Just Finished Reading Drood by Dan Simmons

The 2009 book Drood, by Dan Simmons, is a historical fiction novel focusing on the last years in the life of mid-nineteenth century English writer Charles Dickens, who authored classics like Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield...and of course A Christmas Carol...as told by narrator Wilkie Collins, a collaborator and friend of the literary giant .  His best writing now behind him, it is 1865 and Dickens is riding a train with his mistress and her mother when it goes off a damaged bridge at Staplehurst, killing many but miraculously sparing his own car alone.  The incident traumatizes Dickens and he never completely gets over it.  According to what he relates to Wilkie, Dickens walks around the horrible scene after the wreck, administering help and comfort to the injured...and comes across an utterly sinister man who calls himself Drood and who is also walking among the casualites, many of whom suddenly die after encountering him.  It is the mystery-veiled relationship that ensues between Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and this Drood character that drives the plot through to the end of the book...

Sometimes when I review a book I've read, I can tell some of what happens in it, careful to leave out spoilers that reveal its conclusion.  But Drood is narrated by Collins, an opium addict who tends to perceive things differently when he is under that drug's spell...and the potential for mesmerism (hypnosis), something for which Dickens has much enthusiasm, is another factor that makes the developing story seem at times unreal.  It reminded me of the times I saw the movies The Matrix and A Beautiful Mind.  In each of these, the audience is eventually confronted with the task of determining what is real and what is...well, something entirely different...

Historical fiction comes in different forms.  In alternative histories, the setting is a world that has diverged in some significant way from how history had actually played itself out...e.g. Hitler won World War II or John F. Kennedy's assassination was prevented.  In other historical fiction, like Ernest Hemingway's Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, the setting is a real event but the characters are all fictional...even though famous real names may indirectly impact the plot.  But Drood is different from both of these types, and here is where I really appreciated Simmons' deft writing: from what we know about those years in the lives of  Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, nothing in this tale contradicts anything...yet it creates this incredible imaginary universe full of mysteries and horrors.  Amazing...

There were a few interesting items I picked up reading Drood.  One was that Charles Dickens wasn't just a prolific writer: he was also a prolific walker, often covering 20 miles on a single walk, going at a near-impossible-to-sustain pace of 4 mph...even at times when his health was reportedly suffering.  And keep in mind that he was in his late fifties at the time.  Also, 'The Inimitable", as the narrator often refers to him according to his popular designation in that time, would go on extensive book reading tours, drawing packed houses as he would read whole sections of his earlier works...which he had completely committed to memory.  And finally, you could not have read Drood without noticing the extreme degree of professional jealousy that Collins, himself an established and popular writer, feels about his much more recognized and honored friend.  Throughout the book, in their countless conversations with each other, he tries over and over again to get Dickens to acknowledge their equality in their writing abilities...but to no avail, with one humiliating outcome after another...

Drood is a fantastic book on many levels, and I highly recommend it.  Dan Simmons has also written Hyperion, the first in a science fiction series...I'm in the process of reading that one, too.  I've also become interesting in reading more from Charles Dickens...as well as from his frustrated rival/friend Wilkie Collins...