I haven’t
had much luck in my reading of late, but after 50 pages of Drood by Dan Simmons I’m cautiously optimistic. Perhaps it’s partly
due to my low expectations which were easy to exceed. For a long time, I passed
Simmons’s novel by on my book-buying sprees, as the reviews had given me to
understand that it 1) had horror-story
elements (and I don’t like horror
stories) 2) was sneering about Dickens. In the end, though, immersing myself in
yet another Dickens-themed tale proved too tempting, and besides the novel is
acclaimed and can be seen as an Ambitious Book Project. After a lot of trying
out of potentially soufflé-light reads which failed to give the proper comfort-blanket feel, maybe an ABP is exactly what I need.
I wasn’t
wrong in my prejudices – Drood does have horror-story elements (though
I’ve been able to stomach them so far) and it is sneering about Dickens. The sneeriness is largely a consequence
of its narrator, though, who – supposedly – is Wilkie Collins, Dickens’s friend
and protegé. Collins in this version is deeply envious of his older and more
successful friend, and this colours everything he says about Dickens as a man
and as a writer.
I find I
can bear attacks on Charles Dickens’s character surprisingly well. Few people
would contest that he behaved like a pig towards his long-suffering wife
Catherine, for instance (though there are actually those who do). I have no
problems in imagining Dickens as a difficult man; I admire him as a writer, not
as a wonderful specimen of human kindness and philanthropy. Consequently,
criticism of his writing is much harder to take, but in this context we needn’t
credit the clearly biased narrator’s musings on the subject.
If anyone
comes out of this set-up looking less good than he should it’s Wilkie Collins,
and since I really like his books I think it’s a bit of a pity that he has to
play the role of “Salieriesque rival” – as the blurb will have it – in Drood. I’d have preferred a fictional,
envious sidekick to Dickens. Maybe the real Wilkie Collins’s position as young
friend, colleague and reluctantly admitted almost-family member (Collins’s
brother married Dickens’s daughter, a match Dickens didn’t care for), as well
as an opium addict, is what makes him ideally placed to be the narrator of this
book. I’ll take the liberty of seeing
Collins in Drood as fictional
in substance, however, as I would like to think that the real Wilkie was a
great deal less small-minded than he’s described as here.
One thing
that makes it easier to imagine Drood
Wilkie Collins and the real Wilkie Collins as separate people is that the
narrative style in Drood doesn’t
resemble Collins’s style at all. Again, this raises the question of why Collins
is the narrator when he doesn’t even sound like Collins: on the other hand, we
are spared cumbersome pastiche, which makes the novel a far more interesting read.
I like Wilkie Collins’s style when he is the one using it, but I can imagine
that it would not fare well in the hands of another author, especially as even
the original can become a bit knotty at times when Collins insists on explaining
every detail of his plot in order to make sure that there are no holes in it.
Another
author whom you pastiche at your peril is Jane Austen. I’ve lost count of the
times I wished that an Austen-themed novel – sequel, prequel, retelling, you
name it – was not written in a supposedly
Austenesque style. Austen managed to be pithy and amusing in spite of the
regency feel of her prose. Modern authors, however, seem to use regency
expressions in order to make the prose more genteel and circumspect than it
need have been. This, in my view, is to misunderstand what makes Austen such a
good writer – and it often makes for a boring read, too.
I’ve had
mixed experiences with Stephanie Barron’s series of crime mysteries where Jane
Austen is the narrator and sleuth. I remember enjoying Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor as a cosy manor-house
mystery, and I liked the salaciously gossipy Jane and the Barque of Frailty (what it blithely presents as a known
fact about Castlereagh even Wikipedia finds hard to credit). On the other hand,
I can’t remember anything about Jane and
the Wandering Eye except that I found it surprisingly heavy going, and
recently I felt the same about Jane and
the Man of the Cloth. In the latter case, I was also irritated by Jane’s
crush on mercurial man of mystery Geoffrey Sidmouth, whom I found eminently
resistible and notably underwritten, as if the mere idea of a moody squire with
his own code of honour etc. should be enough to set hearts a-flutter. The books
are written as pastiches on Austen’s style – it’s supposed to be extracts from
her diary – and this simply weighs the narrative down, as do the faux-scholarly
footnotes. Even if the real Jane Austen’s family does play a part, I was still
left wondering why the heroine had to be Austen. There’s not much
about her writing in the “diary extracts” (admittedly, what there is I
enjoyed). The characters and plot of the book don’t connect to Austen’s novels
in any interesting way. Surely, any plucky regency lass would have done just as
well as protagonist, and would have been more likely to be susceptible to
crushes than the level-headed Austen.
I’ll give
this series a couple of more chances – after all, I’ve already purchased a few
of the books in it. Man of the Cloth
and Wandering Eye are early books,
and maybe the mysteries pick up pace as the series moves along. But on the
whole, I wonder if famous authors may have one thing in common with villains –
they’re better off being depicted in novels at one remove, by someone close to
them rather than supposedly in their own words.
