The Mystery Of Edwin Drood (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
When Ernie produced this book at the last Gentlemen's Book Club, he took me to one side before the others could muscle in on this little gem. 'Here,' he said, 'I know you'd be interested in this.' He was right. After all, when we first formed the club, I'd expressed a particular interest in filling the Dickens-shaped hole in my education. Of course, I'd rather had in mind something like Oliver Twist or The Pickwick Papers, but this seemed to me to be as good a place to start as any. My knowledge of this particular book, however, was more scant than usual, and I knew of it only in passing, since this was the book that Lucy had been reading when her farm was attacked in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. Just as Lucy didn't get to finish reading the book, so Dickens didn't get to finish writing it. It was originally intended as a periodical over 12 instalments, but only six were completed before he died. I hadn't realized this, so it was an immense disappointment to get to the end and discover that it was only the middle. I wish Ernie had told me. Like an un-climaxed session between the sheets, as it were, I had now no choice but to roll over and give myself some pause to consider the thing for what it was. Naturally, my first instinct was to attempt finishing the story in my mind. It was obvious that Mr Jasper was probably the murderer of Edwin Drood, if indeed he was actually dead, and I like to imagine that Mr Datchery was really Mr Brazzard in clever disguise, but what's the point of speculating like this? We shall never know, and if your interest lies in endings and denouements, and in those only, let me recommend that you don't even start with this story. Of greater interest to me was Dickens' story-telling and style. If I am really to fill that hole, this is something I shall have to get to grips with straightaway, and for want of anything else to analyse, I may as well take from this experience something that will help me through my further adventures with Dickens. Let me start with his characters. Dickens paints them with broad, uncomplicated strokes. The names he chooses for them should be evidence enough of this: Tartar, Landless, Crisparkle, Rosebud. This is not to say that his figures are of few dimensions, but they seem to me to be caricatures nonetheless. I can hardly imagine that those who populated Victoria's England should be any less complex than people of today, but Dickens seems to have preferred to view this as manifest in action, rather than in thought, and so he spends as little time as necessary examining the internal machinery and far more relating the external evidence of character. It occurs to me that this might have been forced by the circumstances of his time: then, clothes and manners and language made the man, while, today, we are more comfortable with convoluted assessments of the same man's internal cogs and wheels, and how his history and experience shape his unique and multi-faceted set of motivations and drivers, some good, some not. Perhaps I'm mistaken. Perhaps, rather, we like to think today that we are more enlightened in our estimation of others, but are still as black and white in our final appraisal as Dickens ever was. The next thing is his language. This took some practice to understand, and there were times when I had to re-read some passages, especially at first. I'm not unfamiliar (falling into one of Dickens' favourite habits — the double negative) with this, having learned Shakespeare's language with great reward, and Chaucer's and even Beowulf's (with less reward), but it took some doing. The circumlocution, in both speech and description, was especially difficult, and it more than once made me ask myself whether people really spoke, let alone thought, this way a century and a half ago. I don't know — perhaps they did — but here's the thing: once my mind was attuned to the indirect path, to the scenic, long way round, it worked. There was a temptation at first for me to regard Dickens' ambling prose as prissy etiquette, as constricting and unnecessarily circuitous, but as I became more practised, it came into focus as far more colourful and emotionally satisfying than I had thought it capable of being. There is a place for the direct, brutal, Hemingway-esque highway of story-telling, but its opposite, now typified in my mind by Dickens — the country byway of flowery speech and euphemism and sensitive, slow examination of the subject — has risen, by my estimation, to an equal status. This must then be the hole I was seeking to fill all along. So, yes, Ernie, thank you for allowing me first dibs at this little gem. I wish you'd told me, though.
I don't know what made me buy this book and start reading it. The first few pages were torture. I knew the novel was unfinished. At least it would be short. But why even bother at all?Then gradually there appeared light in the murk. Uncle and nephew, Jack and Eddy, got out their nuts and started to talk about Pussy.No one does dialogue like Dickens. It is crisp, clear, entertaining and lifelike. Even the way the men crack their nuts adds to the drama.Dickens is completely unafraid of sentiment. He allows the two men to be as affectionate with each other as two lovers.When Pussy comes into the story it gets even better. Everyone is in love with her. It's sickening but it's also exciting. I love this kind of melodrama.The way John Jasper stares at Pussy when she is playing the piano is fantastic. You remember it throughout all that follows and so does she. She especially remembers it many months later in Chapter 19 when John/Jack is staring at her again, dressed in mourning for the missing Eddy.At times Dickens can be so verbose that it's hard to catch his meaning but when he is describing passion his sentences are models of clarity. This chapter is called Shadow in the Sundial and the image, like so much that Dickens writes, sticks forever in your mind: This time he does not touch her. But his face looks so wicked and menacing, as he stands leaning against the sundial – setting, as it were, his black mark upon the very face of day – that her flight is arrested by horror as she looks at him. What makes Dickens's writing so thrilling is that he captures the passion of the moment in the very rhythm of his sentences. He isn't afraid of dramatic gestures. "There is my fidelity to my dear boy after death. Tread upon it!"With an action of his hands, as though he cast down something precious."There is the inexpiable offence against my adoration of you. Spurn it!"With a similar action."There are my labours in the cause of a just vengeance for six toiling months. Crush them!"The scene builds and builds like a symphonic poem till Pussy rushes away to her room and faints half way up the stairs.There is a masterful touch at the end: A thunderstorm is coming on, the maids say, and the hot and stifling air has overset the pretty dear; no wonder; they have felt their own knees all of a tremble all day long.My knees were also all of a tremble and my heart all of a flutter while I read, and read, and read. Two semi-colons in a single sentence, by the way! There is a man who is not afraid to flout convention.The ending is, of course, abrupt and dizzying. It leaves you tottering on the edge of a precipice. My imagination was teeming with possibilities. I read a few theories about how the story might have been meant to go on but I wasn't satisfied by any of them. I couldn't help feeling that Dickens's imagination was just too ingenious, too inventive and too mischievous to be pinned down by even the most creative of scholars.So for stimulating my imagination, this was the best book by far that I have read this year.
What do You think about The Mystery Of Edwin Drood (2002)?
I knew at the outset that Dickens died before he had the chance to finish this novel, but I didn't realize how incredibly frustrated I was going to be because of it! It seems that he was just getting somewhere, and that there was going to be some climactic action coming up shortly, and then poof. No more book. But on the other hand, it was so good getting to that point, and as noted, I am aware that The Mystery of Edwin Drood was unfinished, so I can't say that I was all that frustrated, really. It's the getting to the end (or the leave-off point) that mattered, and it was a great ride. I won't go over the story/plot here; it is very well known. Movies have been made; I believe there was a stage production or two as well, and there are (as I saw written somewhere) entire websites and pundits devoted to solving the mystery and playing "what-if" in an effort to provide an ending. This edition has a preface by Peter Ackroyd, a Dickens biographer, and an appendix by GK Chesterton. Chesterton provides several theories about what may have followed if Dickens had been alive to finish his work. One more thing: I read this on the heels of Dan Simmons' most excellent novel "Drood," and it puts a lot into perspective.I would definitely recommend it -- if you MUST have an ending, then don't read it, but as I said above...the getting there is most of the fun. Most excellent.
—Nancy Oakes
THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD took me a whopping 10 months to conquer. That kicks the ass of former record-holder MOBY DICK, which took me four.The tedium that slows MOBY DICK results from the plot amounting to a mere short story. The vast majority of nearly 600 pages constitutes a scientific treatise on whales, which can be testy to the patience of a fiction fan—even a fiction fan with random cetacean obsessions (such as myself). The tedium that slows …DROOD, however, is downright maddening.This Dickensophile knew going into it that …DROOD had a dead author in lieu of an ending. But she failed to realize beforehand that it was literally half a book.Only six magazine installments of an intended 12 were committed to paper before we lost Master Dickens forever, and only four appeared in print whilst he lived. Characters like Princess Puffer and Deputy never get the chance to matter. We never find out what opium and all the lugubriousness associated with it have to do with anything.Worse still, several new characters are introduced in the unintentionally “final” chapters and, thus, doomed to eternal superfluousness by the author’s death. This is particularly frustrating, for surely Dickens would have brought them all cleverly into the fold by the end. (He always did.)Worst of all, we never find out what the hell happened to Edwin Drood. Uch!This is the point at which I bitch at the Master for not finishing his book. It’s well known that the Dickens canon is verbose—if not an shamelessly over-written—because he was paid by the word.GREAT EXPECTATIONS (my all-time favorite novel) reads almost entirely as (brilliant) plot, and thus, the verbosity flows quickly. A TALE OF TWO CITIES, on the other hand, is heavy on florid illustrations of history and morbid musings on humanity. With THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, we’re talking two-page diatribes on teapots in the homes of minor characters.Because the reader is painfully aware that the book doesn’t end, the wasting of words on inanimate objects becomes deeply upsetting.Thus, I close with a personal message to the Master, wheresoever his divine soul may be:Dearest Mr. Dickens,You should’ve skipped the teapots, sir.But rest in peace, just the same.Stacy
—Stacy LeVine
Edwin Drood proved to be far more of a page turner than I could possibly have guessed. So many wonderful characters and a great story. There have been many attempts to finish this story and the recent BBC version does a great job at doing this but somehow even though the story is unfinished it feels very satisfying. Rosa escapes Cloisterham and has clearly met a man she really loves, and the net seems to be tightening on Jasper. Dickens surely leads the way in this unfinished novel for the myria
—Tweedledum
