Wilkie Collins – Page 2

Drood was the first book I finished reading this year and I do hope I’m going to read better books than this, this year. My complaints about it are:

It’s too long
It’s too wordy
It’s too full of facts described in great length
It’s too full of Wilkie Collins
It’s too full of hallucinatory nightmares, involving in particular a black beetle scarab.

I began to dislike all the characters, in particular Wilkie Collins, but then I realised this is fiction, not biography and I disliked it even more for initially lulling me into thinking this is what Collins and Dickens were like. But perhaps that’s a good point – I began to believe what I was reading. I began to believe Dickens and Collins were involved in trying to find Drood, that Drood really existed, that he wasn’t just a figment of Dickens’s imagination, or Collins’s opium induced nightmares and that Collins actually planned to kill Dickens.

Wilkie comes over as a bombastic hypocrite full of his own self-importance and with a chip on his shoulder as far as Dickens is concerned. He’s not a well man, riddled with rheumatic gout, living with a woman he refuses to marry and with a mistress who has three children by him. He sees a green- skinned woman with teeth like long, yellow curved tusks who wants to fling him down the stairs and he is haunted by the ‘Other Wilkie’. He takes laudanum by the jugful, but insists the Other Wilkie has been with him all his life and is not a laudanum-induced dream. The Other Wilkie sits and watches him, lunging for the pen as Wilkie writes and eventually writing his novels for him.

Drood as portrayed in this book is horrific, a half-Egyptian fiend, who, according to Inspector Field is a serial killer. I suspect that this bears little relationship to Dickens’s Drood. I haven’t read The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but having read Drood, I feel I really should.

The plus points for Drood are that it does contain some vivid descriptions bringing the period to life for me – the slums of London, the train accident at Staplehurst and the fantastical “Undertown” with its miles of tunnels, catacombs, caverns and sewers are good examples. It has also made me keen to read more books by Dickens and Collins and biographies of them. There is a list of biographical and other sources in the Acknowledgements at the end of the book, so I’m adding some to my wishlist such as Dickens by Peter Ackroyd.

Christmas has been and gone whilst I’ve been away from the blogworld. For days I didn’t even switch on the computer, what with getting ready for Christmas, which this year included moving loads of boxes we haven’t unpacked so that our son and his family had room to sleep at the weekend, and I had a cold, which didn’t help at all. Anyway we had a good time.

I had some books (my favourite presents) for Christmas, all of which I now can’t wait to read. No doubt I’ll be writing about them later – they include Agatha Christie’s autobiography, and her Secret Notebooks and a book on the Eleven Missing Days, all of which I’ve dipped into.

Meanwhile I’m still ploughing through Drood. I have very mixed feelings about this. Ann wrote the other day on her blog Table Talk that she has a problem with books centred on people who really existed and I think that is part of my problem with Drood.

Drood himself, of course, is a fictional character, but most of the book is about Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, both of whom don’t come across as people I would want to meet. But I want to know more about them, if only to find out what they were really like, and to read more of their books. I’m glad I’ve already read Collins’s The Moonstone, because the plot of this is detailed in Drood.

The other stumbling block I have with Drood is that there is far too much detail and emphasis for my liking on horrific opium induced nightmares. On the other hand I want to know how it ends, so it is keeping me turning the pages, although I am tempted just to skip to the last few pages.

The snow is still here, thawing just a little bit today, but we ventured out yesterday to the next town, over the border in Scotland and joined the library. I restricted myself to borrowing just three books – two on the history of the Borders and The Music Room by William Fiennes. I have The Snow Geese by him, which I’d really like to read soon – but it’s still in a box somewhere.