Breaking Free: An Introduction to Titus Alone

Michael Moorcock writes in London Peculiar - and Other Nonfiction. 

Michael Moorcock's reading of Titus Alone displays in its elegant and sensitive synopsis, a closeness to the spirit of the story and a true empathy with the writer. Moorcock's correct view that Titus the eponymous hero is essentially lost within a world he only half recognises, also senses intuitively that is is vital he escape 'the hermetically-sealed world of Gormenghast', and into 'the second half of the 20th Century'. The character that displaces Steerpike in this third novel in the Titus sequence and one whose dominance very much drives the narrative, is the powerful Muzzlehatch, a composite of people both real and imagined whose presence would have entered the real world of the writer in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Inventions that now challenged pre war naivete replaced an innocence, culminating in the figure of Veil whose representation of evil can surely trace its origins to the writer's ultimate witness; the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.