A novel plot in black, dense and complex

We are in June, 1865, at the peak of the career of the most famous Victorian authors, "The Inimitable" Charles Dickens. While it returns from a week's holiday in France, the train that brings him back to London suffered a terrible accident, causing the destruction of all the first-class carriages, the miraculous exception of one: one that contained the writer and his young actress mistress. While he seeks to rescue the few survivors, Dickens will cross a strange fellow named Drood, the allure terrifying qu'extravagante. Far from helping the injured, it seems to bring them death, each man it addresses not slow to expire mysteriously. Yet once the evacuated victims and cleared wagons, no trace at the scene of the mysterious Drood drama and even less on the passenger list to excite, one suspects, the interest of one of the authors imaginative of his time

Upon his return to London, Dickens will therefore start in the footsteps of its "spectrum", carrying with him his best friend and collaborator, Wilkie Collins, prolific author himself also and very little excited to contribute in this adventurous case. In pursuit of the elusive Drood, the two writers will sink into the most sordid London shallows, diving in a hell of dirt, mud and vice But Drood is it really? Would it not morbid invention of the mind overheated "The Inimitable"? Collins doubt it, but curiosity or perverse fascination he can not help max out Dickens, and it is by its acid and caustic pen that we will discover after this dark investigation.

Here is a curious and disturbing novel Good Very ambitious too because this is not an easy task for a novelist, as clever as it is, than to raise such illustrious authors as Dickens and Collins and tell her the last five sauce years of the author's life of "Oliver Twist", at the risk of bawling indignation generations of readers. Therefore a risky bet, but also a very successful bet! Certainly "Drood" is not without flaws: one could accuse Simmons including a swim and a tendency to drown the course of its main plot under a rain of details and anecdotes (still very interesting and pleasantly narrated This says), but the novel remains exciting to read. Holding both the historical novel and fantastico-horror story, he constantly oscillates between the two genres, leading us to the troubled border between the world of fantasy and the reality.

That ambiguity is reinforced by the story of a neurotic Wilkie Collins to the bone and drugged twenty-four hours twenty-four to laudanum, which makes his testimony less reliable. Admirers of Collins might find the portrait of the Victorian writer too squeaky, if not downright negative (same for Dickens who takes unkindly to his rank by moment, without losing a crumb of charisma), but nevertheless manages to Simmons make it a fascinating character and a fascinating narrator. The ambiguous relationship from Dickens almost passionate relationship where mingle real affection, admiration and jealousy sickly is central to the novel and in fact much of the interest.

In conclusion, a novel plot in black, dense, complex (sometimes too convoluted), but quite worthwhile! My only regret is not having read most of the works of Dickens and Collins discussed in "Drood", which probably made me miss a number of references, but I intend to remedy this, one of these days !