Drood by Dan Simmons, a cranky not-exactly review

To begin at the beginning: Wilkie Collins is one of my favorite, most admired, and most-loved authors of all time. Moonstone and Woman in White both landed themselves among my most-treasured books the minute I read them. Armadale and No Name aren't quite there, but are close. I admit, none of the other books I've read quite equals these in brilliance, but four stunning books and several good to really good books is quite enough for any one author, don't you think?

Collins writes beautiful, polished, Victorian prose. He can be scathing in his character descriptions. He knows exactly where and how to use both drama and melodrama to the best effect.

Dickens may not be one of my favorite authors, but he never fails to draw me in, and I am never going to argue with the people who say he's brilliant. I may quibble with the ones who say he's more brilliant than Collins, and I certainly have a bone to pick with the ones who say that Bleak House is clearly and objectively better than Woman in White (I'm looking at you Julian Symons(1)), but I won't debate his brilliance.

And in a general way, I like Victorian novel.

So Drood, a novel purporting to be by Wilkie Collins about Charles Dickens and solving The Mystery of Edwin Drood was either a dream come true or a disaster waiting to happen.

Sadly, it was the latter.

It takes a lot of nerve to write about two great Victorian authors, and a lot more to presume to write as one of them. I didn't really expect Simmons to succeed. I did, however, expect him to at least try. I mean, it is possible to write as a Victorian novelist without being one. Look at Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell(2). Simmons, however, opts to write in an entirely modern tone, and it does not work.

This is Wilkie Collins introducing a character:

A mild, compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain by private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of the vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.

This is Simmons introducing a character:

[Dickens] was the most popular novelist in England, perhaps in the world. Many people in England and American considered my friend to be--outside of Shakespeare and perhaps Chaucer and Keats--the greatest writer who had ever lived.

Of course, I knew this to be nonsense, but popularity, as they say (or as I have said), breeds more popularity. I had seen Charles Dickens stuck in a rural, doorless privy with his trousers down around his ankles, bleating like a lost sheep for some paper to wipe his arse, and you will have to forgive me if that image remains more true to me than 'the greatest writer who ever lived.'

Can you see the difference?

This is not Collins. It's not Dickens. It's not Victorian, and it's not anyone I particularly want to spend the next six pages with, much less the next eight hundred.

I did read a few more pages, and skipped, and skimmed. After all, the book had come fairly highly recommended. It did not work out. I remained decidedly out of sorts and decidedly unimpressed by any resemblance to actual work by Collins or Dickens. Also, while it had been a while since I read The Mystery of Edwin Drood (what there is of it), I couldn't see any resemblance between the book I remembered and the book I was trying to read.

I kept telling myself I should stop thinking of Collins and Dickens and try to let Drood succeed on its own terms, but it doesn't want to succeed on its own terms. If it had wanted to, it wouldn't be "by" Collins and it wouldn't purport to be the "true" story behind one of Dickens' novels.

Yes, Simmons did his research. As far as I know, the biographical details are accurate (give or take the eyeless men and the sinister duplicates), but he missed the style and spirit of both authors entirely.

So this is a long, rambling, completely out-of-sorts review of a book I wanted to like and ended up not even finishing, not properly.

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(1)Whom I may never forgive for saying that the book that gave us Marian is not quite up to the standards of the book that burdened us with Esther. To add insult to injury, Symons does this in the introduction to Woman in White. Seriously. If you're that in love with Dickens, introduce Dickens.
(2)Really. Do. It's a fantastic Victorian novel. It just happens to have been written in the twentieth century.

The Haunted House edited by Charles Dickens, A Book Review

I was excited to read this one for the Readers Imbibing Peril challenge. The short stories in here include work by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Wilkie Collins, some of my favorite authors ever, and, judging by the title, it fits the challenge perfectly.

The Haunted House is a collection of works first commissioned by Dickens for one of his famous Christmas annuals, this one for All Year Round. It has work by Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell), and by lesser-known (to me, anyway) authors Hesba Stretton, George Agustus Sala, and Adelaide Anne Proctor. Promising!

It didn't quite fulfill my hopes. For one thing, it is not really RIP material. The frame story establishes early that the house isn't really haunted. The "ghosts" the guests face are those of memory or make-believe and fairly benign.

The stories also failed to live up to my literary expectations which were, as I said, high. Consider: Collins is the author of Moonstone and Woman in White, two books I cannot rave enough about. His other books don't move me to raving, but I've still enjoyed them. Dickens inevitably manages to suck me into his stories, even when I want to remain aloof (Esther in Bleak House irritates me to no end. Does this stop me from getting drawn in? It does not.) Gaskell wrote Cranford, another of my favorite books. I didn't know the other authors, but was willing to meet new winners. But... not here. Of the authors, only Colllins troubles to make his tale at all suspenseful. George Augustus Sala writes a humorous dream tale that failed to amuse. The others were lackluster to irritating. Hesba Stretton wrote a "frivolous woman reformed" tale that had me gritting my teeth (Victorian literature is full of such tales, and they are often irritating). Gaskell's tale of the judge haunted by a long ago choice was the only one that at all deserved the epitaph "haunting."

Conclusion? Read something else by Dickens, Collins, or Gaskell and give this a miss.