I'm a slow reader and I tend to avoid long books, which is an awful and off-putting thing to lead with, but there you have it. All of which makes my affection for Dan Simmons' 770-page write-your-name-across-it-sideways doorstop Drood all the more inexplicable. Herewith, an arguably overlong and sporadically deranged account of the last days of Charles Dickens, as told by an increasingly unreliable Wilkie (The Moonstone) Collins, complete with tours of the 19th Century London underground, opium-smoking ancients, scarab beetles that may or may not be burrowing through the brains of English literature's greatest writers, illiterate children being walled up in hidden staircases, screams in the night and green-skinned women with ghastly tusk-like teeth. All of this, plus a decidedly skewed take on the origins of Dickens' last, unfinished novel (which I've never read).
Like the laudanum that Collins, our first-person narrator, swills down by the glass, Simmons' prose can be parodoxically numbing and electrifying, sometimes within the same stretch of paragraphs. The result is weirdly compelling and frankly irresistible. Although I haven't tackled Dickens since college, Simmons' version of the guy is almost Hemingwayesque in his superhuman lust for life, right up to the point where body and mind threaten total collapse. Wilkie Collins is the perfect Salieri to Dickens' Mozart, a craven, constantly jealous compatriot wallowing in immediate material success, whose voice is perfectly suited to the shadowy world of writers, drugs, obsessions, hypocracy and the off-hand classicism of the age. The book is more than a bit loony, invoking big italicized slabs of ancient Egyptian invocations and multiple exclamation points, but in all it's like being swept up in a massive tornado that has just sucked up a public library and a Halloween spook show, all in one.
Authorial aside: Drood is probably not the perfect book for an novelist at work on his own seemingly unending work-in-progress, since (to me at least) it encourages a somewhat dangerous "everything into the pot" style of fiction to which I'm already unfortunately vulnerable. It's difficult enough for me to avoid inserting brain-hungry scarab beetles into my own work, and the prolonged exposure to Simmons' fictionalized literary giants, opium-gulping ghouls and London-stalking lunatics has probably, irrevocably warped the credibility of my current project. Ah well.
