Rachel Reads: Drood, by Dan Simmons

I'm not a Dickens fan-- I blame a run-in with Great Expectations and seventh grade English class for the bias-- and I've had my fill of Victorian England settings. So why am I so in love with Drood, Dan Simmons' massive and sensational tome on Charles Dickens?

Well, I've got a secret: I don't care whether it's Dickens in 19th century England or a far-flung Earth colony haunted by a time-traveling devil or literary robots waging war against the Greek Gods. It's Dan Simmons, doing what he does best: uncertainty. Uncomfortably personal voices. Unreliable narrators. An unknown that's more terrifying than any monster we could meet face-to-face. The actual events of the story, while hugely entertaining, are secondary.

On the surface, the story is fairly simple: Charles Dickens, late in life, has a brush with death when his train derails at Staplehurst. He becomes obsessed with the fascinating figure of Drood, who draws both Dickens and fellow novelist/delightfully unreliable narrator Wilkie Collins into a world of murder, cults, mysticism, and deceit. Adventure ensues.

And yet took me six months to get through Drood. It's a frustrating book: long periods of it feel so normal, which is infuriating when you know that bizarre horrors slink just outside the narrator's field of vision. Monsters appear briefly and vanish without closure or apology.

Now, one Louis Bayard's review praises Simmon's bewilderingly graphic descriptions of the book's most exciting moments (train accidents! hypnosis! Voyages into the Victorian sewers!). He writes off the more staid sections of narrative as "little more than warmed-over biography" and filled with "minutiae."

Wilkie Collins: bon... vivant?

I disagree. Violently. By the end of the book, it's these bits of 'minutiae' that are the most foreboding moments. The image of a pudgy middle-aged man sitting on a London train holding an embroidered pillow oozes dread. The banality of the scene frightened me in a way that the eponymous Drood*, despite his missing eyelids, syllibant speech, battered topcoat, and army of minions, could not. It's a fascinating effect, and pure, classic Simmons.

Bayard does Simmons a great injustice by conflating Simmons-as-narrator with Wilkie-Collins-as-narrator. It takes skill, not authorial flailing, to produce 800 pages that packed with absurdly detailed, self-important, sluggish, and frustrating prose. You don't get to that level on accident.

Of course, stuff actually does happen: Simmons is happy to let Wilkie romp around sensational 19th-century London slums, and Wilkie, in true 19th century style, paints us splashy portraits of its myriad horrors-- conspiracies! mysterious Orientals! dudes with no eyelids! entrails! Monsters on the stairs, scarabs under the skin, corrupt policemen, dopplegangers visiting in the night! And plenty of corpses, natch.

All of which makes me hella curious about this book. I'm imagining a 19th century The Mole People, but alas, it's probably nowhere near that ridiculous/awesome.

But it's really Simmons' skill of holding back, of showing how ordinary people react to the madness of living that is Drood's real achievement. And that's only possible by developing the heroes (both charismatic Dickens and sulky-self important Wilkie) through those reams of "irrelevant" detail. The last 100 pages were a whirl of revelations, stories-within-stories, and satisfying narrative justice. I hated and feared every single character by the end of the book, but damn it, I believed in them.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Dan Simmons does.

I'd give it: A for Awesome
Read it if you liked: Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, Simmons' Hyperion
Library or bookshop?: Get it from the library-- it's not for everyone, and it takes up a lot of space on a shelf.


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*Dibs on 'The Eponymous Drood' for a band name. it is mine i will cut you