The Great Stink

Clare Clark's debut novel, The Great Stink (2005), probably needs an advisory label--something on the order of "Do not read while eating dinner" or the like.  Most of the novel, after all, takes place in the malodorous London sewers, and the characters frequently find themselves wading through human excrement (among other things).  But the stench isn't incidental to the novel's intent; if anything, despite the presence of several other historical markers--the toshers, the Crimean War, the occasional real person--London's all-pervasive stink constitutes the novel's key sign of historical difference [1]. While neo-Victorian fiction frequently heads to the literal gutter in order to find alternatives to stereotypical straight-laced, upper-class, sexually-repressed Victorian types, it rarely spends the entire novel there; slums, sewers, and other downmarket sites frequently serve as the "realistic" contrasts to "hypocritical" bourgeois and upper-class environs.  Although The Great Stink occasionally revels in the democratic potential of scatology--"the knobbles and lumps of rich and poor jostling and rubbing along together, faces turned up to the sky," muses one character (13)--Clark is ultimately less interested in puncturing received views of the Victorians and more interested in London's atmosphere.  Everything and everyone, we are informed, stinks.   And bleeds, leaks, decays, and so on.  The novel defines the whole world by what it spews.   

London's stench is, in many ways, the most interesting thing about the book.  In theory, The Great Stink is a multi-plot thriller.  Plot one features William May, a Crimean War veteran who suffers from what we would call post-traumatic stress disorder; while May has found some measure of psychological respite by working on Joseph Bazalgette's project for a new sewer system, he frequently finds himself overwhelmed by the need to cut himself.  The increasingly troubled May, who finds the sewers an excellent place to bleed in, runs afoul of a dishonest superior, Mr. Hawke, especially after torpedoing Hawke's arrangement with a local brickmaker.  The brickmaker turns up very dead (in the sewers, of course) some time after May threatens to kill him (oh, dear--didn't May ever watch L&O?) and, to nobody's very great surprise, the by-now institutionalized May finds himself framed for the death. 

Meanwhile, in plot two, a tosher (someone who searches the sewers for saleable items) named Tom makes a good part of his living selling sewer rats for sport; dogs fighting are out, but dogs killing rats remain in.  In the course of his business, Tom runs into a shady sort known only as the Captain, along with a somewhat odd-looking mutt.   Tom, in an unusual burst of emotion, falls for the dog, whom he names Lady, and trains her to be a world-class ratter; the Captain, an obsessive gambler, offers Tom 100 guineas for her but only pays 40.  And thus, Tom goes on his quest for vengeance (not to mention his dog)...a quest which just happens to mesh with the quest to free William May.

As thrillers go, The Great Stink fails to raise pulse rates: the plotting is somewhat lackadaisical and the connection between the two plots ultimately too incidental.  The villain, moreover, is such a stock character that he practically twirls his mustachios.  (Readers may welcome the decided note of ambiguity at the end, however.)  Clark is better on the plot's historical ornaments, such as ratting, sewer construction, the hulks, and insane asylums.  Overall, if the story eventually falters, fans of neo-Victorian fiction should enjoy the novel's unsalubrious atmosphere--albeit not while eating. 

[1] Claire Tomalin uses a similar technique in her recent biography of Samuel Pepys.  Stench and scatology frequently find a home in neo-eighteenth century fiction and film, where unruly bodies tend to be far more welcome--or, at least, are more openly on display.  (The difference in this respect between The Madness of King George and its neo-Victorian counterpart, Mrs. Brown, is instructive.)