What the Dickens! Del Toro to adapt Dan Simmons' Drood for the screen

24 November 2009

Gerard Wood

Any announcement of the adaptation of a Dan Simmons' novel for the screen is worth a mention even if it is a year past its use-by date. This slice of stale news then is for those of you who, like us, missed the announcement last year that Simmons' 2009 best-seller, Drood, was picked up by Universal Pictures and that Guillermo Del Toro is attached to direct.

If you're wondering about the timing of all of this, Universal did indeed pick up the rights to Simmons' novel before it was published in February this year.

As far as adaptations of genre fiction for the screen are concerned, it really doesn't get much better than a marriage between genre fiction's most versatile and accomplished author (Simmons has awards in Fantasy, SF and Horror for Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Carrion Comfort, Song of Kali and others) and the writer/director of Hellboy, The Hobbit (fingers crossed) and the Oscar winning Pan's Labyrinth.

As well as Drood, Del Toro has three other adaptations of novels lined up for Universal and while they might be remakes, an unfortunate reality of modern cinema, they will at least be remakes of genre classics: Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Slaughterhouse 5. (While I have high hopes for Ken Branagh's Thor, and his Henry V is comfortably in my top ten movies, the sooner that his Frankenstein is superseded, the better, and if it takes a remake by Del Toro to achieve this, I'm all for it!). If you think that five literary adaptations in a row is enough book work for any one director, think again! Word is that Del Toro is also likely to fulfill a life time's dream with the help of Universal, an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's seminal work of Cthulhu Mythos, At the Mountains of Madness. According to an interview Del Toro did with the LA Times in July however, it looks like Drood might be first off the rank after the two Hobbit movies are done and dusted in 2012.

The second of Simmons' pseudo historical novels (following 2007's The Terror), Drood is a fictionalised account of the troubled final years of Charles Dickens' life following his involvement in a train accident on 9 June 1865 (five years to the day before his death) in which, we're told, he encounters a mysterious and other worldly apparition, by the name of Drood, wandering through the carnage: "This figure . . . was cadaverously thin, almost shockingly pale, and stared at the writer from dark-shadowed eyes set deep under a pale, high brow that melded into a pale, bald scalp . . . Dickens' impression of a skull was reinforced . . . by the man's foreshortened nose . . . and by small, sharp, irregular teeth, spaced too far apart, set into gums so pale that they were whiter than the teeth themselves." The story is narrated, unreliably, by Wilkie Collins, fellow writer and laudanum addict, a jealous and bitter friend of Dickens who is described by Simmons as "Salieri to Dickens' Mozart, who knew in his heart he was a mediocre writer and that his friend was the genius."

At the heart of this Gothic novel is the mystery surrounding Drood, but in typical Simmons style the sprawling work (some 800 pages) is multi-layered. Taking its lead from The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens' last novel, unfinished at the time of his death, Drood is part biography, part mystery, part horror, and while Simmons' re-imagining of Dickens and of Victorian England is occasionally long-winded, it is more often mesmerising: Simmons paints even his most bizarre scenes with a visceral authenticity that makes it all too easy for us to suspend our disbelief. Which makes this an ideal project for Del Toro, a master of visceral imagery and believable fantasy.

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