Word: garfield
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...Charles Dickens; concluded by Leon Garfield; André Deutsch; 327 pages...
...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 buried the secret of his story." And yet ... and yet ... the Londoner Leon Garfield, 59, hitherto a writer of juveniles, composes his own conclusion to Edwin Drood, including Antony Maitland's new illustrations, happily capturing the Master's locutions: "Curious, bland, yet deeply various gentleman ... he was very like a convert to a new faith, who walks in the ways...
...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...
...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, and ample evidence that whether Edwin...
Directed by Ronald Neame Screenplay by Brian Garfield and Bryan Forbes