If someone had offered me a new novel by Wilkie Collins, would I have bought it? Well, no. But just tell me it’s about Dickens, and I’m ready to read it – which is the problem for Collins, the narrator of ‘Drood’ and the most unreliable narrator I’ve ever encountered. His constant comparisons between his own work and Dickens’, usually to Dickens’ disfavor, are clues to that – if the admission that he drinks 2 cups of laudanum a day and his encounter with a green-skinned woman on the servant’s stairs weren’t enough to let the reader know that this narrator is playing with considerably more than a full deck, most of the additional cards being jokers.
The main plot line, though, doesn’t come from Collins’ imagination but is reported by Dickens, who seems to be the saner of the two. That’s what kept my disbelief suspended as the sinister Drood became ever more horrifying, and what made the final revelation of his origin so chilling.
The book has the authentic feel of a Victorian horror, both as it’s being read and as it’s being recalled – which is a relevant distinction, in a story with a twist at the end. It might have really been written by Wilkie Collins. And that leads to its main weakness; it gets too slow in the middle. I began to wonder why I was reading it, and when it would move on. And about 80% of the way through, when Drood began to take an active role, I found myself irritated by how omnipotent he seemed to be. I wanted the author to provide answers, rather than letting the story degenerate into drug-addled paranoia – which was, of course, the point. When I had plowed through to the final explanation, though, I was glad I had; and ever since, I’ve been thinking about it. How much of it was Wilkie’s own mind, and how much was Dickens’?
The one real complaint I have with this book is the lack of footnotes. I have no idea how much of the material on Wilkie Collins is true, and I would like to know! Explanatory foot- or end-notes a´ la Flashman would have been a real boon. Perhaps some fan has written them?
