Dan Simmons - Drood

During the Mutiny in India long before I had met him, Dickens had cheered on the British general whose answer to the rebellion had been to tie captured mutinous Indians across the muzzles of cannon and to blast them “homeward” in pieces. Dickens’s wrath and contempt, in Bleak House and a dozen other of his novels, had long been aimed more at the idiotic missionaries who were more concerned with the plight of native brown and black people abroad than with the problems of good Englishmen and Englishwomen and white children here at home.

“You’re a fool,” I said that night in June to young Edmond Dickenson. “Your Master is a fool if he thinks that Charles Dickens wants to plot against white men in favour of Lascars and Hindoos and Chinamen and Egyptian murderers.”

Dickenson smiled tightly and rose. “I need to deliver this instalment of the notes to my Master before dawn.”

“Stay,” I said and raised the pistol until it was aimed at the man’s face. “Keep the d— ned papers, but tell me how to get this scarab out of my body. Out of my head.”

“It will leave when the Master commands it to leave or when you die,” said Dickenson with that hungry, happy cannibal’s look again. “Not before.”

“Not even if I were to kill an innocent person?” I said.

The young man’s light-coloured eyebrows rose. “You’ve heard of that ritual exception, have you? Very well, Mr Collins. You might try that. One cannot guarantee that it will work, but you might try that. I shall show myself out. Oh, and be assured that the young lady who let me in tonight will not remember doing so tomorrow.”

And without another word he had swung on his heel and left.

And it turned out that Dickenson was right about Carrie not remembering his visit; when I asked her the next morning about what aspect of our visitor’s appearance had disturbed her, she looked at me oddly and said that she remembered no visitor, except for a bad dream about some stranger in the rain, beating at the door and demanding to be let in.

Yes, I thought as we pulled into the station where someone from Gad’s Hill Place would be meeting me with a carriage or pony cart, telling my story of the end of that busy night in June might surprise the Inimitable.

But then, I thought, how terrible it would be if it did not surprise him.

ON THE SUNDAY of my pleasant weekend visit at Gad’s Hill Place—and it is difficult for me, even now, to forget or overstate just how pleasant such convivial times at Dickens’s home truly were—I was in James Fields’s chambers talking with him about the literary life in Boston when there came a knock at the door. It was one of Dickens’s older servants, who stepped into the room as formally as a courtier to Queen Victoria, clicked his heels, and handed Fields a note written in a fine calligraphic hand on a scroll of rich parchment. Fields showed it to me and then read it aloud:

Mr Charles Dickens presents his respectful compliments to the Hon. James T. Fields (of Boston, Mass., U.S.) and will be happy to receive a visit from the Hon. J.T.F. in the small library as above, at the Hon. J.T.F.’s leisure.

Fields had chuckled, then coughed with embarrassment at having read it aloud, and said to me, “I am sure that Charles means for both of us to join him in the library.”

I smiled and nodded but was sure that Dickens had not meant the joking invitation for me. He and I had not shared two private words in the four days I had been at Gad’s Hill Place, and it was increasingly apparent that the Inimitable had no plans to alter that unhappy state of public politeness but private silence between us. Nonetheless, I followed Fields as the American hurried down to the small library.

Dickens could not quite conceal his frown when he saw me enter, even though the expression crossed his features for only a fraction of a second—only an old friend who had known him for many years would have noticed the flicker of surprised displeasure—but he then smiled and cried out, “My dear Wilkie—how fortuitous! You have saved me from labouriously writing out my invitation to you. Penmanship was never my strongest quality, and I feared it would take me another half hour to produce the document! Come in, both of you! Sit down, sit down.”

Dickens was perched on the edge of a small reading table and there was a short stack of manuscript pages next to him. He had set out only two chairs where an audience might sit. For a slightly vertiginous moment I was sure that he was going to read notes from his own dreams of the Gods of the Black Land.

“Are we all the audience for… whatever this is?” asked the obviously delighted James T. Fields. The two men seemed to revel in each other’s presence, almost literally shed years as they carried out their boyish adventures, and I’d sensed a sadness in Dickens the last few days. Well, why not? I thought at that moment. When Fields and his wife leave England for America this week, it will be the last time the two men will ever see each other. Dickens will be long dead before Fields ever returns to England.

“The two of you, dear friends, are indeed the only audience for this reading,” said Dickens, who went to shut the door to the library himself and then returned to his easy perch on the edge of the thin-legged table.

“Chapter the First, The Dawn,” read Dickens.

“An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours…”

And so he read on for almost ninety minutes. James Fields was obviously enthralled. The longer I listened, the colder my skin and scalp and fingertips felt.

Chapter One was an impressionist (and sensationalist) description of an opium smoker coming up and out of his dreams in an opium den obviously based upon Opium Sal’s. Sal herself is there—properly described as “a haggard woman” with a “rattling whisper”—alongside a comatose Chinaman and a Lascar. The viewpoint character, obviously a white man awakening from his own opium dream, keeps muttering, “Unintelligible” as he listens to (and struggles with) the incoherent Chinaman and unconscious but muttering Lascar. He leaves, returning to a “Cathedral town” that is obviously Rochester (under the clumsy pseudonym of “Cloisterham”), and there in the second chapter we meet a cluster of the usual Dickens-style characters, including the Minor Canon, the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle, who is one of those kindly and dim-witted but well-meaning “Muscular Christians” of precisely the sort I was parodying in my own novel-in-progress.

It also becomes clear in this second chapter that the rogue opium-eater whom we’d glimpsed in the first chapter is a certain John Jasper, the lay precentor of the Cathedral. Jasper, we understand at once, has a beautiful voice (strangely more beautiful at some times than at others) and a dark, convoluted soul.

Also in this second chapter, we meet Jasper’s nephew, the shallow, callow, easygoing but obviously lazy and complacent Master Edwin Drood.… I admit that I jumped when Dickens actually read that name aloud.

In the third chapter we hear some rather well-written but gloomy descriptions of Cloisterham and its ancient history and then are introduced to yet another of Dickens’s near-infinite series of perfect, rosy-cheeked, virginal young heroine—romantic interests: this one with the cloyingly insipid name of Rosa Bud. Her few pages of presence did not make me want to strangle her immediately—as so many of his young, virginal, Dickens-perfect young characters such as “Little Dorrit” made me want to do—and by the time Edwin Drood and Rosa Bud take a walk together (we learn that they have been betrothed since childhood through the agencies of conveniently acquainted but deceased parents, but also that young Edwin is condescendingly complacent towards Rosa and the entire engagement, while Rosa simply wants out ), I could feel the echoes of Dickens’s estrangement from Ellen Ternan as I’d heard it discussed between them outside the Peckham rail station that evening.