Dan Simmons - Drood

“To more such successes,” I said, and we touched glasses and drank again.

After a moment or two, I said, “ The Moonstone is finished. I have completed the proofreading of the final number.”

“Yes,” said Dickens with no hint of interest. “Wills has sent me the galleys.”

“Have you seen the commotion at Wellington Street?” I was referring to the crowds at the door each Friday as mobs pressed in to buy the newest instalment of The Moonstone.

“Indeed,” Dickens said drily. “I had to use my stick as a sort of machete-knife to hack my way through the crush to get to my office towards the end of May before I left for France. Very inconvenient.”

“I dare say,” I said. “When I have brought corrections or business papers to Wills in person, I have seen the delivery boys and porters standing in various corners, their packs still on their backs, reading instalments.”

“Hmmm,” said Dickens.

“I understand that bets are being made on the street—and in some of the better clubs around town, including my Athenaeum—about when the diamond shall finally be found and who shall be revealed as the thief.”

“Englishmen will bet on anything,” said Dickens. “I have seen gentlemen on a hunt wager a thousand pounds on which direction the next flight of geese shall pass over.”

Our sad history is buried in France was the phrase that kept going through my head in Ellen Ternan’s voice. Had it been a boy infant or a girl? I wondered. Weary of Dickens’s endless condescension, I smiled and said, “Wills reports to me that sales of The Moonstone have put both Our Mutual Friend and Great Expectations in the shade.”

Dickens raised his head and looked at me for the first time. Slowly—very slowly—a thin smile widened beneath his thinning moustache and greying beard. “Yes?” he said.

“Yes.” I studied the amber of my cordial for a moment and said, “Are you working on anything now, Charles?”

“No. I’ve found it impossible to begin a new novel, or even a story, although ideas and images flit and buzz in my head as always.”

“Of course.”

“I have been… distracted,” he said softly.

“Of course. The American reading tour alone would stop any writer from working.”

I had offered the American reading tour as an opening for Dickens to change the subject, since he had much enjoyed discussing his various triumphs there with all of his friends, including me, during the weeks after he came back and before he decamped to Paris. But he chose not to accept my offered segue.

“I have read the galleys of your last numbers,” he said.

“Oh?” I said. “Do you find them satisfactory?” It was a perfunctory question, for the first time in our relationship. He was not my editor—Wills had served that needless purpose during the months of Dickens’s absence—and although Dickens was nominally my publisher through his magazine, I had already found a real publisher, William Tinsley, for the first book edition of 1,500 copies and had received a promise of £7,500.

“I find the finished book extremely tiresome,” Dickens said mildly.

For a moment I could only hold my glass in both hands and stare at the older man. “I beg your pardon?” I said at last.

“You heard me, sir. I find The Moonstone tiresome in the extreme. Its construction is awkward beyond endurance; there is a vein of obstinate conceit that runs throughout the entire tale and makes enemies of readers.”

I could not believe that my friend of long years was saying this to me. I was embarrassed to feel the blood rising to my cheeks, temples, and ears. Eventually I said, “I am heartily sorry, Charles, if the novel disappoints you. It certainly has not disappointed its many thousands of eager readers.”

“So you have been telling me,” said Dickens.

“What exactly about the construction do you find tiresome? It follows the structure of your very own Bleak House … only with improvements.”

As I may have mentioned to you, Dear Reader, the construction of The Moonstone was nothing less than brilliant, consisting, as it did, of a series of epistles solicited by one of the offstage characters for most of the other central characters to tell their various stories in series via an assortment of diaries and notes and letters.

Dickens had the effrontery to laugh in my face.

“ Bleak House, ” he said softly, “was told from a limited series of third-person viewpoints, always with an authorial eye above, with the single first-person narration by the dear Miss Esther Summerson. It was constructed as a form of symphony. The Moonstone strikes any reader’s ear as a contrived cacophony. The level of contrivance in the endless series of first-person written testaments is, as I say, unbelievable and tiresome beyond all words to convey it.”

I blinked several times and set my glass down. Henry and two waiters bustled in with the first course. The wine steward bustled in with the first bottle—Dickens tested it and nodded—and the flurry of black tails and starched white collars bustled back out. When they were gone, I said, “I’ll have you know that the testimony and character of Miss Clack are the talk of the town. Someone at my club said recently that he has not laughed so well since The Pickwick Papers. ”

Dickens winced. “To compare Miss Clack to Sam Weller or any of the other characters in The Pickwick Papers, my dear Wilkie, would be the equivalent of comparing a spavined, swaybacked mule to a thoroughbred racehorse. The characters in Pickwick were—as generations of readers and audiences might tell you, should you bother to ask—drawn with a loving eye and a steady hand. Miss Clack is a mean-spirited caricature of a poorly rendered cartoon. There are no Miss Clacks on this world or on any Earth generated by any sane Creator.”

“Your Mrs Jellyby from Bleak House …” I began.

Dickens held up one hand. “Spare us comparisons with Mrs Jellyby. They simply won’t do, dear boy. They simply won’t do.”

I looked at my food.

“And your character of Ezra Jennings, who springs from nowhere to solve all outstanding questions in the final chapters,” continued Dickens, his voice as flat and steady and relentless as one of the tunnel-boring machines working along Fleet Street.

“What about Ezra Jennings? Readers believe him to be a most fascinating character.”

“Fascinating…” said Dickens with that terrible smile. “And familiar.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think I would not remember him?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about, Charles.”

“I am talking about the physician’s assistant we encountered during our northern walking tour in September 1857—dear me, almost eleven years ago—when we climbed Carrick Fell and you slipped and sprained your ankle and I had to carry you down the mountain and then take you by cart to the nearest village, where that physician bandaged your ankle and leg. His assistant had precisely that incredible piebald hair and skin which graces your monster called ‘Ezra Jennings.’ ”

“Do we not compose from real life?” I asked. My voice sounded plaintive in my own ears, and I hated that.

Dickens shook his head. “From real life, yes. But it cannot have escaped your attention that I had already created your Ezra Jennings in the form of Mr Lorn, the albino and piebald assistant to Dr Speddie in our collaborative Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices in the Christmas Issue that same year.”

“I fail to see the similarities,” I said stiffly.

“Do you really? How odd. The tale of Mr Lorn—the dead man in the bed who came back to life in the young Dr Speddie’s shared room in the overcrowded inn—took up the bulk of that rather forgettable short novel. The same tragic past. The same haunted expression and manner of speaking. The same albino complexion and piebald hair. I clearly remember writing those scenes.”