Stranger than fiction, larger than life, full of shades and echoes, Titus Groan is not merely one of the most brilliantly sustained flights of the imagination in modern English fiction, it is also a sustained piece of deadly irony. The characters are weird; the setting fantastic; everything about Mervyn Peake's masterpiece seems eccentric but for the stringent sense of reality which always seeps through the farcical, frightening antics in the mad castle of Gormenghast.