At the end of book 2, Titus left the crumbling towers and struck out for adventures new. Those adventures are detailed in this, the slimmest of the three volumes.
He finds himself in a strange city, washed up on the banks of a river and is recued by the exquisitely named Muzzlehatch. Thus begins what is probably the strangest book in the series.
Also the least satisfactory.
Peake was dreadfully ill when writing this and this book was pieced together by his editors and it shows. It feels bitty and somehow incomplete. It's obviously not the completed draft that Peake would have wanted.
That's not to say it's a bad book because it isn't. But compared with its predecessors, it falls short.
Gone are nearly all the characters that made the first two books so wonderful, no Prunesquallor or Flay or Steerpike, or any of the schoolmasters. Of course some of those characters couldn't have appeared in book 3 regardless, but you get my point.
Instead we have Titus and a brand new cast of supporting characters. However, since the book is half the length of the first two, they don't seem as fully fleshed out as those in the first books.
This started well. Muzzlehatch is the best of the new creations, but his motivations are not what I would call crystal clear. Indeed, none of the new characters have clear motivation except for the fact that they all develop a deep devotion/love for Titus for no particular reason. This then leads them to fight for him or plan his downfall for non-reciprocation.
From being a fantasy series with no magical elements, this book turns into a weird science fiction tale about a third of the way into the narrative.
Most of the more potentially interesting conflicts happen off camera and we only hear about them later on. I feel that Peake would have fleshed these scenes out fully and described then for us in detail had he been fit and well. The book would have been twice as long and all the better for it.
What was happening in the factory? We get the briefest of glimpses and need more. Who are the helmeted figures following Titus and why? There are so many unexplained factors in this book. Given that the levels of detail in the previous volumes could almost be argued to be excessive, this marks the tone of this book as drastically different.
The prose seems to be lacking compared with the others. He's still capable of some truly alarming turns of phrase (Chapter 102 starting with "Under a light to strangle infants by..." being a particular favourite of mine - '"But you are very poor and very ill," said another voice, with the consistency of porridge' is another favourite), but this book just doesn't have the feel of the rest of the series. It's a faster read than the others, not just because of the lesser word count, but because the writing just isn't as dense or poetic as before.
I wanted to love this book but I don't. It's very good. But the particular weirdness in this book feels out of place with the rest of the series. It's not the same type of weird and just feels wrong.
And I still want to know how Titus knew what a car is when I don't recall any motorised transport in the first books.
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