Fair warning, Drood is not an approachable novel. A reader that doesn’t meet two or more of the following criteria likely won’t enjoy it:
You are familiar with the history and writings of Charles Dickens.
You are familiar with the history and writings of Wilkie Collins.
You are a writer of fiction or enjoy reading about the process of writing.
You enjoy a leisurely pace in the fiction you read.
You aren’t intimidated by a thick book with a lot of words in it.
It has been a long time since a novel was so ambitious that it left me flabbergasted. The prospect of trying to review Drood is even more intimidating than the book's elephantine appearance.
Let me begin with the simplest of synopses. The book is written in the form of a memoir by Wilkie Collins (best known for books like The Woman in White and The Haunted Hotel) and tells the story of how he and his friend Charles Dickens become entangled in the grotesque world of Drood, a mysterious underworld figure reputedly responsible for the murder of more than 300 persons in 19th century London.
But that’s just one head to this hydra of a novel. Early on, I decided Drood was a threading together of ancient mysticism and Victorian-era rationalism that was both compelling and convincing. About two-thirds of the way though, however, I realised it was actually a tale about a widening rift between two good friends due to… what? Obsession? Jealousy? Madness? Addiction? Perhaps all of them.
Adding further complexity, the book has an increasingly unreliable (and unlikeable) narrator. How much of what Wilkie Collins experiences is down to Dickens’ influence? How much is due to Collins’ prodigious use of laudanum and other opiates? The final page hints at an answer, but it is only a hint.
And those are just the main plot threads. If the reader takes a step back, he finds a literary homage to the writing of both Dickens and Collins. If he takes another step back, he discovers a novel within a novel, a writer within a writer – Dan Simmons, an author from Colorado, USA pretending (convincingly in most respects) to be a 19th century Englishman. The deeper the reader delves, the more layers he discovers.
Here’s another: While it’s not a horror novel per se, Drood contains passages that are as harrowing and unsettling as anything I have encountered in nearly 30 years as a horror aficionado. Reading the train crash scene in a 50-page excerpt I downloaded was what convinced me to buy a hard copy of the book.
With Drood, Simmons also has the unbelievable conceit to think he can hold the reader’s interest while sifting through the minutiae of several years of one man’s life the way Dickens did in David Copperfield. In this readers opinion, anyway, he succeeds.
With aplomb, I might add. The occasional clanger of composition – the word ‘distant’ used in consecutive sentences, clouds described as ‘aerial sheep’ – only serves to underscore how erudite and effortless Simmons’ prose is as a whole. And unlike Dickens, he does not require a huge investment of concentration, only a promise of devotion for several days or weeks, depending on how regularly and quickly one reads.
If modern literary awards really rewarded literary achievement instead of the ‘right’ political and social themes and pretentious ‘experimental’ prose, Drood would surely have been nominated in its year of publication. Thinking about how much research must have gone into this novel makes my head spin, yet Simmons never bores the reader as, say, Stephen King did in 11.22.63.
Drood has the hallmark of the true classic: it lays down the framework of a great story before adorning it with intellectual and literary trappings. It doesn’t (as so many ‘celebrated’ literary novels have in the last 30 years) scattered the literary trappings around like confetti and then asked the reader to find a story in it.
