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Genre: Historical Fiction
Main characters: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, “the Phantom named Drood”
Time and place: London and its surroundings, 1865 – 1870
First sentence: “My name is Wilkie Collins, and my guess, since I plan to delay the publication of this document for at least a century and a quarter beyond the date of my demise, is that you do not recognise my name.”
Verdict: Four stars out of five.
Book read as part of Charles Dickens month over at Fig and Thistle. The occasion? Charles Dickens’ Bicentennial anniversary! (he was born in February 1812)
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Summary:
“This true story will be about Charles Dickenss final five years and about his growing obsession during that time with a man—-if man he was—-named Drood, as well as with murder, death, corpses, crypts, mesmerism, opium, ghosts, and the streets and alleys of that black-biled lower bowel of London that the writer always called my Babylon or the Great Oven.”
Thus begins Wilkie Collins’ manuscript. These are his memoirs of the strange things happening to him (and his friend Charles Dickens) after an unfortunate event caused an encounter between Oliver Twist’s author and a mysterious character calling himself (or itself) Drood.
General impression
I am not usually fond of the idea of having real people act out an author’s fantasies, especially when the book has paranormal elements mixed in. And yet in this case I have very much enjoyed having two of my favorite authors have “their” adventures brought to life. I loved the way the events in the book mingle with the real ones — the Staplehurst accident for example has actually happened (although at first I was tempted to dismiss it in an “yeah, right, of course Dickens’ carriage was the only one to survive, could this be any more obviously fabricated?” kind of way); Dickens’ infatuation with Ellen Ternan was real, as was Inspector Field; if we take into consideration the fact that Dickens’ last (& unfinished) novel was called The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the book starts to get a sort of an aura of authenticity that makes it very enjoyable to me.
(when I say “authenticity” I do not mean, of course, that the things in the book have/may have actually happened, but that there is no real-life element interfering with my suspension of disbelief when reading the novel; it is one of the things I love most when reading historical fiction novels :) ).
Characters
The characters themselves are part of the illusion, as they behave very much in the way I would have expected them to.
Well, to be fair, I do not know enough of Mr. Collins’ life & personality, but the Wilkie in the book (other than carrying out his personal life just like real life Wilkie, up to and including his “Other Wilkie” doppelganger) acts and thinks in just the way I would have expected from him on seeing his picture:
Not that I usually judge people by the way they look like, nor do I consider myself a great judge of character; however in this particular case the image and the feelings on the inside felt like they matched. Wilkie of the book seems born to be a sidekick (and he himself realizes that) : quite intelligent, and a capable author in his own right, he nevertheless lacks the easy-going confidence that make Dickens one of the most, if not the most appreciated author of the time. By his own admission, Wilkie does not care a fig about what society makes of him/his living arrangements; and this unwillingness to make some amends to make people like him is very likely one of the reasons for the status quo. In his own words, he’s “small, cherubic, usually pleasant, rarely-taken-seriously“; everything about him seems less impressive than the corresponding traits of his friend’s. In simpler terms, Dickens was born to lead and make people obey his entreats; Wilkie Collins was born to agree to do other, stronger people’s bidding.
It is a pity Dickens (the real one) didn’t dedicate himself to becoming an actor (no, scratch that, I think we — the posterity — are better off having his books rather than not). Thing is, I was always impressed (and am even more so after having read this book) by how much of a performer Dickens was, and how much he enjoyed the spotlight and giving performances. If Wilkie is the type that never stands out — despite his literary successes and his very real talent –, Dickens is pretty much the opposite. People are drawn to him, people admire him, people end up worshiping him; he is a celebrity of his time, and I always was impressed by his managing to achieve that. One hundred years before Michael Jackson, people were fainting at his shows. The Dickens in the book goes on to flesh out these impressions I had. Dickens-the-character is a perfectionist, every performance rehearsed, every book passage rewritten and improved as needed. Even more impressive was his elephantine memory, knowing every one of his novel by heart, being able to recite them at will, while at the same time editing and improving the prose.
Dickens, during one of his readings:
Outside the stage, Dickens was still, in many ways, a child. He loved to laugh, sometimes in the most unfortunate circumstances; he lived to impress people; sometimes he even played pranks. He was not perfect (his pride was perhaps his greatest sin), but his personality shines through the pages in the book. I consider a sign of the author’s skill the fact that, although the narrator (Wilkie) and Dickens grow apart, driven away by their shared Drood experiences and in no small measure by Wilkie’s own jealousy, although by the final chapters the narrator’s feelings for Dickens become less than amiable ones, Dickens-the-character (“a complex, sensitive, and paradoxical man“) is nonetheless a very likable one. Or at least I liked him a lot. So much so that the last part of the book, as the dates approached the day he was going to die in (five years after the Staplehurst accident, to the day), made me grow sadder and sadder, feeling the loss.
Relationships
As the book opens, Wilkie and Dickens are close friends. However, their Drood-related adventures start taking a toll on their easy relationship ever since the night Wilkie found himself, against his better judgment, traversing the city sewers alongside Dickens, hunting Drood. It is the first time that Wilkie feels mistreated by his friend and mentor, and it is by no means the last. Quite the contrary actually; the frustrations pile up and Wilkie’s feelings for Dickens slowly turn into downright hate. I have a theory actually regarding that: perhaps the reason things turn out so is that Dickens and Drood were superimposed into one and the same deep down in Wilkie’s mind (after all, Drood has entered his life via Dickens — people often mistake a cause and an effect); thus his inability to find and destroy the one that ruined his life reflects itself onto the other, affecting W & D’s relationship in the way described. Although of course, pure professional jealousy also has a part in it (as old Wilkie finally manages to acknowledge, his first and foremost problem with Dickens was that in the end, “despite all of his weaknesses and failings (both as a writer and as a man), Charles Dickens was the literary genius and I was not“).
Setting
The London we come to associate with the world of Drood is a side of London I have not noticed being mentioned before: a stinky city with a sewer system that sent all human waste into the Thames. Even the citys cemeteries are overflowing, and it does not improve the atmosphere one bit. And then there is the Undertown, the ‘town’ below London, where people live like rats, or worse. I dont think I can properly imagine the sights there — and yet a human being can get used to anything, as proven by Wilkie himself, whose quest for opium attracts to the area again and again and again.
A very picturesque description:
Twenty thousand tons of horse manure per day were gathered from the reeking streets and dumped in what we politely and euphemistically called “dust heaps”—-huge piles of feces that rose near the mouth of the Thames like an English Himalaya.
The overcrowded cemeteries around London also stank to high heaven. Grave diggers had to leap up and down on new corpses, often sinking to their hips in rotting flesh, just to force the reluctant new residents down into their shallow graves, these new corpses joining the solid humus of festering and overcrowded layers of rotting bodies below. In July, one knew immediately when one was within six city blocks of a cemetery—-the reeking miasma drove people out of surrounding homes and tenements—and there was always a cemetery nearby. The dead were always beneath our feet and in our nostrils.
Plot
For me, the book was character driven, as I loved discovering bits and pieces of the two authors lives. Which is why I did not pay that much attention to the plot itself. What I did find interesting about it was how fluid it was, everchanging. There wasn’t one big arc (or at least it was not an obvious one), but many smaller ones, developing from one another like so many plan Bs.
Example: Dickens sees Drood and takes Wilkie on a hunt for him; the two of them do not discover his lair *but* Dickens does, behind the scenes; enter Inspector Fields and his own quest to discover Drood, getting Wilkie entangled in the story almost without his will; however Wilkie’s spying on Dickens offers no useful results, so the detective rennounces their collaboration *but* about that time Wilkie meets Drood himself, and is irrevocably changed by the encounter; and so on.
What I liked
One of the things I enjoyed the most consists of Wilkie’s ruminations about his future books, and the way he ‘put aside’ in his head all sorts of events and characters, for future use. My favorite such thoughts were the ones regarding The Moonstone (initially The Eye of the Serpent or maybe The Serpents Eye), and the various iterations it went through until reaching the shape it was published in. Alas, Wilkie’s feelings/themes/ideas were probably quite interesting in regards to the other novel he writes in the course of the book too (Man and Wife), but I have not read that one so I couldn’t enjoy comparing the drafts with the finished form, like I did with The Moonstone.
Speaking of which, my reading list has lengthened with no less than three books after reading this one: I added Our Mutual Friend (written at the height of the writer’s infatuation with Ellen Ternan and showing a passionate side of Dickens I never saw of thought of before), Armadale (Wilkie’s pride and joy prior to writing The Moonstone), and Man and Wife (if only to discover what was the way our female hero, a representation of Wilkie himself, was forced by law to marry someone she did not want).
What I did not like
Two things, both more or less spoilers (and both more or less nitpicks) :
show spoiler
1) Wilkie Collins killing Joseph Clow (Catherine G—’s husband). Did he or didn’t he? At first I was certain he imagined everything. Clow and his wife just happening to be there, and having a picnic on a grave, no less; Wilkie just happening to have the gun on him, although he usually didn’t — an unlikely string of coincidences. Not to mention the part where he throws the body in the lime pit, almost forgetting to take the metal bits (just like in his earlier dream about Dickens). And yet Catherine did come to live with Wilkie afterwards, and she couldn’t have done so if something hadn’t happened to her husband. Now, admittedly the author couldn’t have clarified this (as Wilkie the narrator had no idea of the actual truth), but I was somewhat bummed by not knowing nonetheless.
and
2) That’s sort of an editing mistake, and it really drew me out of the events for a while. At one point Wilkie dreams he is killing Charles Dickens (quite a heartbreaking moment for me — especially the mention of “[t]he brain that conceived of and brought to life David Copperfield and Pip and Esther Summerson and Uriah Heep and Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit and Bob Cratchit and Sam Weller and Pickwick and a hundred other living beings that live on in the minds of millions of readers” ending up spreaded onto the grass). While Dickens is dying he says ‘unintelligible’ (the key word) and “wake, Wilkie, wake”, or something along these lines. Just as if, with his final strength, Dickens wanted to do his best to relieve his friend from the mesmeric influence he was under.
Which would have been very well, but Wilkie only finds out about the key word the next day. How could he dream about a word whose importance he knew nothing about? (technically I suppose this can be explained by the fact that Wilkie’s subconscious did know about the said word, but still, I find it a strange place for the subconscious to make an appearance, especially seeing that it never did before).
And no, I did not mess the order of events, as Wilkie thinks about the said dream a few moments after Dickens shares with him the word, and the non-existence of Drood, so the dream definitely had already happened by then.
Thoughts on the title
Brilliant :)
Everything that happens in the book can be traced to Drood, one way or another. Which makes the title nothing less than perfect :)
Thoughts on the ending
Ah, the ending. The ending is… sad. The kind of ending that makes me like the book a little less (remember Atonement?), despite the fact that it makes the book better, not worse.
show spoiler
My review notes while reading include the words “Wilkie Collins – unreliable narrator”. Much fuss is made about the character in The Moonstone, that did things without knowing, being under the influence of opium; much fuss is made of mesmerism too. About the time when the Other Wilkie started affecting the physical world, I started thinking that odds are Wikie Collins was at least a bit delusional himself. Which is why I wasn’t particularly surprised about the big reveal: there was no Drood, Dickens invented it and played a joke on poor Wilkie. I did enjoy the moment though: the way the original idea has come to Dickens after dreaming about the accident, a dream where the reality mingled with a certain Inspector Field’s obsession.
[Dickens says: ]“But it was indeed Police Detective Charles Frederick Field, during our long walks through the night streets of the Great Oven back in the early eighteen fifties, who told me about the spectre in his mind whom he called Drood.”
“Spectre,” I repeated. “You are telling me that Inspector Field was insane.”
“Not at first, I believe,” said Dickens. “I later spoke to many of his colleagues and superiors in the Detective Bureau about this—as well as with the man who succeeded Field as Chief of Detectives when the inspector actually did break down.”
“Broke down because of Drood,” I said sarcastically. “Because of Field’s fantasy about an Egyptian occultist killer named Drood.”
“Yes. At first it was not a fantasy. There were a series of incredible murders about the time that Charles Frederick Field was becoming Chief of Detectives–all were unsolved. Some seemed to relate to cases that Inspector Field had been unable to solve in earlier years. Some of the Lascars and Malays and Chinamen and Hindoos that the police dragged in at the time tried to blame a spectral figure called Drood—the details were always hazy, but consistent at least on the basics that this monster was Egyptian, was a serial-murderer, could control other people by the powers of his mind and by the rituals of his ancient cult, and that he lived in some vast temple underground–or, according to some of the opium-eating villains, in a temple beneath the Thames itself.
[...]
“It was his fantasy about this make-believe master criminal, Drood, that eventually cost Field his job and then his pension,” said Dickens. “Inspector Charles Frederick Field simply could not believe that the terrible crimes which he saw and had reported to him every day of his working life could be so random… so meaningless. In his increasingly confused mind, there had to be a single master criminal behind all the terror and misery he saw and experienced. A single villain. A master criminal nemesis worthy of him, of the great Inspector Charles Frederick Field. And a nemesis who was not really human, but who–when caught (by Inspector Charles Frederick Field, of course)–would bring an end to the literally endless series of brutalities that he was spending his life observing.”
So simple and so plausible at the same time. I loved that part. Just as I loved the idea of Wilkie’s novelist mind expanding by itself on the original story, and making it such a complicated novel. Alas, it is the next part that I enjoyed somewhat less (although admittedly made the book better) — the part where Dickens wants to mesmerize Collins again, to make him wake up from the ‘dream’ he invented, to make him see what was real and what wasn’t. And then, a few days later, Dickens falls ill and never makes the appointment. Wilkie is then left to live with Drood around him (and with Drood’s scarab in his head) for the rest of his life.
It is the very ending though, the very last word actually, that I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand what the author wanted to do there, I mean. Wilkie’s last word is ‘unintelligible’, the very word that was supposed to wake him from the mesmeric influence Dickens unfortunately left him under. Thing is, in order for it to actually work, Wilkie had to be mesmerized when he heard it. The word by itself does nothing and means nothing — although how interesting would have been if Wilkie would have realized, at the very end of his life, that all the last few decades were spent imagining things. Things that at one point made him want to murder his erstwhile mentor and best friend, no less.
Recommend it to?
People who like dark, Gothic novels :)
Also, people who enjoy Wilkie Collins’ plots, as the book did remind me about him and his novels now and then, for more reasons than the obvious fact that ‘he’ was the narrator.
Buy this from amazon.com | Buy this from bookdepository.co.uk | An article about Dickens’ public readings | a site about Wilkie Collins (with details about Dickens and some of the events in the book) | read Dickens’ works online
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