Great Explorations

Since I recently added the new historical mystery, Drood, to the stack of six or seven books I’m reading, I was interested to happen upon The Seattle Times’ interview with its author, Dan Simmons. Of the novel’s plot, book review editor Mary Ann Guinn explains that it is

based on the troubled last years of [Charles] Dickens’ life. The author’s health was failing. He had banished his wife and mother of his 10 children from the household and was entangled in a likely affair with a young actress.

And he was composing “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” the darkest and most death-obsessed of his books. Dickens died before he finished it.

Simmons takes this material and creates a creepy, baroque and often hilariously tongue-in-cheek portrait of Dickens and his “frenemy,” the mystery writer Wilkie Collins.

Collins narrates “Drood.” His jealousy of Dickens swells and seethes as he becomes ever more detached from reality, courtesy of a kill-an-ox opium habit; he keeps company with a green-skinned woman and his own doppelganger, The Other Wilkie. As for the “Drood” character himself--he’s a sinister, eyelid-less fellow in a black cloak who may or may not be a figment of Dickens’ and/or Collins’ imagination.

One of the more interesting parts of this interview comes at the end, when Guinn asks Simmons about the era in which Drood takes place.

Q. Why does our culture retain such a fascination for the Victorians?

A. There’s something icky about the Victorian era that I don’t like too much. We identify with it very strongly, in that we've tried to become the opposite of the Victorians, and the roots of a lot of our neuroses are in the Victorian era.

The Victorians had more energy, dynamism, hangups and life spirit than any era since then. The icky part? When you begin to scratch the surface. Dickens was the ultimate family man, the symbol of the English happy family--and then he threw his wife out of the house. So much was underground, then, literally.

You’ll find the full piece here.