Trespass

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The book is supposed to cover her change of heart, from this cold hateful girl into a caring woman. It certainly does this, but offers no context. One days she hates Mary--another victim of the mad scientist, and a chapter later, she's trying to save her life. There's some thread through the book about St. Paul's dome, but it never amounts to anything important. This book is shitty. No, honestly, it's shitty. Any book titled "The Great Stink" better deliver, and this one does in the shittiest possible way. 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. 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. 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 | Waterstones

From the no. 1 bestselling author of The Versions of Us comes a novel about how wonderful and sad and difficult and happy and strange Christmas can be. Stories to inspire, move and comfort. Clare Clark’s critically acclaimed The Great Stink “reeks of talent” ( The Washington Post Book World) as it vividly brings to life the dark and mysterious underworld of Victorian London. Set in 1855, it tells the story of William May, an engineer who has returned home to London from the horrors of the Crimean War. When he secures a job trans­forming the city’s sewer system, he believes that he will be able to find salvation in the subterranean world beneath the city. But the peace of the tunnels is shattered by a murder, and William is implicated as the killer. Could he truly have committed the crime? How will he bring the truth above-ground? 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. Clare Clark (b.1967) is the author of The Great Stink, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and The Nature of Monsters. All of the characters are distinctly unlikable, perhaps with the exception of Mary, a mentally handicapped maid, but really only because the reader must pity her sad life as the apothecary's living experiment.

Tess looked at the letter for a long time. With each sentence she felt Sylvie’s hands on her shoulders, turning her against herself. When it was time to fetch Mia from school, she tore the letter into small pieces and put them in the bin. Later that night she took them out again and burned them in the kitchen sink. Mia couldn’t read and she couldn’t reach the bin but Tess couldn’t shake the fear that she would find the torn-up words and put them together. That somehow the words would find her. So I started skimming. And I kept skimming. (Oddly enough, the only overwhelmingly sexual scenes were in the opening.) The ending was wrapped up too neatly, with a character who had previously hovered unnoticed in the fringes of the story suddenly swooping in to save the day, and everything tidily working out.

TRESPASS | clareclark TRESPASS | clareclark

The story opened with a pregnant woman escaping the great fire of London. The piece was well-written and interesting both in story and characterization. But then the book switches to fifty years later, where we are immersed in the explicit lustings of a sixteen year old farm girl for a gentleman who her mother is trying to ‘capture’ via pregnancy (it works). The problem is that it was too explicit for me and once past all that, not all that interesting. 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. 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!) William May is a veteran of the Crimean War and suffers from post traumatic stress, his mental health plays an important roll in this story. He is employed as a surveyor to the Commission of Sewers under Joseph Bazalgette, the chief engineer responsible for reconstructing London's sewers. William is charged with murder and it looks certain that he'll hang for the crime. 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.Then why are we stopping? I told you, I’m desperate for the toilet.’ Tess nodded absently, staring out towards the sea. The book is told from Eliza's point of view and it's primarily her "monsters" that are confronted and dealt with. She begins the novel a not-very-kind or sympathetic person but the horrors she and Mary suffer break down that sociopathy and she grows more empathic and sympathetic as the novel progresses. I've been more aware of the question of authorial voice vs. character voice since reading James Wood's How Fiction Works and I think Clark is remarkably successful in keeping Eliza's thoughts and observations Eliza's alone without injecting too much or too blatant an author's point of view. There are only occasions where I think Eliza writes or says something wholly out of character for an ill-educated girl from an English village. The Great Fire of London sweeps through the streets and a heavily pregnant woman flees the flames. A few months later she gives birth to a child disfigured by a red birthmark.