The Great Stink

A sympathetic but flawed protagonist, a good mystery plot and a fascinating setting. Clark is a very good writer as well, and some of her paragraphs reward repeated reading just for their sheer artistry.

William May returns to England after having served in the Crimea and starts to work as a surveyor for the Metropolitan Board of Works, charged with the construction of a modern sewer system for London. Haunted by his own demons, he retreats to the underground tunnels where he feels safe and commits

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terrible acts of self-harm. Declared insane and framed for murder, it falls to a young, inexperienced lawyer to exonerate him.

From the first page the reader is thrown headlong into the secret world of the sewers of London with descriptions that bring the nauseating, claustrophobic conditions alive. Also within the first chapter, we are exposed to William's secret of deliberately cutting himself to extinguish the memories of the war and the appalling conditions in the field hospital in Scutari. Personally, I found these passages quite harrowing to read but they set the scene for the rest of the novel and if you can stomach the often graphic descriptions of the filth, squalor and gore both below and above ground, you will be rewarded with a novel that will open your eyes to the terrible living conditions during that time of Victorian England and you will never read another historical novel again without remembering the vision, ingenuity and determination of Joseph Bazalgette.

Meticulously researched and with wonderfully descriptive, evocative prose, Clare Clark's debut novel is astonishingly assured and its characters entirely believable and real, even though I found the appearance of the lawyer resembling a little bit too much a caricature straight out of Dickens. Don't expect this to be a historical murder mystery novel like I did when I picked it up; the first time you learn that there has even been a murder is on page 168, almost halfway through the novel, and it was not difficult to guess the identity of the murderer; I think the synopsis on the front cover is slightly misleading because I don't think that Clare Clark had intended to write that sort of book. In my opinion the novel is too bogged down with detail in places and would have benefited from some judicious editing but it was certainly time well spent, a valuable history lesson and I'm sure you will agree that you'll never read another novel like this again.

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Very original. After reading everything in sight for 50 years, including the toothpaste tube, original is good.

Quite an average book. Not a bad story, but a bit predictable and very difficult to get into.

When I read a book normally I do pay attention to details like colors, scenery, and all other images painted by the author; here I just got the olfactory vision and it wasn't pretty. Nor was it meant to be.

William May, a veteran of the Crimean War, now lives with his wife and son in London. He was

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given a job as an engineer in the massive new London sewer project; he knows the sewers like the back of his hand. May is suffering from his experiences in the war and emotionally, he's a wreck when he returns. He uses the sewers as a hiding place in which he might release his inner demons from that experience -- he self cuts to handle the pain. His story is interwoven with another man's, Long Arm Tom, who finds a life companion in a dog only to be cruelly tricked. Both stories detail 1850s London; both eventually overlap in a mystery involving murder.

The writing was good; I just couldn't really get involved as much as I normally would have liked. William May's character was drawn marvelously and he was very much alive to me. I would recommend this book to mystery readers, to those interested in the time period, and to readers who are interested in the topic of Bazalgette and his desire to clean up the city. I wished I had liked it more, but, well, it happens.

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This is a well-written book. This is also a very difficult book. And almost impossible to get into. Halfway through I decided it was not going to take me another three weeks to get this finished and I read the ending. Which was a bit predictable. But seriously, Clare Clark writes for all five

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senses and this is admirable and really well done!

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first line: "Where the channel snaked to the right it was no longer possible to stand upright, despite the abrupt drop in the gradient."

This book gets really really dark in places. (Of course, I suppose one should expect that anything titled The Great Stink isn't likely to pull any punches....) The

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main characters are William (a PTSD-suffering veteran of the Crimean War) and Tom (one of London's poor, who makes his living collecting rats from the sewers and selling them for dog fights), whose paths cross briefly but significantly. There's a sort of Dickensian-Gothic sensibility to this novel, which is often quite disturbing (particularly to anyone sensitive to themes of self-mutilation or animal cruelty) but ultimately satisfying.

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Novel about corruption and murder in London's sewer system during the 1850s. Takes awhile to set up, but also engrossing (as well as gross!) and the last third becomes an absolute page turner.

a stench to my eyes. Sorry, couldn't get ten pages into it

The Great Stink. Clare Clark. 2005. William May, a veteran of the Crimean War who suffers from PSD works for the board charged with designing and developing and building a sewage system for the city of London. He is institutionalized and charged with murder. This is a fascinating picture of

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Victorian London and an excellent historical novel. One needs a strong, strong stomach to read it however. The horrors of the Crimean War and the smelly, nasty condition of a sewer-less London, and the incredible conditions in mental institutions of the era a described in great and vivid detail. I thought I remembered reading a review of this book when I was at the library, but it may have been the non-fiction title, The Great Stink of London, by Stephen Halliday that was mentioned as a source by the author.

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