Mervyn Peake may be my favourite author. His "Gormenghast" series is outstanding, and if Peake hadn't succumbed to neurological disease he would have continued to write. "Titus Awakes" is the work of his wife, Maeve Gilmore, extrapolating from the thinnest of fragments left behind, and it is proof positive that one can marry a genius but not continue on for them.

I wanted to love it. But the characteristic grotesquerie of Peake, the Baroque prose you can drown in, just isn't there. Gilmore tries, and the mimicry of style is in some places clever, but compared to the immensity of Gormenghast castle she has produced a scaffolding at best - the same sense of shape, with none of the depth. "Titus Awakes" feels like stepping stones, an episodic skipping of here-to-there that doesn't have the cohesion, the interconnection, of Peake's previous works.

This isn't surprising. Gilmore isn't so much writing a continuation as she is an exploration - what life is like without her husband. It is hard to read the final parts of the book and not recognise Peake himself as the patient in the sanatorium, his mind and intelligence failing as his wife sits beside him and waits for the end. It's not just the patient, of course - Peake appears in the book, unnamed, a couple more times after that and it is unutterably sad - but sad because of context, and not because of text. One can't blame Gilmore for reaching out, for trying to reconcile her husband's greatest work with the ending of his life - but it's not "Gormenghast", not even close, and I wonder if the fragment should have been left well enough alone.