People who know me well are always surprised to hear that as a teenager I hated Dickens. Hated. I thought his books were overly long, ridiculously rambly and life was, quite frankly, too short.
When I was 17 (the year in which, basically, I became the person I am today – I’ve been lucky like that, got it all over in one fell swoop), I read The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
And it changed my opinion of Dickens forever.
However, the thing about Drood is, as I’m sure you know, that Dickens died while writing it. Most people think, like Mozart’s Requiem, that it is unfinished.
That’s as maybe, but unfinished does not necessarily mean incomplete.
There have been many attempts at the ‘constructed ending’ (usually by inferior writers) when it comes to Drood - most recently in the BBC’s rather odd adaptation – and, like really bad sewing, you can always see the join.
To me Drood isn’t incomplete. I never walk away from reading it with a feeling of dissatisfaction. I’d go so far as to say that it is perfect just the way it is. So far as to say, in fact, that it is finished.**
We humans have an almost innate need for things to be done, for loose ends to be tied off, for everything to be tidied away. Maybe it’s because deep down we know life’s not really like that. There are nothing but loose ends in life, question marks hanging over paths we didn’t follow, people we lost touch with. We will most likely die unfinished, a work in progress. And, if you believe in reincarnation, have to come back and do it all over again, still unfinished.
But we are always trying to beat this. Rather than allow ourselves to be unvarnished we continue to search for new shades of polish. Especially at this time of year, when every newspaper or magazine we open, every other blog post we read is telling us we’re too fat, or too thin, or should eat more raw vegetables, or have less clutter. Whatever it is, We’re Doing It Wrong and Need To Do It Better.
We really don’t. Change happens over time. Most of us change for the better without even realising it’s happened. And sometimes it’s OK to remain unpolished. No good has ever come from trying to finish Drood, no good came of adding that awful ending to Requiem. Lots of things aren’t broken, they’re just unfinished, so they don’t need fixing.
This year why not let your loose ends hang free?!
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** Much as I love Dickens now, I still maintiain he’s not very good at endings and often resorts to pantomime and farce to wrap up his loose ends. Perhaps that in itself is what makes Drood so very very good.
