Drood: It Was 800 Pages, Ya’ll!

I picked up Drood based on the strength of the write up on the back cover. Reading that, I thought the novel was a macabre mystery story involving Charles Dickens dueling it out with a savage murderer, accompanied by his Salieri-esque friend/rival, Wilkie Collins. And that is in there. Just not very often.

Really, the story isn’t about Dickens or Drood at all. It’s about Wilkie. And Wilkie is boring. You’d think he’d be a rich and compelling character considering that he’s a Victorian serial novelist with two mistresses and an opium addiction that prompts visual hallucinations of a woman with green skin and his own doppelganger. But he’s not.

Instead of these attributes being exciting, Wilkie manages to make them cumbersome with 800 pages of detail. There’s nothing saucy about the mistresses – Wilkie prefers to describe the affairs by focusing on the uninteresting, repeatedly listing the addresses where he’s got them shacked up and the pseudonymns he uses for them at the boarding house. The opium addiction is Wilkie’s excuse to bemoan all his chronic ailments that necessitate pain relief, including arthritis and gout, and to obsessively chronicle every single trip he takes to the opium den. Even the hallucinations are snoozers. The doppelganger mostly just sits and stares and the green woman just makes feeble lunges at Wilkie.

But there are highlights. As the back cover indicates, the interesting parts of the book involve the curious case of Drood. Dickens first tells Wilkie of Drood after a railway accident that kills most of the passengers – save Dickens and his party. In the carnage, Dickens spots a bizarre caped figure that I pictured to be a cross between Nosferatu and Lord Voldemort ministering to the injured. Problem is, all the people “helped” by Drood end up dead.

This piques Dickens’ interest, and he decides to find Drood with Wilkie’s help by tracking him down through the slums of London. They pick up a lead that sends them into a pauper’s cemetery and a subterranean sewer world accessed through an underground crypt and filled with the poorest and most degenerate of London’s underclass. But even though we get 100 pages on this decent into the underworld, we never see Drood because our dull narrator only goes on part of the quest – for the big payoff, Dickens goes alone.

So, is Drood real or is he another of Wilkie’s opium-induced imaginary friends? You never learn for certain because Wilkie is the epitome of the unreliable narrator. Instead, you get pages upon pages of Wilkie fretting about it and slowly descending into disjointed paranoid fantasies about both Drood and Dickens. And while I get the point (Wilkie was no Dickens and his narration in print, like in life, is a chore to slog through) that doesn’t necessarily mean that the point was interesting to read.