Trespass

Product Information

I wish that we could give half stars, because I would rather give this one 4.5 stars instead of 5 because I could have done without all of the references to body fluids. Is it really necessary to know how the main characters urinate, defecate, vomit or bleed? The story would have been just as good without all of that. Which is why I would say this book is not for everybody. It is certainly not for the faint of heart. Set in the 1700’s. The book starts out with a woman fleeing from a devastating fire. Then it jumps ahead 50 or so years and we meet Eliza who is a young woman all worked up over a sexy young man. The opening scene was something akin to an erotica novel but you won’t hear me complain. Eliza’s mother is the local midwife but fears being accused of witchcraft and wants to have her daughter safely wed to someone with lots of cash and property before it happens. Thus she encourages her daughter towards the wealthy and randy young fellow and performs a hand fasting ceremony. Pregnancy immediately follows and once the dupe realizes he isn’t legally wed he hightails it out of there and she’s left penniless, ruined and nauseous because of the “worm” in her belly. Ah, the best laid plans. As memorable for her sharp and even funny social observation as it is for the powerful outrage that drives it’ Sunday Times

Clare Clark | The Guardian Clare Clark | The Guardian

The Nature of Monsters is told by Eliza Tally, a coarse (hence the language), headstrong young woman living in England in the early 1700's. The question you consider throughout the book is what really makes a monster? Is it a child born deformed mentally or physically? Is it a mother's self-serving actions to promote herself at her child's expense? Is it a young woman's bad choices that brand her a harlot? It it a man's quest to do evil in the name of God? Is it standing by while someone is hurt and you do nothing? Upon arriving at the apothecary's residence, she discovers another young woman there also. Mary is considered an idiot since she was born with a harelip and seems to have only a child's understanding of the world around her. But Mary manages to squirm her way into Lize's life and soon Eliza finds herself looking out for Mary.He closes his eyes. Sweat greases his scalp. His head throbs, his hand too. It usually only bothers him when it’s cold. He presses his thumb hard into the scarred skin, presses till the pain is in his shoulder, the base of his skull. He should never have come. It was stupid to think it would help, that it would make things clearer. Stupid and deluded. Other problems with this book: unlikeable characters (the annoying heroine feels sorry enough for herself so we don't have to), overwrought descriptions, and a few more I might find if I ever bother to read the second half of the book (fat chance!) Tess’s fingers tightened around the phone. Tess’s father and Delphine had been divorced for ten years. There was only one reason she would call Tess now. Don’t say it, Tess pleaded silently. Please, Delphine, please, whatever it is you are about to say, don’t let it be that. As a teenager, Tess falls into environmental activism – and the arms of an older, charismatic protester. She has never been happier. When he suddenly disappears, leaving her pregnant and alone, she is shattered. Slowly, though, she rebuilds a life for herself and her daughter Mia. ‘We’re all we need,’ she sings to Mia as they dance around the kitchen. ‘Me and you, us two.’

Trespass by Clare Clark | Goodreads

Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’

William, an emotionally scarred veteran of the Crimean War, throws himself into this work, hoping to quiet the memories of that ghastly military adventure. He reminds himself again and again that a successful engineer is "regular in his habits, steady, disciplined, methodical in his problem-solving." William is ordinarily a paragon of those virtues, but when the pressure of maintaining that regulated life becomes too much for him, he slinks deep into the sewer to slash his arms and thighs with a knife. Clare Clark’s seventh novel , her first book to be set in the contemporary world, explores one of the defining scandals of recent times: from the 1980s to the present day, undercover police officers infiltrated activist groups in the UK. They developed sexual relationships with their targets as part of their cover, in some cases fathering children. This story was brought to public attention by the unmasking and subsequent disclosures of the former undercover officer Mark Kennedy. It was also exposed in the Guardian by Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, whose landmark work, Undercover, is credited as the source material for Trespass.

Trespass by Clare Clark | Waterstones

At the heart of the narrative, though, is one significant failure. It may well be intentional. Clark interleaves three voices to tell her story – those of Tess, Mia and Dave. She signally fails to explain or humanise the last of these: as the novel proceeds he becomes steadily more monstrous, until his behaviour is almost unbearable to read about. It may be Clark’s contention that such men are simply monsters. However, the value of extending Evans and Lewis’s work into fiction is surely the opportunity to go deeper into the lives and motivations of all the people caught up in these atrocities. Trespass does not fully pursue this. Having met Mark Kennedy once while he was still undercover, and been haunted by that meeting ever since, I could not help but wish it had. It's a fast read, but the prose gets tedious quite fast too. I understand that the author is a history expert of some sort, and that the early 18th century setting of the story calls for a style of writing that matches the time. But it seems unbelievable that a book written from the point of view of a midwife's daughter should contain ample servings of similes, metaphors, and an extensive vocabulary! The author goes overboard with her descriptions and prose, perhaps because of a deep love for that period in London's history. I can understand that. So I soldiered on until halfway through when I got to this sentence: "I swallowed a blade of dread so sharp that it seemed to pierce my gullet." That was all I could take. These midwives' daughters, they really should learn the meaning of restraint. Complex, profound and devastatingly timely, this brilliant psychological suspense explores the twisted world of undercover operations, the most secretive part of the secret state where nothing is sacred and no one cares to count the cost. Like her other novel, The Nature of Monsters, Clare Clark accomplishes two things with The Great Stink. One, is a powerful (and queasily wonderful) evocation of the sights, sounds and smells of a by-gone London. In this case, the city of the Victorian Age c. 1860. The greatest city in the world is drowning in its own filth, and Parliament has reluctantly begun funding an enormous public works project that will modernize the capital's sewers. Say what you like about Clark's other qualities as a writer but even her harshest critics must admit to a marvelous facility for describing urban life that is vivid and economical - using just the correct amount of adjective and simile to create 19th century London (at least the London that existed for most of its inhabitants - unhealthy, foul, and full of men and women brutalized almost beyond humanity by the misery of their lives). As with Monsters, Clark's tale plots the development of a person's humanity. In the case of William, a person who's lost his and must find a way to regain it or go mad. In the case of Tom, a person who knows there's a void in his life but doesn't know what it is or how to fill it.

The story is compelling; I couldn't put it down, reading well into the night to see how it would resolve itself. I felt a great appreciation for being born in a time and a place where a young woman has choices in life, as Eliza struggles with the limitations of 18th Century society. This book really really was a doozy. When I first began reading, I thought for sure it would be a 2 star, or possibly a low 3. I actually contemplated giving this one a 4, but the slow beginning made me round down. This is a fascinating, but at times very dry, piece of historical fiction that delves into the dark space that exists between medicine and science and mythology and superstition that existed in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. It takes place in London, and most of the story takes place in Victorian sewers where engineers are trying to figure out how to flush out the sewage into the Thames to control disease and of course, the smell. I really loved Clare Clark's writing. The following passage is about the main character William May and how he thinks about the sewers;

Trespass by Clare Clark | Hachette UK Trespass by Clare Clark | Hachette UK

This was a most unusual book. A murder mystery set in Victorian England does not invoke anything out of the ordinary but... this story revolves around the woefully inadequate sewage system and an engineer who was chosen to assist in the design to modernize it. The main character, William May, is a truly disturbed man whose effort to tame his demons, within the literal bowels of the great city, fails him on every level.Clare Clark is the author of six highly acclaimed historical novels, including The Great Stink, Savage Lands (both longlisted for the Orange Prize) and The Nature of Monsters. Born in 1967, she graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge with a double first in History, and now lives in London with her husband and two children. * * * * * The story is of Eliza Tally – young pregnant girl who is bundled off to an apothecaries’ shop in London to protect the father of her baby. But the apothecary is using pregnant girls for experiments to prove that it is the mother’s imaginations (intelligence, personality, experiences while pregnant) that create disfigured / disabled babies. Eliza must save herself and another girl from the situation. After a particularly severe episode, he awakens to discover that a man he fought with at work has been found brutally stabbed in the sewer. As Clark has devilishly constructed it, the evidence against William couldn't be more damning. Murderous fantasies in his diary don't look good. At this crisis point, William's feverish story merges with the tale of a sewer scavenger named Long Arm Tom and his rat-catching dog. Regularly violating the laws of Parliament and nature to search the sewers, Tom may hold the clue to William's salvation, but he has no reason to give it up, and William's not convinced he deserves salvation anyhow. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth