Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake

I've been well aware since I started reading the Gormenghast books that Mervyn Peake is a mad genius, but this is much more 'mad' than 'genius'. It's greatly inferior (but that's just my opinion) to the previous two books, and seems to just kind of fall apart into a collection of bizarre and creepy incidents that refuse to cohere into a whole. There's also a lot of sci-fi, instead of fantasy (airplanes, drones, weird spying machines). As usual, a lot of it is highly disturbing and the style is frightening, but it's nothing like the sublime grotesqueness of the other two books. I didn't like any of the characters, especially not Titus, who is prone to crazy outbreaks of violence and anger. The best character (for me) was Cheeta, a socialite who is so angry that Titus only lusts after her (and doesn't love her) that she attempts to drive him insane by creating a monstrous pastiche of Gormenghast to convince him that his home is a figment of his imagination, which I think is fair enough. However, it's not that she portrayed as a figure of female empowerment (there are none of those), and her project eventually fails, I think I'm the one who's reading something sympathetic into this character. There's also a really upsetting bit about a woman who escapes from a labour camp with one of the guards, only to be tormented by him, which I would have loved to hear more about, but it's really brief. Mostly I just spent this entire book wondering what the hell is going on. I read it for a book club, which I didn't even bother to go to after finishing it, I couldn't even think of what to say about it, let alone discuss it for two hours.