Dan's Papers - June 5, 2009

Some recent Dickens-based books caught my attention as I was on the way to a Dickens-fest of my own design. Two of them are historical literary thrillers that revolve around Dickens's last, unfinished work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens completed half this book before his death - six of the promised 12 serialized chapters - and it was published posthumously as a single volume in 1870. The plot of Dickens's tale is the disappearance and presumed murder of Edwin Drood by his uncle, the choirmaster John Jasper, a secret opium addict. Jasper's supposed motive for the crime is his "mad" love for his nephew's fiancée, Rosa Bud, inevitably nicknamed "Rosebud." From the time of its publication to the present day, the incompleteness of this work has drawn writers to attempt a satisfying conclusion. In 1873 a Vermont printer, Thomas James, claimed to have "channeled" Dickens's spirit and printed a finished story that won praise from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1980 both Leon Garfield and Charles Forsyte wrote completed versions of the story. Now, in 2009, we have two novels, Drood by Dan Simmons, and The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl, each an oblique homage to Dickens's mystery.

In Simmons's Drood, a work of almost 800 pages, we encounter a most unlikable Dickens in the last five years of his life. The narrator of this story is mystery writer Wilkie Collins, Dickens's sometime friend and collaborator, author of The Woman in White and Moonstone. Collins is portrayed here as the now envious and bitter rival of Dickens, consumed by what Nietzsche called "the creative ressentiment ... of an imaginary revenge." Revenge for having to take second place to the "Inimitable" Charles Dickens. A tormented Collins reviles Dickens as a man of many failings - from having to "wipe his arse" like every other human being, to taking a mistress and forcing his wife out of the marital home.

Drood begins with the train wreck of 1865 in which Dickens (along with his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother) narrowly escaped death. Moving quickly from fact to fiction, the book shows Dickens, while trying to help other survivors still trapped in the wreckage, coming face to face with the strange and eerie figure of Drood. At first glance, Drood seems to be Death personified, but he is soon unmasked as something much more sinister. When Dickens and Collins together go in pursuit of Drood, they take the reader into the nightmarish half-life of the London underworld, where prevailing opium hallucinations make this seem like a descent into madness. Left in a fictional limbo by the real-life Dickens, Simmons's Drood is back from the dead in a terrifying horror story that will appeal to lovers of the macabre, especially those enamored of the current culture of "undead" vampires and ghouls.

Matthew Pearl's The Last Dickens, begins five years later, in 1870, right after Dickens's death, in the publishing world of New York and Boston. Dickens, their "cash-cow," has made it possible for his American publishers, Field and Osgood, to keep in print the less lucrative works of contemporary writers like Emerson and Longfellow. As Field and Osgood anxiously await the latest - now final - installment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, due in from England at any moment, rival publishers are also on the alert, waiting to steal it. When the messenger carrying the manuscript is killed and the manuscript vanishes, James Osgood, the junior partner, goes in search of it with his young female assistant.

The Last Dickens connects book pirating, murder, and the search for the missing manuscript to the dark world of opium addiction and opium trafficking, but its portrayal of that world is never nightmarishly surreal. In the end, Pearl, through the character of Longfellow, sends us back to the original story when Longfellow tells us that "all proper books are unfinished" and merely "feign completion for the convenience of the public." Thus, according to Longfellow, the incompleteness of Dickens's mystery is perfection itself, since "each reader will imagine his or her ideal ending ...... and every reader will be happy with their own private finale in their mind." So, dear reader, before you take up either or both of the contemporary tales based on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, I suggest you read Dickens's own masterpiece for the incomparable pleasure of finding an ending for yourself.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens, 336 pages, Everyman Library, $18. Drood: A Novel, By Dan Simmons, 784 pages, Little, Brown and Company, $26.99. The Last Dickens: A Novel, By Matthew Pearl, 400 pages, Random House, $25.