![]() ![]() It’s a limbo in which the increasingly unsettled May slashes and mutilates himself, and where the novel’s most interesting character, “tosher” Long Arm Tom, patrols the fetid depths accompanied by his beloved dog Lady, scavenging for lost valuables and catching rats to be used as prey in the dogfights that are staged in London’s grubbiest watering holes. ![]() Relying heavily on period historical sources (notably, Henry Mayhew’s classic sociological study London Labour and the London Poor), Clark creates a graphically detailed vision of this hell just beneath earth. Clark sets her darkly confrontational story in mid-1850s London, where William May, a severely traumatized Crimean War veteran, begins work as a surveyor for master engineer Joseph Bazalgette, who has been charged with renovating and sanitizing the city’s notoriously malodorous and pestiferous sewers. It’s a faux-Victorian melodrama, akin to such recent successes as Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith. Excrement happens in this impressively researched first novel, which earned its London author an Orange Fiction Prize nomination. ![]()
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