Titus Alone, a new US edition

Asked to write the introduction to the new Overlook Press edition of Titus Alone, David Edelman triumphs. Early on in the lengthy assessment he dispenses with the somewhat repetitious chestnut about the third part not being on a par with the others. He advances arguments about the novel which place it where it should be, at the then very forefront of contemporary writing.

In fact Titus Alone differs from the previous two parts of the trilogy in which 'Peake ambles through page after page of glorious lyrical exposition' by taking here, the 'linguistic expess route'. Titus Alone, Edelman contends, is 'bursting with sexuality, both expressed and repressed'. 'Can you imagine anyone', he asks, 'in the first two novels saying, as Titus says to Cheeta, "let me suck your breasts, like little apples and play upon your nipples with my tongue"?' In the long, considered, and by the end of the introduction obviously partisan and won-over analysis of the novel, Edelman notes correctly that 'clearly Mervyn Peake was not finished with Titus Alone, as 'we know that Peake planned to write further episodes in the saga'. 'The more I study Titus Alone' he concludes, 'the more I realise that Peake knew precisely what he was doing with the book'.