More on Wilkie Collins

After reading The Woman in White (1860), I immediately turned to my copy of The Moonstone (1968). Both books are great stories with complicated plots and casts of interesting and sometimes fascinating characters. But the tone is quite different in The Moonstone, which has much more comedy, especially in some of the supporting characters. Both books feature thrilling and convoluted plots, likely the result of their original serial publication, where episodes end with some sort of mystery or anticipation of a new revelation. Both also feature thwarted lovers and a determined hero who at first runs off and leaves the country for a time before returning to solve the mystery.

Having now read what are considered Collins's two best novels, I'm struck by what a great storyteller he is. Yes, there are some improbable twists and turns in his plots, but generally these are cleverly done and amusing, even when they may seem a bit far-fetched. While The Woman in White has a very formidable and complicated villain at the center of the plot, The Moonstone keeps us guessing until we discover that things are not what we thought or what they may have seemed to all of the main characters. I hope it's not giving too much away to say that Collins's own opium addiction must have played a key part in his invention of the plot and its eventual solution. I don't know if I'm convinced of the medical accuracy of this device, but as fiction it makes for another ripping yarn.

I'm not quite sure how to sum up my reaction to belatedly reading these two nineteenth-century classics. I had heard about them for most of my reading life, but I never took them seriously for some reason. Perhaps that was because Collins was considered less serious than his friend and mentor Charles Dickens. As I observed earlier, he seems more like Edgar Poe, and not only because both were masters of mystery and early examples of what would become "detective" fiction, but also because of their fondness for exotic characters and complicated plotting. Of course, plots are important features in good stories, especially mysteries, and some of the best and most enduring fiction is in this popular genre. Yet, for various reasons, scholarly types tend to rank such authors somewhat lower than those who write the great literary classics.

But Collins is not all clever plots, interesting characters, and mysterious occurrences. In both The Woman in White and The Moonstone he includes some very strong and quite formidable women characters who carry a good deal of the story's weight. And while romantic entanglements are often predictably Victorian, the depiction of these strong females adds an interesting dimension to Collins's writing. The other remarkable feature of both novels is the narrative structure, which relies on a series of reports or testimony contributed by various characters who play pivotal roles in the stories. Collins is quite good at creating individual voices for each of these narrators, as well as shifting points of view so that the reader gets a variety of perspectives on the unfolding story and its participants. As all of this suggests, he's just a very good writer, something Dickens recognized right away.

I'm not yet sure whether or not I'll try another of Collins's novels. For the moment I've returned to my old friend Aldous Huxley and his seventh novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939), which came out just prior to World War II and was written during the Spanish Civil War. (For some reason I skipped over Eyeless in Gaza (1936), but I'll probably read that one next.) Then it's back to my book club selections and Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001), which is our book for July.