The Sense of No Ending
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Charles Dickens’ fifteenth and final novel, was to be published in 12 monthly instalments beginning in April 1870. Dickens wrote six of those parts prior to his death on 9 June 1870, three of them published posthumously, leaving the novel forever unfinished.
I started reading Drood shortly before Christmas. I’m struggling to be honest and without a gargantuan effort on my part I too may leave it unfinished. Not - I hope - because of my death, but on account of being unable to get to grips with the plot. I’m not new to the novels of Charles Dickens - and it would surely be foolish for anyone to start with the final, incomplete one. That would be akin to trying to get into Bob Dylan’s music by listening to his woeful album Shot of Love, which I did when it was released in 1981, borrowed from my local library. That put me off Dylan until a few weeks ago when I saw Timothée Chalamet in James Mangold’s biopic A Complete Unknown. But, back to Dickens, in the last couple of years I’ve read Twist, Nickleby, Rudge and Pickwick, all page turners and the latter laugh out loud funny.
But in addition to being unable to follow the convoluted plot - guardians of orphaned children, inheritances, opium addiction, nuns, a mound of quicklime, garden sharing - I’m having a hard time with the names of the characters. 202 pages in and we’ve got someone called Dick Datchery appear. Not that he makes it easy for us. While eating his dinner of “fried sole, veal cutlet, and pint of sherry” (a pint!!) he asks of the waiter:
‘Take my hat down for a moment from that peg, will you? No I don’t want it, look into it. What do you see written there?’
The waiter read: ‘Datchery.’
‘Now you know my name,’ said the gentleman; ‘Dick Datchery.’
Datchery is in good company, in the preceding pages we have been introduced to The Rev. Septimus Crisparkle, Hiram Grewgious, Mr Bazzard, and Durdles. To keep us on our toes Dickens sometimes refers to his characters by their profession so Crisparkle is simply ‘the Minor Canon’ (whatever that is). Even all of this would be fine except many of these people speak absolute gibberish. A ‘hideous small boy’ called Deputy, who Datchery seems to have taken a shine to and is using as an analogue GPS to guide him through the streets of Cloisterham, is the worst, singing guff like this:
Widdy widdy wen!
I—ket—ches—'im—out—ar—ter—ten,
Widdy widdy wy!
Then—'E—don't—go—then—I—shy,
Widdy widdy Wakecock Warning!
Actor, comedian, writer (and let’s not forget, singer - Did you steal my bongos?) Charlie Higson once said he found writing for children was more challenging than writing for adults. He should know, having successfully authored books for all age groups: The Young Bond series for children, the Y.A. Enemy series and several thrillers for adults. His rationale being that whereas, once started, an adult will keep reading to the end of a book, if a child isn’t grabbed by what they are reading within a couple of pages, they’ll just abandon it.
He may have a point there. From my - grown up - side of that equation, I can’t think of a book that I have completely given up on. Yes, there are always some ‘on hold’ as it were, books that I have started, but that I’ll come back to, although usually these are non-fiction. Looking over at my current reading pile there’s Madeline Bunting’s The Seaside, A.N. Wilson’s recent biography of Goethe and a review copy of David Keenan’s collection of music writing Volcanic Tongue, all part read, but not forgotten, just waiting for the right moment to reconnect.
My feelings on The Mystery of Edwin Drood are different to those three. The Penguin Classic edition contains an introduction by the late David Paroissien, a Dickens scholar and founder member of the Dickens Society. He writes ‘In its partial state, the novel, exercises for many an even greater allure on account of that which is not there.’ And therein lies my difficulty: it matters not whether I stop reading now on page 210 or continue to the last paragraph of ‘The Dawn Again’, the final chapter that Dickens wrote, either way, half of the novel ‘is not there’. Although there have been plenty of theories, there is no conclusion - we’ll never know who murdered Edwin Drood, or indeed if he was actually murdered. And with that playing at the back of mind, I don’t feel invested in the storyline or the characters.
Still, only 60 pages to go. Perhaps if I pour myself a pint of sherry …