Word: drood
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Charles Dickens died having finished only half of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and that tantalizing incompleteness has prompted countless attempts to round off the novel's Gothic plot. The story echoes Dickens' familiar themes of unspoken sexual obsession, middle-class hypocrisy and the crushing burden of guilty secrets. It also contains some of his wittiest portraits of pomp and vanity. Fans of the book will look in vain for more than vague resemblances in the amiable musical version that opened on Broadway last week. Composer- Author Rupert Holmes has framed Drood within a Victorian music-hall pastiche...
Taken on its own terms, however, Drood is vivacious, funny and richly tuneful, and it has an irresistible gimmick: the song and dance comes to a halt in mid-syllable to mark where Dickens' novel breaks off. The audience then votes to select the murderer and therefore the ending. This do-it- yourself detection has been honed since last summer's tryout by Director Wilford Leach and Choreographer Graciela Daniele, the team that made a zonked- out Pirates of Penzance a 1981 Broadway triumph. Fully half of Holmes' songs are instantly hummable, notably the sweet Perfect Strangers and the plucky...
...year 1980, with a coincidence so uncanny that Charles Dickens might have written it, not one but two Edwin Drood continuations appear. The Decoding of Edwin Drood (Scribners; $10.95) is written by Charles Forsyte, the nom de plume for a husband-and-wife team of British mystery writers. The Forsyte book picks up where Dickens departed but omits the preceding chapters. The reader is left with only the latter half of the novel, composed without the tone or richness of its predecessor. The reader might well sigh with Kate Perugini, Dickens' daughter: "In my father's grave lies...
...Garfield version, to be published in the U.S. by Pantheon Books in 1981, is sympathetic to the circumstances that fathered Drood: Dickens was consumed by his liaison with the 20-year-old actress Ellen Lawless Ternan. "The affair overshadows the book," Garfield be lieves. "Jasper represents Dickens himself. At times the affair with a girl so much younger must have appalled Dickens, who had conventional moral views...
...would be unsporting to give the game away; suffice it to note that the continuer does not hold with G.K. Chesterton's theory that "if Drood is dead, then there is not much mystery about him." As to Jasper, he is indeed made a version of his guilt-racked creator, a man, notes Garfield, "who was beginning to have a far greater interest in the criminal, and the divided mind." Doubtless this divided book will not have done with the Droodists - or with subsequent versions. It is merely the best to date: arbitrary, full of guesswork and lively writing...