![]() ![]() He secretly looks down upon many of his most famous works whilst simultaneously craving his respect and approval. Wilkie both loves and hates Charles Dickens. ![]() The spectra of Drood looms large over the life of Wilkie Collins in the five years following the Staplehurst disaster, and as Wilkie, in his own demented way, trains himself as a detective in order to solve the nature of the relationship between Drood and Dickens, the inspiration or the genre birthing The Moonstone takes form in his mind.Īs fascinating as this macabre tale is, it is overshadowed by the complex and often tragic nature of the relationship between Collins and Dickens. He commits an act of atrocity in his own home that goes singularly unnoticed (did it actually happen, or was it an opium dream?). He is plagued with visions of a green skinned woman with tusks who repeatedly attacks him in his own home, as well as a doppelganger of himself who is slowly taking over his duties as a writer (and is in fact the better writer). At no point in the novel can the reader really be sure if Collins is hallucinating, insane, or simply a character in an all too real ghost story. What follows is a long and involved game of cat and mouse between Dickens, Drood, and Collins, who devolves slowly from modern minded skeptic to an increasingly unhinged obsessive. His presence at the accident spurs Dickens to seek him out amongst the London slums and sewers known as “Undertown,” dragging the gout-ridden and laudanum-drunk Collins. Dickens tells Wilkie of a mysterious figure named Drood who appeared to him at Staplehurst, a pale bald figure of nightmares worthy of Poe. The accident was said to have a profound effect on the mental and nervous health of Charles Dickens, and may have been a contributing factor to the author’s death on June 9th, 1870, exactly five years to the date of the accident.īut this is where any notion that Drood is a mere historical fiction ends, as the reader is taken on a gothic ride of madness, mesmerism, murder and opium fueled insanity. The real life Dickens was aboard the train when it de-railed, just as the real life Collins and Dickens were life long friends and collaborators. The narrative begins with Dickens recounting to Collins his involvement in the very real railway accident at Staplehurst that killed ten and injured forty in 1865. It is the friendship between Wilkie Collins and the far more successful and famous ‘Inimitable’ (Charles Dickens) that focuses Drood. ![]() However despite his success, in his own time his peers often derided Collins as a writer of “sensationalist” fiction (Victorian speak for anything that might frighten or turn one on).Īs a historical figure, Collins is the perfect ambassador from the Victorian era, bridging the gap between his time and the present with a mixture of caddish behavior, a stubborn disdain for both his own reputation and the social hypocrisies of his time, yet refined, proud and pompous enough to provide the reader a window into the mindset of a Dickensian era London society. His fears are unfounded, as Collins’ reputation remains intact as a Victorian master of such works as the The Woman in White and his classic, The Moonstone, a novel which many now view as the precursor to the modern detective novel (Poe’s The Purloined Letter notwithstanding). He begins the narrative fretting over the possibility that readers of the future will have forgotten him and his works. But what if God is out of his mind? Or, worse yet, what if he isn’t? In the case of the novel Drood, by Dan Simmons, the God of perception is none other than Mr. Between the covers of a book, the narrator is God he sets the agenda, he decides what aspects of reality are to be explored, and in what manner they will be perceived. The unreliable narrator forces the reader’s own imagination to engage in a sort of collaborative exploration of the text along with the author. When one is led to doubt the honesty, perceptiveness, or even sanity of the person telling a tale, the story itself takes on very flexible and strange dimensions. There are few literary tropes more fascinating than that of the unreliable narrator.
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