The Nature of Monsters
Clare Clark Viking, 382pp, £16.99
ISBN 0670915327
I like my history straight up. Clare Clark's The Nature of Monsters is anything but: she wraps up a slice of 1700s London in a bodice-ripping, action-filled thriller.
Clark's words jump off the page with full 3D effect. Her heroine, the 16-year-old Eliza Tally, describes everything in lurid detail: her emotions, the people she meets, the streets of London. Men smell of "sweat and Stilton cheese" or look like "beer-soaked dumplings". Pregnant Eliza is sent off to London by the family of the baby's father, to work for Grayson Black, apothecary and madman. He wants to prove the hypothesis of "maternal impression": that a pregnant mother's mental state and her desires physically affect the unborn baby. He sees Eliza, opium-addled and debt-ridden, as the solution to his problems.
If Danielle Steele had written Frankenstein, this would be it. I was constantly distracted by the vulgar details. As I read, I tried to imagine it as a BBC period piece. That way, when reading about Eliza's reaction to her lover ("the hot rush of longing between my thighs that made my fingers curl . . ."), I could just imagine her face with a slight blush to it.
In fact, that's the only way I could stomach this story. Sometimes, too much detail is simply too much.
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