THE NATURE OF MONSTERS
By Clare Clark
Harcourt, 379 pages, $31.95
Clare Clark's gripping novel The Nature of Monsters unfolds in the early 18th century, when physicians still believed in Galenism, a medieval idea that comprehended the body through humour pathology and treatments such as bloodletting and emetics. We look back at these curatives with horror and revulsion. As the author explains in a fascinating essay appended to the novel, these beliefs persisted in the 18th century despite new philosophies that incorporated clinical trials and experimentation as standards in establishing medical theories. It is in this world of contradictions that Clark sets this, her second novel.
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The year is 1718, and 16-year-old Eliza Tally, pregnant, selfish and impatient, is shipped from the country to London to avoid bringing scandal to the gentleman father. Hired out as a maid, she joins the household of the disfigured and demented apothecary Grayson Black, along with his dour wife Mrs. Black, slimy apprentice Edgar Pettigrew, and the imbecilic and endearing maid, Mary. While Eliza thinks she has only a year to endure in servitude, she gradually discovers that her master has something else in store for her. The 18th century was a precarious time for women, their very lives dependent on the mercy, charity and whims of men.
The novel is told in parallel narratives, Eliza's first-person perspective punctuated with journal entries and letters of the apothecary, an opium-addicted, ailing creature obsessed with proving his brilliance to the scientific world he both worships and despises. The apothecary's writings reveal early on to the reader the gruesome reality awaiting Eliza and Mary. Black subscribes to the theory of maternal impression, a belief that a fetus will take on the characteristics of images and trauma it is exposed to. Black sets out to prove he can create a monster, and who better to experiment on than young Eliza and the dimwitted maid. Throughout the book, Clark shows that a monstrous nature is determined not by gestation, but by choice and action. While Grayson Black succumbs to the deviant nature of his character, Eliza becomes a kinder person when faced with horror and catastrophe.
Trained as a historian at Cambridge, Clark also has a unique talent for descriptive writing and imagery. These skills combine to make for great storytelling. With a startling sense of ambience and place, Clark brings London to life. Her first and lauded novel, The Great Stink, is set in Victorian London. Georgian London is the world of her second book, and it is a filthy, clambering city, rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666, a London coated with sooty, noxious air that obscures the very skies. The city is dominated by the newly constructed St. Paul's Cathedral, which serves as a metaphor for both hope and extravagance.
With a historian's eye for arcane detail and a poet's ear for lyricism, Clark sets the tone for the novel when Eliza first glimpses London: "Beyond the hill it stretched away into forever, a glittering carpet of low black-tinted mist pierced by the sharpened points of innumerable spires and unrolled like a gift at my feet. London. And, in its centre, triumphantly, rose up a mighty orbed mass, a dome of unimaginable majesty, its silvered patina shadowed with midnight's inky blue. For all its immensity, it seemed to float above the city, borne up upon a solemn wreath of cloud. As I stared, a thin shaft of sunlight broke through the mottled sky above it, striking the lantern at its crown and turning its apex to liquid gold. ... I could not take my eyes from the city. It glistened in the pale light like a promise. Even as I watched, it seemed to grow, as all around it and beyond it, smoke curled endlessly and proprietarily upwards from a thousand chimneys to join with the clouds and claim ownership of the heavens themselves."
Clark deftly unifies the hideous and the beautiful, capturing their inseparable link. Her portrayals of all things from food to sex to illness and childbirth are intense and graphic; her dark talent culminates in the butchering of a pet monkey. But the macabre nature of the novel is threaded with humour and sensuous prose: "My master was as present and yet invisible in that house in Swan-street as God himself was in church, except that, as Mrs. Black and the frog-voiced parson liked to instruct me, God was the one true Light. My master, on the other hand, seemed to me to be composed of darkness, of shadows and locked doors and windowless stairwells and the sour black smoke of extinguished candles. In the gloom of the house, his absence was unyielding. It clung to the murky corners of every closed-up room, as sticky and persistent as cobwebs." The novel's perch on the world of grotesque is kept in balance with such evocative writing.
The Nature of Monsters is a compelling and curious book, a blend of fascinating history, dramatically wrought narrative and moments of absolute horror. It is a novel that shows how redemption lies in our power to choose, that humanity is measured not by our achievements but by the mercy and tenderness we show the weak and the vulnerable. It is also a reminder that certainty and fact are best examined with a healthy dose of skepticism, and always with an eye to the future.
Christy Ann Conlin, author of Heave, is working on her second novel.
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