After really enjoying Dan Simmons’ The Terror, I was stoked to hear the subject for his next novel- Charles Dicken’s final, incompleted mystery novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
In it, Simmons uses his considerable skill for blending fact and fiction, following Dickens (through the voice of narrator Wilkie Collins, a fellow writer and friend of Dickens) through the train wreck that introduced Dickens to Drood, the mysterious stranger who changed his life (and may have played a part in ending it), and the bizarre behavior that followed. What follows is a traipse into London’s seamy (to say the least) under-underworld, a look as psychosis, and an account of Dicken’s decline and eventual fall.
The story is intriguing and the characters are engaging, but Simmons occasionally slows the narrative by falling into traps of verbosity. Too often I found myself distracted by overly descriptive prose and rabbit trails that seemed unnecessary. While the ideas were great, and I was left with some compelling imagery, I found it too hard to wade through the fluff to get to the good stuff.
Posted on April 6, 2010
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