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When I opened Dan Simmons’s Drood, I was quite excited to have a peek at the mind of Charles Dickens—and to see how his masterpiece, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, might have come to be.
Drood is a piece of historical fiction, set in 1865. The story is told through a first-person narration, in a diary style, with a narrator who often speaks to an unknown “Reader” in the story, which is reminiscent of books such as Charlotte Temple from the 18th century.
Told through the eyes of his good friend, Wilkie Collins, the story initially revolves around Dickens, beginning with a train accident at Staplehurst. Though many were killed that day, Dickens and his mistress survive. As Dickens tends to the dying and the dead, he comes across a mysterious man by the name of Drood, thus beginning his dangerous infatuation with this dark and mysterious man.
However, as the novel progresses, the majority of the events center around Wilkie, instead of Charles, which seems like a cheap bait-and-switch by the author. I was expecting an in-depth look at Dickens and his writing inspirations, but instead I was presented with a jealous and conceited complaint journal, told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator, who leaves many of the story’s events hanging or unexplained. While I understand and appreciate the human and flawed qualities of the narrator, this book is incredibly focused on Wilkie and his drug use, so much, in fact, that what I perceived as the true purpose to the story—Dickens’s development of Drood—falls incredibly flat. If I had one brick for every time the word “laudanum” or “opium” comes up in the story, I could build a great wall to China.
The biographical information that’s seeded throughout the novel is intriguing and interesting. Additionally, the style and word choice is fitting for the time period in which the events take place. However, the descriptions often get wordy, causing the story to get bogged down in tedious details—so much, in fact, that I often got lost and distracted from the main action. Though some of the scenes work well with additional detail (such as Simmons’s depiction of the slums of London), the long descriptions take up much of the book’s 771 pages.
While I realize that this book was written in a diary style, and some rambling for authenticity’s sake may be warranted, there are simply too many minute details of things that have little or no story value. Descriptions of Dickens’s writing room, for example, are intriguing—but not down to the fine-toothed descriptions of the paperweights and pens on his desk and what Wilkie thinks of each object. It’s simply not relevant. And if you’re going to put that much effort into describing an object in a story, it darn well better have some major significance to the story line, or the reader will be left puzzled and distracted. Too often, this story lacks direction and purpose.
Overzealous description may have been forgivable at half this book’s size, but this is a serious time commitment for so little payoff, particularly with such an anticlimactic ending. What I initially jumped at for a fun beach read ended up being a real snooze—and by the time I reached the end, I just didn’t care about the characters. Don't get me wrong; there are little gems of a good story in here. But they’re so overwhelmed by superfluous description and the narrator’s rambling that they never really get to shine.
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