Edwin Drood Ascendant Over Emma Bovary

When my Slacker fellow English major got all atwitter about my discovery of Llosa’s The Perfect Orgy and my finally reading Madame Bovary, I too fell into the nostalgia of reliving thesis topics and decided to revisit The Mystery of Edwin Drood and two of the more recent adaptations of the story: The Last Dickens and Drood.

First I reread Dickens after a hiatus of … no I don’t think I want to admit how many decades it’s been contemplated writing my magnum opus on it instead of sitting for comps, which is what I eventually ended up doing anyway. Because this novel is not capping off a course wherein I read oodles of Dickens, I have lost my sense of where it actually might rank against Boz’ masterpieces. In all honesty, on this reading, I found it pale. I don’t mean to diminish its dark themes, but more to comment on my not considering it a weighty work.

For a relatively new genre of murder mysteries, I have to expect that Dickens would not make the crime or the suspects transparent or even readily deduced. Jasper is villainous but is he the arch-criminal, acting alone only motivated by jealousy unleashed by opium. Nor am I comfortable with an interpretation that treats Drood as a polemic against drug addiction, as it is unjust to view Oliver Twist as a diatribe against child labor. These two scourges of the London poor are critically important time and place settings, but it is the characters that make Dickens unforgettable.

Like Elizabethan dramatists, Dickens overloads his novels with quirky supporting characters to make his crisply evil or tragic stars seem more believable when aligned next two folk an audience recognizes from daily living. With an unfinished story, it is almost impossible to decide which of these outer constellation characters will assume meteoric importance in the denouement.

And so I moved on to Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens. Like previous two novels about Holmes/Emerson/Longfellow and Poe, Pearl writes stories set in the 1800s as though he is a contemporaneous observer. As historical fiction, they are steeped in accuracy and these facts make the creative assumptions highly plausible.

Pearl uses his main characters, publisher James Osgood and bookkeeper Rebecca Sand as detectives attempting to find the missing six installments in Dickens estate. Motivating Osgood is the benefit to accrue to his company struggling against the nefarious Harper brothers and their cut-throat “bookaneers.” Another layer is added in having Drood based on true crime and the real world criminals intent on the ending never being made known.

It is an excellent book and all the minor players, be they based on actual people or literary devices, are tidied up at the end, an ending that is a highly-visual, fast-paced page turner.

Now I move on to Drood, a tome of about 700 pages that starts off splendidly, as a true story being retold by Wilkie Collins. I would have continued reading this story that immediately captured my interest, but for not wanting to lug a four pound book to read during my lunch breaks at work … TLD runs just under 400 pages and is much more portable. Already several of the sections found in Drood recur as facts and background in Pearl’s book, so it will be like reading the different version of weekly events from the perspective of my son and his girlfriend’s blogs.