (2022)

This page contains affiliate links which help support the charitable work of the Burgess Foundation.

In previous series of Ninety-Nine Novels, we learnt about authors including James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Nadine Gordimer, Vladimir Nabokov and Christopher Isherwood, among others. These episodes are available at your favourite place to get podcasts.

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to this podcast below or on your audio platform of choice (Apple Podcasts / Spotify/ YouTube), or use the streaming links below.

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

• Share | 
• Print