Matthew Pearl

Pearl reopens one of literary history's greatest mysteries, in a tale filled with the dazzling twists and turns, the unerring period details, and the meticulous research that thrilled readers of bestsellers "The Dante Club" and "The Poe Shadow."

A Novel

The Last Dickens

Sarah Sammis

In The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl the clerk of Dickens's American publisher is murdered at the docks. He had been there to hopefully pick up a shipment of notes for the author's unfinished serial, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. When there is no sign of the package the publisher and the clerk's sister go to London in search of an ending for Drood.

As anyone who has seen the Doctor Who episode "The Unquiet Dead" knows that Charles Dickens died in 1870. When he died he was only half way through Drood.
James Osgood on his trip to London comes up with a hopeful notion that Dickens wrote his serial front to back, so that the first published episodes were actually the last ones he wrote. In his search for the missing manuscripts he ends up solving another mystery.

Besides being about the last months of Dickens's life, the novel has flashbacks to a previous trip Dickens took to the United States and other installments involving Dickens's son Frank who lives and works in India. These asides from the main plot may seem out of place but they are well within keeping with Pearl's approach to writing. Each of Pearl's novels is written in the style of the author he's highlighting. His first book is just as grotesque and lyrical as Dante's Inferno; his second reads like a Gothic detective story and this one is Dickensian.

When my friend brought Matthew Pearl's latest novel, The Last Dickens to our BookCrossing meeting, I snagged it. I set aside the other book I was reading and made it my "must read now" book. It ended up being one of my favorites books for 2009.

I wanted to love this book; I so looked forward to it, having considered myself a big Pearl fan. I was sorely disappointed. 

That said, a disclaimer: two things have possibly affected my perspective. 

1: I've been reading a lot of masters in the few years since I last read Pearl (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Fitzgerald, Flaubert...), so it could be that I'm making very different comparisons than I was when I read "The Poe Shadow" or "The Dante Club." That said, I don't think my tastes have evolved *that* much. 

2: I abandoned this book after picking up Franzen's "Freedom" in a bookstore. I read a couple of paragraphs, and, frankly, remembered what great writing looked like. Possibly another unfair comparison. 

Disclaimers made, I didn't finish the book (life's too short, etc., etc.). I was disinterested from the start. Pearl spends so much time establishing his premise that the plot feels like an afterthought. When he finally does focus on the plot, it feels like too little, too late. The plot is, however, one of the better aspects of the book. The characters are not- they feel very flat and one-dimensional. There's a moment in the first "book" when he focuses on the relationwship between two of the main characters, developing them a bit, and just as I started to think he was redeeming himself, that subplot gave way to a flatter story of Dickens himself and his trip to America. Again, the plot is decent, but the characters are even more flat here. Dickens himself is only interesting because he's Dickens, and the focus of the plot (his bodyguard) didn't interest me a bit- from the outset, it was clear that he's not complicated at all, and would do no wrong throughout the course of the novel (that's speculation, of course, since I didn't finish it, but that's the impression I got). 

I wouldn't pick this up. There's so much better stuff out there (even from Pearl himself).

Liz Carpenter

'A tour-de-force... ingenious, engrossing' Jed Rubenfeld, author of The Interpretation of Murder Boston, 1870. News of the untimely death of Charles Dickens reaches James R. Osgood at his American publisher. Expecting the arrival of the latest instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and suspicious of unscrupulous New York publishers keen to get their hands on the novel, Osgood sends his clerk, Daniel Sands, to await its arrival. When Daniel's body is found by the docks, the manuscript is nowhere to be found, Osgood must embark on a transatlantic quest that leads him to the dangerous streets of London in order to unearth the rest of Dickens' final mystery and solve another of his own.

The Last Dickens A Novel

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