In the Shadow of Charles Dickens

Amid the chaos of the Staplehurst train crash of June 9, 1865,
something mysterious, and ultimately deadly, happened to the most
popular novelist in the world. Seven railcars leaped the track and fell
from a bridge to a small creek below. Ten people were killed, 40 more
were wounded, and by all accounts Charles Dickens was a hero of the
day. He helped free people trapped in their cars, and he administered
aid to dozens of injured and dying passengers before assistance finally
arrived.

Dickens was hailed as a hero, but he had something to hide: He was
traveling with Ellen Ternan, his secret companion and (most likely) his
mistress. And something that day changed Dickens for good. His wit and
good nature had been celebrated far and wide, but after Staplehurst,
Dickens demonstrated the classic signs of depression, punctuated
erratically with outbursts of rage and cruelty. He never completed
another novel, although he left one, The Mystery of Edwin Drood,
unfinished. Some doctors theorize that Dickens suffered a brain injury
in the crash that altered his personality; some biographers suggest he
was emotionally overwhelmed after bearing witness to so much death and
suffering. Whatever the cause of his change in behavior, this much is
true: Five years to the day of the accident, Dickens died, a portentous
fate that would not be out of place in one of his novels.

Dan Simmons is no stranger to giant novels with enormous casts: His
Hyperion cantos are sprawling sci-fi epics, and he’s published
two-dozen mammoth horror, mystery, and fantasy novels over the last
quarter-century. His latest novel, Drood, is about those last,
dark years in the life of Dickens, and it’s in every way Dickensian:
huge, unflinching in its description of the grubby Victorian world, and
melodramatic in the very best way.

Like the best of Simmons’s work, Drood stands astride genres:
It’s a historical novel, but it also features a supernatural element.
Narrated by Dickens’s contemporary and occasional collaborator Wilkie
Collins, Drood posits that Dickens was visited at Staplehurst by
an apparition in a top hat and opera cape, “cadaverously thin, almost
shockingly pale… [with] dark shadowed eyes set deep under a pale,
high brow that melded into a pale, bald scalp” and a nose consisting of
“mere black slits.” This skeletal visage belongs to a man named Drood,
and Dickens and Collins spend the next five years trying to discover
his secrets.

The two authors journey below London, to opium dens and weird
pseudo-Egyptian temples beneath the streets. Their adventures are
drug-addled and dark:

I fumbled out the pistol. At the moment, I was convinced that we
were being attacked by gigantic grub-faced rats.
Dickens stepped between me and the surging, feinting forms.
“They’re boys, Wilkie,” he cried. “Boys!”
“Cannibal boys!” I cried back, raising the pistol.
As if to confirm my statement, one of the pale faces—all tiny
eyes and long nose and sharp teeth in the bull’s-eye light—lunged
at Dickens and snapped, as if he were attempting to bite off the
author’s nose.

Collins is an unreliable narrator, to say the least: He drinks two
cups of laudanum a day (allegedly to battle his painful gout), and he
is often racked with jealousy that Dickens, whom he regards as an
inferior talent, is exponentially more popular than he. Many passages
of the book are consumed with unflattering (and often hilariously
misguided) criticism of Dickens’s work; Collins claims, for instance,
that Miss Havisham is a pale imitation of the main character from his
own The Woman in White. Collins becomes convinced that Drood has
implanted a scarab beetle in his skull, and stress and jealousy cause
the beetle to crawl around his brain impatiently. Before long, he’s
planning to murder Dickens and assume his role as the most beloved
novelist in England.

Simmons leaves the fantasy elements up to the reader’s judgment.
There is enough mesmerism, opium, and out-and-out storytelling in the
book to potentially render any one part of the account untruthful. In
many ways, Drood is equally a mystery—a what-did-he-do as
much as a whodunit—and a fantasy novel. And it functions as a
fairly comprehensive biography of the last five years of Dickens’s
life. Dozens of biographers have reported that, after the train crash,
Dickens undertook a relentless schedule of public readings so gruesome
in their delivery that women and children would faint or flee in tears.
None of those biographers have been as spirited as Simmons in
describing the ghoulishness of an imaginary murder that Dickens commits
onstage every night, playing both roles at once:

Dickens’s voice filled St. James Hall so thoroughly that even
Nancy’s final, whispered, dying entreaties could be heard as if each of
us in the audience were onstage. During the few (but terrible)
silences, one could have heard a mouse stirring in the empty balcony
behind us. We could actually hear Dickens panting from the exertion of
bringing his invisible (all too visible!) club down on the dear girl’s
skull… again! Again! Again!

And no other biographer recognized the fatal toll that the exertion
of performing these ghastly readings night after night probably had on
Dickens: Collins declares it “suicide by reading tour,” a sentiment
that must surely bring a smile to the lips of many a published
author.

Drood is about the horrors and pains of being a novelist.
It’s a book about the heartbreak of putting years of your life into a
book, populating it with all the wonders and terrors that live in your
head, and watching that book receive no attention at all on its
release, as though it were published in invisible ink. It’s about being
friends with another novelist you suspect is your superior (it’s said
that T. S. Eliot once called Collins “Charles Dickens without the
genius”) and you know is better loved by the general public, and also
knowing that there’s nothing you can do to change that.

The story of literature can be told entirely in friendly and
not-so-friendly rivalries (Bacon and Shakespeare, Plath and Hughes,
Marston and Jonson, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Amis and
Barnes—hell, Amis and Amis). And history has no doubt
forgotten the thousands of also-rans who’ve been swallowed in the
conflagration of literary glory. Drood masterfully tells the
story of one such also-ran and invites the reader into the special kind
of hell that exists in the dark space right next to the limelight.

Dan Simmons reads Wed Feb 18, University Book Store, 7 pm,
free.