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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens (view source)
Revision as of 13:25, 4 February 2012
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If you have never come across 'Drood' before, there are certain significant factors which make this a 'must read'. It is Dickens' last work, and he died without completing it. Given that this is a detective story, one of the very first in that tradition, it is doubly intriguing, because although we are clearly being fed clues and hints throughout, at the point where the text ends we aren't even fully sure even if a crime has been committed. So as the basis for endless speculation about what really happens this novel could hardly be bettered. We certainly have potential villains and victims, but we also have a number of likely red herrings; complex threads of romantic interest, but again it is by no means clear exactly which way these will resolve; and a shadowy detective figure, who's whose speculations certainly have no sense of conclusion.
And the novel creates a fascinating environment, the old town, the murky characters attached to the functioning of the cathedral, but also the sinister world of the opium den and the London tenements. And at the centre is the twisted figure of the choir master John Jasper, outwardly respectable but harbouring evil intent. And for lovers of Dickens' immersive, detailed style, this is the master at his best - the atmosphere oozes from each scene, but with a little more economy and terseness than sometimes was his approach. In focus too this is the 'later' Dickens, for his main interest here is not the social conditions or campaigning of his earlier work (although there is here a view on the workings of racial prejudice), but on the psychology of sexual repression, with hints of the preoccupations of modernist novels of the 1920s.
