Titus Awakes

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I WAS HANDED, simultaneously, a generously measured gin and tonic and a typescript in a blue-grey folder, on the cover of which was written Search Without End, words that would eventually become the title of the final chapter to the book you are about to read.

This was over thirty years ago and Maeve Gilmore and I were sitting in what she called the ‘Petit Salon’, an intimate room overlooking the backgarden of No. 1 Drayton Gardens in Kensington, London – the last home she had shared with her late husband, Mervyn Peake.

Both were artists of considerable talent and Mervyn was a remarkable polymath: in addition to being a painter and an illustrator (reinterpreting classics such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for the twentieth century) he was also a novelist, playwright and poet. As a writer, he used the rich language of the artist’s palette; repeatedly describing characters and scenes in the Titus novels in terms of composition, colour, texture, light and shade.

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