Review | Drood by Dan Simmons

With Charles Dicken’s 200th birthday just passed, perhaps this is an appropriate homage to his work and his life.

“The Mystery of Edwin Drood” was Charles Dickens last novel, but he died before it could be finished. Dan Simmons picks up the mystery, not to solve and finish Dickens’ work, but to provide a back story, the real source of Drood. The result is a tale that is tragic, eerie, and mysterious.

Simmons starts out with heavy foreshadowing. Told in the voice of protagonist Wilkie Collins, friend and confidant of Charles Dickens, we are promised to know the real story of Dickens’ last years. After a narrowly surviving a disastrous train accident, Dickens’ tells Collins of a mysterious figure he sees slipping among the dead and dying of the train wreck. Tall, pale white, in an opera cloak and stove-pipe top hat, the man identifies himself as Drood. As the story progresses, Dickens and Collins explore the underside of London, visiting underground opium dens and dark tunnels running with tributaries of the Thames, seeking the illusive Drood.

As Collins’ narrative of Dickens’ last years progresses, Dickens dabbles with mesmerism, seemingly with assistance of the dangerous Drood, always somewhere on the periphery of vision. Meanwhile, Collins fights demons of his own, an increasing addiction to laudanum and opium.

With the end approaching, Dickens slowly wear himself out conducting dramatic readings of his literary works, conducting a break-neck tour schedule, both through-out the British Isles and post-Civil War America. We also see Collins struggle, like Amadeus’ Soliari, to achieve recognition and wealth to prove his worth relative to the great master Dickens. He is only a mediocre shadow of his friend, however, and soon finds himself under the spell of Drood. Before long, we are left to wonder what is real and what is illusion, what is perspective and what is opium induced.

While the book weighs in at over 700 pages, the setting, the depth of texture, and the reality with which Simmons spins this tale in Dickens 19th century England, makes the book worth reading, even if just to see and feel the world in which Dickens lived. However, beyond just showing an insider’s glimpse of the era, the reader feels like he is looking at a picture of the great Dickens himself. The mystery, and Collins’ apparent madness, combined with the dangerous and hypnotic villain-like Drood keep the reader reading, even when the months bleed into years.

I never felt like I was rushing to an ending or being pulled along by the plot, as I might have in a Clancy or a Patterson. On the other hand, I always enjoyed my Simmons deft use of language. I appreciated his ability to keep the story, and the character development, moving subtly and building to a surprising, but entirely plausible and almost expected, climax. Throughout, he makes appropriate use and reference to Dickens’ various works, weaving them into the story and the Collins consciousness. The book feels well researched, and though I am no Dickens expert, it seems like Simmons either knows his Dickens or has done the research to look like it.

The book is at times dark. Many times I found myself loathing the narrator, and it is rare that I read a book through the eyes of such an almost irredeemable character as Collins was by the end of the novel. He is scheming, mediocre, addicted, and, inexorably, mad, not to mention untrustworthy, deceptive, murderous, and greedy. Yet Simmons writes in honesty, developing the character as he must and with a story that almost compels finishing. I cannot recommend this book to everyone, but I wish I could. Dan Simmons is a good writer, and he does Dicken’s justice with this latest novel.

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Overall rating: 

Parent’s guide:

• Content rating: PG-13, due to drug use at center of plot
• Sex: none, but some reference to an affair between Charles Dickens and his mistress.
• Violence: some threat while protagonist descends into the London underworld.
• Language: none.
• Drugs: Extensive description of opium dens and drug use that is central to the story.