Clark, Clare 1967–

PERSONAL:

Born 1967, in London, England; married; children: two. Education: Trinity College, Cambridge, received degree in history; attended New York University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—London, England.

CAREER:

Writer. Also worked for Saatchi and Saatchi, London, England; worked for Bartle Bogle Hegarty, London, England, and New York, NY, beginning 1994; became board member.

AWARDS, HONORS:

New York Times Editors' Choice award, Washington Post Best Book of the Year citation, Orange Prize long list citation, and Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award, all for The Great Stink.

WRITINGS:

The Great Stink (novel), Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2005.

The Nature of Monsters (novel), Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Historian and author Clare Clark's first novel, The Great Stink, is set against the background of nineteenth-century London. The book, according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, is "a gripping and richly atmospheric glimpse into the literal underworld of Victorian England: the labyrinthine London sewer system." Clark explained in an article appearing in the Independent Online: "I found an account of the event that the newspaper famously dubbed the Great Stink. In the early 19th century, the new fashion for water closets meant that instead of household waste being stored in cesspits, as was customary, it was being flushed into the rudimentary drainage system and from there into the Thames. By the 1840s the river was a vast open sewer." "For over a decade Parliament ducked the problem," Clark recounted, "but during the scorching summer of 1858 the stench grew so overpowering that curtains soaked in chloride of lime were hung in the windows of the House."

The Great Stink takes place in 1858, when the intense heat wave has finally forced officials to take steps to address the malodorous sewers of London. Their chosen representative is William May, a veteran of the Crimean War suffering from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. May's job is to discover how the great stink is escaping from the sewers and to fix the problem. "If William succeeds," Susann Cokal declared in her New York Times Book Review critique of the novel, "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." Long Arm Tom, according to several critics, invited comparisons with characters from the works of Charles Dickens. He "might have enjoyed quaffing ale and swapping horror stories with Dickens's immortal Bill Sykes," concluded a Kirkus Reviews contributor. However, Tom's closest Dickensian parallels are probably Gaffer Hexam and Boffin from Our Mutual Friend, Cokal explained. "His favorite 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."

In The Nature of Monsters, Clark steps back another century, to the early 1700s, and examines the conflict between the Age of Reason and the Age of Faith. The key figure in the novel is Eliza Tally, a teenager from the countryside who travels to London partly to take a job as a housemaid and partly to avoid the shame of a pregnancy outside of marriage. Eliza's employer, the apothecary Grayson Black, however, is planning to use her and her unborn child as subjects in an experiment: to determine the extent to which an unborn child can be shaped by its mother's experience. In particular, Black wants to see if he can manipulate Tally's unborn child by exposing her to a variety of phenomena. In a desperate attempt to preserve her life and her freedom, Eliza befriends Black's mute servant girl Mary—also a victim of Black's immoral experiments—and the two of them seek refuge in an uncaring city. "Clark's empathetic portrait of the powerless and the victimized," a Publisher Weekly contributor said, "will [again] remind many readers of Dickens." "As she did so successfully in The Great Stink," Barbara Love stated in the Library Journal, "Clark again transports readers to another time and place in this mesmerizing tale." "It is bracing to come across a writer who is mistress of such unrelenting Swiftian nastiness," wrote Hilary Mantel in the Guardian. "She meets the 18th century on its own terms: knocks its wig off, twists its private parts and spits in its eye."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 2005, Margaret Flanagan, review of The Great Stink, p. 58; March 15, 2007, Margaret Flanagan, review of The Nature of Monsters, p. 23.

Books, January 15, 2006, Michael Upchurch, "Novel Carries Readers into the Past and Underground," p. 7.

Bookseller, February 16, 2007, review of The Nature of Monsters, p. 12.

Book World, October 16, 2005, Ron Charles, "Going with the Flow: The Suspense—among Other Things—Gets Deep in This Redolent Story about London's Sewers," p. 6.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2005, review of The Great Stink, p. 699.

Library Journal, July 1, 2005, Barbara Love, review of The Great Stink, p. 65; March 1, 2007, Barbara Love, review of The Nature of Monsters, p. 69.

New Statesman, March 12, 2007, Jasmine Gartner, "Hold On to Your Bodice," p. 59.

New York Times Book Review, September 25, 2005, Susann Cokal, "The Waste Land," p. 31; June 17, 2007, "Prenatal Scare," p. 12.

Publishers Weekly, June 20, 2005, review of The Great Stink, p. 54; August 8, 2005, Michelle Wildgen, review of The Great Stink, p. 105; March 5, 2007, review of The Nature of Monsters, p. 39.

Times Literary Supplement, February 18, 2005, Lucasta Miller, "Lower Depths," p. 22.

ONLINE

Curled Up with a Good Book,http://www.curledup.com/ (October 1, 2007), Luan Gaines, "An interview with Clare Clark, author of The Nature of Monsters."

Guardian Online, February 17, 2007, http://books.guardian.co.uk/ (October 1, 2007), Hilary Mantel, "How to Beget a Monkey."

Harcourt Books,http://www.harcourtbooks.com/ (October 1, 2007), "Interview with Clare Clark, author of The Nature of Monsters."

Independent Online, February 11, 2007, http://www.independent.co.uk/ (October 1, 2007), Clare Clark, "Clare Clark: Nocturnal Services."