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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Oct 2005, 368 pages
Paperback:
Oct 2006, 372 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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With extraordinarily vivid characters and unflinching prose The Great Stink marks the debut of an outstandingly talented writer in the tradition of the best historical novelists.
It is 1855, and engineer William May has returned home to his beloved wife from
the battlefields of the Crimea. He secures a job transforming London's sewer
system and begins to lay his ghosts to rest. Above ground, his work is
increasingly compromised by corruption, and cholera epidemics threaten the city.
But it is only when the peace of the tunnels is shattered by murder that William
loses his tenuous hold on sanity. Implicated in the crime, plagued by visions
and nightmares, even he is not sure of his innocence. Long Arm Tom, who
scavenges for valuables in the subterranean world of the sewers and cares for
nothing and no one but his dog, Lady, is William's only hope of salvation. Will
he bring the truth to light?
With extraordinarily vivid characters and unflinching prose that recall Year of
Wonders and The Dress Lodger, The Great Stink marks the debut of an
outstandingly talented writer in the tradition of the best historical novelists.
Chapter 1
Where the channel snaked to the right it was no longer possible to stand upright, despite the abrupt drop in the gradient. The crown of William's hat grazed the slimed roof as he stooped, holding his lantern before him, and the stink of excrement pressed into his nostrils. His hand was unsteady and the light shuddered and jumped in the darkness. Rising and rushing through the narrower gully, the stream pressed the greased leather of his high boots hard against the flesh of his calves, the surge of the water muffling the clatter of hooves and iron-edged wheels above him. Of course he was deeper now. Between him and the granite-block road was at least twenty feet of heavy London clay. The weight of it deepened the darkness. Beneath his feet the rotten bricks were treacherous, soft as crumbled cheese, and with each step the ...
This is a gripping, richly atmospheric and exceptionally well researched first novel that delivers a fast paced, credible story-line against the background of one of the great feats of British architecture - the building of the London sewer system (made all the more challenging because much of London is 30 feet below the River Thames at high tide, making drainage by gravity alone impossible)...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
Clare Clark writes with the eyes of a historian and the soul of a novelist.If you had a choice between being a tosher, mudlark, rag-and-bone man, scavenger or riverman in Victorian London, which would you choose?
London was a dangerous place with an unnerving number of bodies ending up in the river - cutpurses would murder their victims and throw the bodies in the river,
drunken sailors fell overboard, dock fights would result in more bodies in the
river, and why pay the expense of a burial when granny could be dropped down the sewer and end up in the Thames?
Rivermen scraped a living hauling corpses from the river with long boat hooks in the hope of finding valuables in their clothing.
Mudlarks were mostly children who searched the mudflats of the Thames at low tide looking for anything of value - coins...
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