Meredith’s Reviews > Titus Groan > Status Update

Nannie's head was old with lines and sunken skin, with the red rims of her eyes and the puckers of her mouth. A vacant anatomical ancientry.

Keda's oldness was the work of fate, alchemy. An occult agedness. A transparent darkness. A broken and mysterious grove. A tragedy, a glory, a decay.

These three were beings at the shadowy corner waited on. Nanie was 69, Keda was 22, Titus was 12 days old.

Titus watched Keda's face with his violet eyes, his grotesque little features...there was the history of man in his face. A fragment from the enormous rock of mankind. A leaf from the forest of man's passion and man's knowledge and man's pain. that was the ancientness of Titus.

The only life in the room lay in the throats of the flowers

Each stride was a gesture, a probing. It was a kind of downward, inward search, as though he knew that what was important for him, what he really understood and cared for, was below him. It was in the earth - the earth

Pentecost turned his back upon the castle and made his way upon the cedars, leaving in his wake upon the glittering blotches of the dew, black imprints of feet that turned inwards. As he walked it seemed that he was moving into the earth.

Only their children's had radiance, their eyes, the sheen on their hair, and in another way, their movements and their voices. Bright with a kind of unnatural brightness. It was not the wholesome lustre of a free flame, but of the hectic radiance that the sheet-lightning gives suddenly to limbs of trees at midnight; of sudden flares in the darkness, of a fragment that is lit by torchlight into a spectre

And yet they did not die as might be imagined, any earlier than is normal. On the contrary, from the long line of ancient faces at the three tales nearest the great wall, it might be imagined that their longevity was abnormal.

^Referencing the above quote. There is exposition in this book, but it takes about 90 pages to get it

These then, Lord Sepulchrave, the Countess Gertrude, Fuchsia their eldest child, Doctor Prunesquallor, Mr. Rottcodd, Flay, Swelter, Nannie Slagg, Steerpike and Sourdust, have been discovered at their pursuits on the day of the advent, and have perhaps indicated the atmosphere into which it was the lot of Titus to be born.

This was the loft which was for Fuchsia a very secret place, a kind of pagan chapel, an eyrie, a citadel, a kingdom never mentioned, for that would have been a breach of faith - a kind of blasphemy.