Drood – the Denouement

It may be limp to say it just didn’t feel right, but then, the arts are not science and there are no objective, empirical measures, so... it just didn’t feel right.  All credit to Gwyneth Hughes for even trying to conclude a Dickensian tome when he’s arguably even more popular now than in his lifetime, and not known for his simplistic plots.   The resolution she proposed, however, seemed a mish-mash of modern psychology (Jasper’s bad because Daddy didn’t love him) and enough coincidences to out-Dickens Dickens (not only are Drood and Jasper brothers, rather than nephew and uncle, but the Landless twins are also the product of Drood Senior’s lust).  We were tempted to ask whether Ms Hughes had helped out with the recent spoof with Stephen Fry et al.

The contrivance of Edwin’s having gone to Egypt without telling anyone, therefore leaving everyone to believe him dead, and turning up again just in time to tie up all the loose ends, was less than convincing, to say the least.  They may not have had email, but they did have post and even, for some of the distance, telegraph.  His reputation had enjoyed something of a renaissance by then – strange how often this is the case with the dead – yet despite his growing maturity he hadn’t seen fit to bother informing anyone for the supposed year he was away?

Perhaps the main problem with finishing the creative vision of someone else, particularly when the original work is from a different era, is that it can’t be picked up from where the author left off.  The externals that shaped Dickens’s thoughts are so far gone that the modern writer must rely as much on Dickens’s other novels as on history books.  Had he lived, he would undoubtedly not only have finished writing but revised earlier parts of the book, perhaps making major changes, and what he left us with is by default inferior to what would have been published, had it reached that stage.  There is a continuing fad for ‘additionals’, be they sequels, prequels or reimaginings, and some have more success than others but, we would argue, one of the reasons for the popularity of Dickens in this cynical, business-driven age, is his ability to take his world and from it create something new.