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Original Essays | November 5, 2009
By John Buntin
For more than 60 years, Los Angeles's origins, its underbelly, and (yes) its blondes have fueled the imagination of writers and directors from...
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Drood
by Dan Simmons
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"On June 9, 1865, Charles Dickens was returning from a trip to Paris, traveling by train from Folkestone to London. As the train approached the river Beult near Staplehurst, the rail viaduct spanning the river collapsed. Incredibly, the engine was able to jump the 45-foot gap between the rails, but six of seven private passenger cars fell to the swampy riverbed below. Dickens was seated in the one private car that was spared. Descending to the crash victims, the great English writer witnessed scenes of death and carnage that would haunt him for the remaining five years of his life.
What happened to Dickens after Staplehurst is the subject of Dan Simmons's new novel, Drood, a work that is equal parts historical fiction, horror, and mystery." Bob Hussey, Rain Taxi (Read the entire Rain Taxi review)
Synopses & Reviews On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens — at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world — hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever.
Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research...or something more terrifying?
Just as he did in The Terror, Dan Simmons draws impeccably from history to create a gloriously engaging and terrifying narrative. Based on the historical details of Charles Dickens's life and narrated by Wilkie Collins (Dickens's friend, frequent collaborator, and Salieri-style secret rival), Drood explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author's last years and may provide the key to Dickens's final, unfinished work: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Chilling, haunting, and utterly original, Drood is Dan Simmons at his powerful best. Review: "Bestseller Simmons ( The Terror) brilliantly imagines a terrifying sequence of events as the inspiration for Dickens's last, uncompleted novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in this unsettling and complex thriller. In the course of narrowly escaping death in an 1865 train wreck and trying to rescue fellow passengers, Dickens encounters a ghoulish figure named Drood, who had apparently been traveling in a coffin. Along with his real-life novelist friend Wilkie Collins, who narrates the tale, Dickens pursues the elusive Drood, an effort that leads the pair to a nightmarish world beneath London's streets. Collins begins to wonder whether the object of their quest, if indeed the man exists, is merely a cover for his colleague's own murderous inclinations. Despite the book's length, readers will race through the pages, drawn by the intricate plot and the proliferation of intriguing psychological puzzles, which will remind many of the work of Charles Palliser and Michael Cox. 4-city author tour. (Feb.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "My name is Wilkie Collins," announces the narrator of "Drood," "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." Au contraire, Wilkie! We know and love you still. Has any thriller ever boasted a better opening sequence than your "Woman in White"? Has any detective ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) story employed multiple narrators more artfully than your "Moonstone"? Has anyone produced so many sinfully entertaining books while maintaining an opium habit that made Thomas de Quincey look like a dabbler? No, Wilkie, you're still the man. And in fact, your provocative social critiques and nuanced portraits of women make you look considerably more modern than the Victorian aesthetes who thumbed their noses at you. But I admit that, in the opening pages of Dan Simmons' historical thriller, you're in bad shape, Wilkie. In your 40s and already a near-invalid, with rheumatic gout so painful you can hardly see to write. You're living with a woman who's not your wife (you've tried, not very successfully, to pass her off as your housekeeper), and you've got another mistress stashed in private lodgings, and they each want more of you than you have to give. And, to make matters worse, you're seeing things. A scary gal with green skin and yellow tusk-teeth who wants to fling you down the stairs. And a silent doppelganger — "the Other Wilkie" — who comes when he's least wanted and even writes parts of your books for you. And writes better than you! Speaking of which, you have the signal misfortune of being best pals with Charles Dickens ("the Inimitable," you call him, not very respectfully). A leading light of the age is our Dickens, which means that everyone around him must learn to live in his shadow or else rage at the dying of the light. And now Dickens ... here's where fact gives way to fiction ... has drawn you into his private mythos, which revolves around a half-Egyptian underworld fiend named Drood. Hard to miss, this fella, with his scarred head and missing eyelids and "a nose that looked to have been mostly amputated in some terrible surgery" and "ears that were little more than stubs." This same Drood, according to a retired police inspector, is London's "least notorious but most successful serial murderer." You're skeptical, and no wonder. "There is no Drood," you declare flatly. "Only a legend." But then the legend makes himself known to you in truly terrible fashion. And you realize that the only way to be rid of him is to rid yourself of Dickens. Which will have the not unincidental effect of forcing Dickens to acknowledge you as an equal, if not a superior. Drood, as one might expect, bears a nominal relation to Dickens' unfinished final volume, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," but it plays out more as a cross between "Amadeus" and "The Usual Suspects." As hybrids go, that has the potential for some horsepower, especially because Simmons, in earlier days, was a much-lauded sci-fi writer, and the pictorial imagination he brought to that earlier genre pays handsome dividends here. In one hallucinatory moment, Collins sees the audience at Dickens' public reading tied by "hundreds of slender, white, barely perceptible cords." Books are "dalmatianed with spattered ink," a nasty black scarab burrows into a human belly "as if flesh were sand" and a man looks down at himself and sees "the hands of a corpse disappearing into chalk." The most successful of the book's set pieces is in the very first chapter, when the train carrying Dickens and his mistress plunges from the Staplehurst viaduct. This real-life incident becomes almost unbearably vivid in Simmons' hands: "Dickens watched a man stagger towards him, arms outstretched as if for a welcoming hug. The top of the man's skull had been torn off rather the way one would crack an eggshell with a spoon in preparation for breakfast." Equally vivid is the guided tour of "Undertown," a labyrinth of crypts, tunnels, caverns and underground rivers where Drood rules over a small nation of feral children and opium addicts. It's when Simmons takes his book aboveground that he loses his way — in a forest of factoids. For long stretches, "Drood" is little more than warmed-over biography, larded with the minutiae of London sewage systems and Dickens' Italian travels and his fistula surgery and the names of the dogs who visited his estate and the titles of every last reference work consulted by Collins during the writing of "The Moonstone" ... and then more of same. "Perhaps I have already mentioned ... ," Simmons' narrator murmurs. "Perhaps you also know. ... Perhaps I have told you, Dear Reader. ... I may have mentioned earlier. ... " You have. You have. And, like the arch-villains he portrays, Simmons gang-presses his characters into historical servitude. "Oh, Mr. Collins!" cries one. "I am deeply honoured to have such a famous writer visit me! I so greatly enjoyed your 'The Woman in White' that was serialised in 'All the Year Round' immediately after Mr. Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities' ended." People don't actually talk like this, any more than they say, "Dickens' novel — which I thought rather dreary and stodgy to that point, especially in the person of the cloying and saccharine narratoress named Esther Summerson, did seem to come alive in the penultimate chapters as our Inspector Bucket took charge of the murder case regarding Lawyer Tulkinghorn, as well as in his fruitless but exciting pursuit of Lady Dedlock, Esther's true mother, who was to die outside the city burial ground." This padding and sock-puppetry come at some cost: The book is halfway over before it feels like it's beginning. (Drood even pauses in the midst of his evil-doing to announce the species of beetle he uses.) Simmons may justify his novel's length as a tribute to the enormity of evil or perhaps to the bagginess of Dickens' own fiction. But "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," had it been finished, would have been one of Dickens' most compact productions, and truth be told, this modern-day "Drood" has less to do with evil than with spite. Specifically, the nastiness that a pair of brilliant men inflict on each other. A more apropos title, then, might have been "A Tale of Two Egos," which, all in all, is a worthy subject, but not worth the epic length afforded to it. Inside this artery-clogging almost-800-page book is a sleek and sinewy 300-page thriller waiting to be teased out. If only Simmons hadn't left the job to us. Reviewed by Louis Bayard, whose most recent novel is 'The Black Tower', Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Synopsis: Based on the historical details of Charles Dickens' life, Drood explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author's last years and may provide the key to his final, unfinished work: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. About the Author Dan Simmons is the award-winning author of several novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Olympos and The Terror. He lives in Colorado.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780316007023
- Author:
- Simmons, Dan
- Publisher:
- Little Brown and Company
- Subject:
- Thrillers
- Subject:
- History
- Subject:
- 19th century
- Subject:
- Historical fiction
- Subject:
- Mystery fiction
- Publication Date:
- February 2009
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 784
- Dimensions:
- 9.50x6.50x2.24 in. 2.32 lbs.
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