Probably could have been a great book if it had an ending or we at least knew what happened. Far bleaker and creepy than any other Dickens work. I really like Drood but hate the people who tried to write endings for it (and the endings they wrote). ( )

Good who-done-it and respect the finish by Leon Garfield ( )

This is my fifth Dickens novel. Normally I wouldn’t read a final, unfinished work so early in my perusal of an author’s oeuvre, but when I learned that the BBC was going to be airing what sounded like a pretty interesting adaptation of Drood, I decided that I ought to give it a shot.

Like anyone approaching this book, I had to make one very important decision. Would I read it as Dickens left it to the world, incomplete and with no resolution, yet all the work of the master himself? Or would I settle for a conclusion by one of his lesser imitators, doing his best to honor Dickens’s intentions? Some purists would balk at the second idea, but I must admit that it appealed to me: the chance to compare the styles of two different authors writing the same story and characters. I selected Leon Garfield’s 1980 completion, as I was already familiar with Garfield as an excellent children’s author with more than a touch of the Dickensian about him.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is an atypical Dickens novel on several levels. I had to read the first paragraph several times before I could understand it—and, moreover, understand why it was confusing me. To begin with, it was in present tense, unusual for a nineteenth-century novel. Secondly, the exotic scene that was being presented was not of a physical location that the character inhabited; instead, it was part of a character’s opium-induced hallucinations. The orientalism of the vision, coupled with the darkness and squalor of the London opium den that John Jasper wakes up to, made me think more of Wilkie Collins than Charles Dickens. (My instincts were right for once; there’s quite a bit of scholarly speculation that Dickens based Jasper’s opium addiction on Collins’s own addiction.)

Not much of Dickens’s portion of the novel is set in London, however. Instead, most of the action takes place in Cloisterham, an “ancient English cathedral town.” I just love the way in which Dickens describes this community:

A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, with an inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind it, and that there are no more to come. A queer moral to derive from antiquity, yet older than any traceable antiquity.

This being Dickens, both London and Cloisterham are peopled with eccentric and charming personalities. Chief among them is John Jasper, one of the most fascinating and mysterious antiheroes in the literary canon. It is mainly on his account that one regrets Dickens’s inability to complete the novel; the mystery’s solution would have solved the problem of how exactly one ought to read his character. Others surrounding him are worth notice in their own way, though. It’s almost impossible not to fall in love with Mr. Crisparkle, the cheerful, lonely bachelor of a minor canon who plays at boxing in the mirror every morning. Likewise, I couldn’t help laughing at Mr. Sapsea’s conceitedness. Speaking of humor, how about this exchange between Mr. Jasper and the sodden stonemason Durdles?

“Is there anything new down in the crypt, Durdles?” asks John Jasper.

“Anything old, I think you mean,” growls Durdles. “It ain't a spot for novelty.”

Among the most moving of the figures is Mr. Grewgious, a stiff, seemingly emotionless lawyer who harbors past regrets and heartbreaks all his own. The scene in which Dickens pulls back the curtain and allows us readers a look into this lonely old gentleman’s soul is masterfully done. The only character I didn’t much care for was Rosa Bud, Mr. Grewgious’s ward and the object of so many affections. She is spoiled, pert, and childish, but painted in golden hues. She is simultaneously perfect and annoying—just the sort of Dickens heroine that gives a bad name to all the rest. The other young people are more convincingly drawn, especially the poor, beautiful, and sensible Helena Landless, who ought to be as annoying as Rosa but somehow is not.

The narrative style of the book confused me a bit; it switches between past and present tense, seemingly at random. I believe that in Bleak House Dickens includes two narratives, one in each tense, but here there’s no clear distinction like that.

The mystery of the title revolves around several questions: Why did young Edwin Drood disappear? Was he murdered? And, if so, who was the murderer? Looking at the text, the answers to these questions seem fairly obvious, and the secondhand accounts we have of Dickens's intentions square up with the most common interpretation, but one has to wonder: was he pulling our legs all along?

Leon Garfield goes for a pretty conservative conclusion, but a good one. Stylistically, he copies Dickens admirably; the only things that seemed out of place were the overabundance of Shakespeare references and a few supernatural occurrences. I originally took the back cover’s claim that the contents could be read as a single, unified piece as pure rubbish, but as I read I couldn’t really make distinctions between Dickens’s Jasper and Garfield’s Jasper, Dickens’s Rosa and Garfield’s Rosa. It functioned as a continuous narrative. Bravo to Garfield!

His achievement appears even more stunning when considered alongside some of the film adaptations, which of course make up endings of their own. Claude Rains makes for the perfect John Jasper in a 1935 film, despite his diminutive stature, and the scenes between him and Zeffie Tilbury in the opium den are amazingly good. But the rest of the movie is dated and cartoonish in the manner of most of the older Dickens adaptations, and the narrative winds down too quickly; there’s less than a quarter of an hour’s worth of material added to Dickens’s manuscript. The version recently aired on the BBC and PBS had a more consistently Gothic tone and a great cast—Tamzin Merchant actually made me like Rosa somewhat—but the ending was like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. Too far-fetched, even for Dickens.

This shouldn’t be anyone’s first Dickens novel, but I recommended it, especially with Garfield’s conclusion. ( )