The Mystery Of Edwin Drood Charles Dickens, completed by David Madden, Unthank Books
ISBN: 978-0-9564223-3-0 Paperback: £15.00 466pp
When Charles Dickens died, suddenly and much too young, on 9th June 1870, he left unfinished a novel which might otherwise have become a masterpiece. Of the twelve monthly instalments in which the book was initially to be published, Dickens had written six at the time of his death, the first three of which he had prepared for publication. The remaining three were published later that same year, leaving unresolved the mystery of the disappearance from the cathedral town of Cloisterham one stormy night of Edwin Drood, John Jasper’s young ward, Rosa Bud’s erstwhile fiancé, the sworn enemy of Neville Landless, and giving rise to questions that have fascinated readers ever since. Disappointed in love, did Drood go abroad to begin a new life? Was he so drunk that night that he fell into the river and drowned? Was he murdered and, if so, why has his body never been discovered? Is Jasper right in pointing suspicion at Landless, a newcomer, an outsider, or does he himself have something to hide? It’s an intriguing mix of possibilities, one that has tempted other writers to try their hand not only at unravelling Dickens’s intentions for the resolution of the novel, but also at completing the task, Leon Garfield, for example, in nineteen-eighty and Charles Forsyte, in the same year. This new version by David Madden, however, a substantial, large-format paperback printed on good quality paper and in a very readable font, comes on the eve of next year’s two-hundredth anniversary of Dickens’s birth and so is both especially interesting and timely.
If the second half of the novel is to fit well with the first (and they are of almost equal length), Madden has to have answered two fundamental questions: should he write in a modern vernacular style rather than try to imitate Dickens, his narrative voice, the voices of his characters, and should he resolve the plot in the manner of a straightforward whodunit, rather than attempting a more psychological investigation into motivation, what drives individual characters to behave as they do? Dickens being a particularly hard act to follow, these are difficult questions and it does Madden great credit that he doesn’t take the easy way, even though, as anyone who has ever read a Dickens novel knows, the author’s uncanny ability to bring an entire world to life not only through individuals’ names, but also through their voices, personal mannerisms, eccentricities of speech and behaviour, is a major facet of his genius, something he can achieve so finally that their effect remains with the reader forever (as, for example, in Oliver Twist, Ch. 2: Please sir, I want some more). Madden manages this crucial test well, sustaining and developing characters introduced by Dickens, such as Septimus Crisparkle, Hiram Grewgious, Dick Datchery, Billickin, Durdles, pompous Mayor Sapsea, the grotesque bully Honeythunder and, quoted below, the street urchin Deputy, a hideous small boy, a baby-devil (as Jasper describes him) and a real Dickensian gem, maintaining their individualism and liveliness in ways central to the narrative:
“Yer owes me”, offers Deputy rather truculently … “I brings yer himportant hinformation. Like the Hangel brings ’Erod … I know where she lives. Her Royal Highness. The Princess Puffer. I know where she lives and puffs her hopium”. He again contorts his face, and in a pantomime appears to be sucking greedily at a pipe the size of large and opulent cigar … “At a price, mind yer”, he adds fiercely.
How Dickens would have developed and completed his story is, in some ways, a still harder nut to crack, not simply because he left no notes regarding his plans for the second part of the novel, but because the possibilities contained within the first part are themselves so rich and various. Should the villain, if there turns out to be one, end in gaol under sentence of death, or did Dickens intend a much deeper and darker study of the complexities of evil? There is evidence for both views. On the one hand, Landless may be guilty after all, on the other, suspicion grows that Jasper, the cathedral choir master, a saturnine character, an opium addict and frequent visitor to a sordid London opium den, is a Jekyll and Hyde figure. London, too, as in much of Dickens’s writing, plays its part in creating the novel’s mood music. As Madden tells us in the opening paragraph of his first chapter, it is a great, smoky, tarnished city full of gritty secrets and hidden corners, although it is in the mud at the bottom of Cloisterham weir and amid the dust, decay and death of the cathedral crypt, that the keys to the mystery will finally be discovered:
Datchery looks around him, and listens … The odour of death and decay, ever-present in the dank air of the crypt, is infinitely more oppressive in this confined space, but Datchery does not permit himself to be deterred from his task.
Madden’s navigation of this tangled web is persuasive, interesting and original. He guides both the central narrative and its sub-plots to a credible completion, not necessarily the one Dickens would have chosen, although there is plenty of evidence elsewhere in his work that might argue otherwise. Those characters who embody the force for good in the novel and are concerned to see justice done, meet and plan their detective work in London, among the sooty tenements and lawyers’ offices of Staple Inn. It is an unlikely environment in which to expect goodness to flourish, although, with heavy Dickensian symbolism, it is also the location of Lieutenant Tartar’s lovely rooftop garden and the birthplace of friendships, unexpected generosity and a love affair. By contrast and equally unlikely, the heart of the novel’s darkness turns out to be located in small, peaceful, sleepy old Cloisterham, where the stony shadow of the cathedral almost buries virtue. Appearances can be deceptive. But then a good book is always full of surprises … and I’ve avoided giving away the ending.
…..©2011:Ken Head