The Great Stink: A Novel of Corruption and Murder Beneath the Streets of Victorian London
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It is 1855, and engineer William May has returned home to London and his beloved wife from the horrors of the Crimean War. When he secures a job transforming the city's sewer system, he believes it will prove his salvation, as, in the subterranean world beneath the city, he begins to lay his ghosts to rest. But when the peace of the tunnels is shattered by a violent murder William loses his tenuous hold on his sanity. Implicated in the crime, plagued by nightmares and visions, he is no longer sure: Could he truly have committed it? Long Arm Tom is a tosher who scavenges for anything of value in the old sewers, always accompanied by his beloved dog Lady. It is this business that brings him into contact with "The Captain," a wealthy businessman with a weakness for gambling who asks Tom to use his knowledge of London's underworld for an even less savory purpose. But Tom is also William's only hope of salvation. Will he help William bring the truth aboveground?With richly atmospheric prose of almost visceral power, The Great Stink transports us behind (and below) the glittering façades of Victorian England. Seamlessly combining fact with fiction, it marks the debut of an outstandingly talented writer in the tradition of the very best of historical novelists.The New York Times - Susann CokalClark's triumph is that she makes us see and smell everything we politely pretend not to, and she even manages to give the miasma its own kind of beauty: "The stink of rotting meat crammed the skull and a fatty brown foam curdled on the water"; in the sewers, "the walls were slick with a fatty dew of nitre that gleamed silver in the lantern's light"; and when William slices his arm, "the disintegrating sand of his self no longer slipped from his fingers. . . . Inside his head the shadowy twilight darkened and tightened to reveal at its center a single vivid pinprick of light." At moments of such lyrical brilliance and sensory precision, the book is literally breathtaking.
