Q & A: Dan Simmons, author of “Drood”
(The Seattle Times, Feb. 15, Mary Ann Gwinn)
Say “Charles Dickens,” and most 21st-century citizens think of a benevolent bearded fellow with a holly wreath around his neck. The famous English author helped invent today’s Christmas by publishing “A Christmas Carol,” a fable so universally popular that Tiny Tim’s turkey banished roast goose as the English Christmas meal.
More serious students of Dickens know he had a darker side. He wandered the dismal working-class precincts of 19th-century London for research; he had an enormous ego; he practiced mesmerism (now called hypnotism). His account of the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes in “Oliver Twist” ranks as one of the most chilling scenes in English literature.
Now novelist Dan Simmons has written “Drood,” (Little,Brown,775pp.), based on the troubled last years of Dickens’ life. The author’s health was failing. He had banished his wife and mother of his 10 children from the household and was entangled in a likely affair with a young actress.
And he was composing “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” the darkest and most death-obsessed of his books. Dickens died before he finished it.
Simmons takes this material and creates a creepy, baroque and often hilariously tongue-in-cheek portrait of Dickens and his “frenemy,” the mystery writer Wilkie Collins.
Collins narrates “Drood.” His jealousy of Dickens swells and seethes as he becomes ever more detached from reality, courtesy of a kill-an-ox opium habit; he keeps company with a green-skinned woman and his own doppleganger, The Other Wilkie. As for the “Drood” character himself — he’s a sinister, eyelid-less (more…)