Earlier this week, I finally got around to starting Drood, by Dan Simmons. I’d read some very interesting reviews this past Spring that made me really want to read it. I’ve enjoyed Simmons before, because I love the way his books play with literature, and I’m not afraid of five pound books. But I only made it about a hundred pages in before I gave it up.
Drood has a great premise. It proposes that Drood was a character that was haunting Charles Dickins, and inspired the writer to draft The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a novel the author died before finishing. From that premise, apparently, Simmons spins out a disturbing meta-mystery. The novel is narrated by Wilkie Collins, another writer who actually was a friend of Dickins. Collins was a laudanum addict and, as such, becomes one of my favorite types of storytellers: an unreliable narrator.
What made me give the book up was Simmons choice to include flashbacks to events that I couldn’t see the relevance of and didn’t have the patience to wait and have it revealed to me. These flashbacks distracted and detracted from the part of the book I found really interesting, the Drood plot. Every time things started to move forward on that front, Collins would stop talking about it and go back to talking about his collaboration with Dickins on a play, hiking up mountains with Dickins, etc. etc. Frankly, I didn’t care. I just wanted to yell at Collins to focus on the matter at hand. I have to trust Simmons that there was a purpose, but it was just boring.
I’ve read other reviews of Drood that said similar things, so I have to wonder if this narrative style continues through the whole book. So, I gave up and have moved on to another book. I don’t often give up on books, but I don’t want to spend my free time reading books I don’t like. Not when there are so many other wonderful books out there waiting for me to get my hands on them.