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Drood
by Dan Simmons
Little, Brown and Company, 2009
ISBN13: 9780316007023
Hardcover $26.99
Dan Simmons’ mammoth novel, Drood, is historical fiction centered around two of 19th-century British literature’s most prominent figures: Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. It is “narrated” by Wilkie Collins and chronicles the last five years of Charles Dickens’ life and his growing obsession with a mysterious figure named Drood. Drood is a menacing character that Dickens encounters in the aftermath of a tragic train accident. Drood becomes the inspiration for Dickens’ last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The narrative follows Collins’ day-to-day life, his interactions with Charles Dickens and their hunt for Drood through London’s seamy underbelly: opium dens, back alleys, cemeteries and all other manner of creepy, gaslit Victorian places.
I’ve made no secret for years that I love The Alienist by Caleb Carr. It is quite simply the best work of modern fiction I’ve read and my gold standard for historical mystery/thrillers. So when I saw Drood sitting on my neighborhood bookseller’s shelf, I practically drooled on it. The summary promises a thrill ride of mystery and suspense. What the book actually delivers is a long-winded, meandering, nonsensical narrative as seen through the eyes of a thoroughly unstable opium addict in Collins.
From the outset, I disliked “the character” of Charles Dickens… not a redeeming quality to be found, especially when seen through the eyes of Drood’s whiny, jealous, tripped-out narrator, Collins. The novel is heavily laden with unrelated and rambling historical asides (some of which repeat themselves). I kept with it, thinking that all of these side roads might eventually come together in some way that was relevant or revealing to the plot. They don’t. And then there is the story itself. The build-up scene to Charles Dickens’ second encounter with Drood was mouth-wateringly good: a grimy trip through Bluegate Fields, opium dens and a crypt with secret passages under it… only to culminate in Dickens being whisked away in a gondola piloted by two men in tights (yes, tights) on a river of sewage. We later learn that they took him to Drood’s huge Egyptian-style fortress in some sort of secret London sewer-city where he and Drood sipped tea and chatted about mesmerism. Uh huh. That marked the first time (of several) that I set this book aside with a vow to read no more.
Ultimately though, I kept with it and finished… all 784 painful, psychedelic pages. But I am sorry to report that my opinion of this book never improved. As narrator Collins’ drug problem grows, the story just gets weirder and weirder, leaving the reader to decide what is real and what is an opium-induced fantasy. (Some are easy, like the green-skinned woman with tusks for teeth. That’s right… green skin and tusks. Sigh.) I rate it as Fair rather than Poor simply because I think Simmons did an admirable job of assuming the voice of Wilkie Collins. An authentic-sounding Victorian “voice” is tricky to achieve, let alone maintain for 700+ pages. I also appreciate how much research it must have taken to write it. That said, I just can’t recommend Drood. What a disappointment.
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