The great stink

Not since Perfume has a book brought strong smells to you, except these smells are not so good. Clare Clarke's latest novel is set in Victorian London, reviewed here by Susann CokalClare Clark's first novel opens much like Saturday Night Fever, sketching a young man's character by the way he walks down a street. But where John Travolta strutted through Brooklyn with a paint can, William May takes tentative, rolling steps through the sludge and crumbling bricks of what is surely the nastiest thoroughfare in literary history: the sewer beneath mid-century Victorian London. Wounded both physically and psychologically in the Crimean War, William has been sent home to help engineer a more effective sewer system and eradicate what the capital's newspapers simply call the Great Stink.
If William succeeds, he will ruin the livelihood of a scavenger called Long Arm Tom, whose life's work has lain not in disposing of sewage but in making the most of it. His favourite source is the Thames, ultimate destination of all these effluvia and just as foul as the Stygian tunnels – bobbing with excrement and the occasional corpse, bearing its reek to the nostrils of rich and poor alike. The stink is a source of riches as well as metaphor because there is money in discards: a corpse can be robbed, and when that fails there are rats to catch and sell to tavern keepers who'll pit dozens of them against one tough little dog so their patrons can bet on the fight.
Tom is the ultimate “tosher”, possessing a nose that's able to separate the city's stench into its various layers and components – and thus its potential financial yield. Not since Patrick Süskind's Perfume has a character, or a book, dissected, smell so minutely and grotesquely. Tom identifies parts of London by the way their sewers reek, although, he reminds himself, even the rich ladies' doings “stank same as anyone else's”.
The Great Stink alternates between the stories of these two men, both trying to work within a society that would prefer to forget them. William marries his prewar sweetheart and sets up house with her and the child they conceived before he left for the Crimea. But his story line traces his inexorable mental, physical and professional dissolution: the middle-class dream is not for him. Perhaps acting on the same self-destructive impulse that makes him cut himself with knives, he takes a stand against a shady deal with a brick maker whose last name is, allegorically, England. His honourable behaviour leads eventually to an accusation of murder – of which even William isn't sure he's innocent. Tom, meanwhile, deals with corruption of a different sort as he's cheated by a so-called gentleman associated with the rat-killing ring. That Tom is willing to do just about anything for money, including shifting the corpse that leads to William's downfall, doesn't compromise his own sense of integrity and what's owed to him. He's not as likeable as William, but he may be more memorable.
Certain comparisons are inevitable. Dickens explored the world of waste in Our Mutual Friend, with the river scavenger Gaffer Hexam and the “golden dustman” Boffin. But Clark is writing during an era in which graphic expression is more widely accepted, if not universally approved. The four-letter word for excrement is sprinkled as liberally through the novel's pages as the actual substance is in the sewers. And the descriptions of that substance are painstaking and thorough; you find out almost more than you would ever want to know about what it feels like smeared across your skin – or how it smells in a dead man's trousers. All of this is appropriate to Clark's story and crucial to establishing the world in which it's set, but it means The Great Stink is not for readers of delicate constitution.
Those expecting moments of Dickensian humour will be disappointed. The book is very dark, with a focus as narrow as its tightest tunnels. William and Tom are the only characters we really get to know, and they offer us mostly a contrast between self-mutilating despair and self-serving greed. Even William's resolutely cheerful bride is unsympathetic; she prefers to ignore his pain and simply hope that all will turn out well. The great redemptive relationship in the novel is the one Tom has with Lady, a rat-slaughtering mongrel he adopts and grows to love – but, even so, he sells her to a gambler in order to make a hundred guineas. That everything may turn out well (or well enough) will be the result of coincidence and the efforts of a fledgling lawyer who might be the only pure heart left in London and who rings, as anything pure must do in this setting, somewhat hollow.
Most despicable but least forgettable is the stink itself. Clark'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.
© The New York Times