Books & Poetry

Clare Clark’s London of 1719 is a putrid place which roars like the ocean, where the ash-heaps crawl with beggars and people rush about on business so urgent that the loss of even a minute would have dire consequences. Into this chaos is cast our co-narrator, headstrong 15-year-old Eliza Tally, after she falls pregnant by the local landowner’s cad of a son. The capital is a world away from the small parish outside Newcastle where Eliza grew up with her mother, and the house to which she is sent to work as a servant (in return for the abortion of the loathed maggot inside her, or so Eliza believes) is a dark prison.

The dual narrative also lets us into the mind of her master. While others see Grayson Black as a mere tradesman, really he is intent on proving himself a scientist, thanks to his theory that whatever a woman feels or sees during her pregnancy will be written all over the unborn child. He sets about attempting to prove this through experiments he conducts within his home on his two pregnant servant girls – one of them, of course, being Eliza.

Eliza he wishes to terrify; to the hare-lipped, childlike Mary he gives a monkey, so that a monkey might be born. As Grayson slips ever further into opium addiction and madness, the rest of the household desperately try to save themselves.

Clark’s impressively atmospheric historical novels (this is the follow-up to ‘The Great Stink’) are steeped in London as it really was. Both page- and stomach-turning, ‘The Nature of Monsters’ pulls no punches and gilds no edges for the modern reader.