It is 1718 and, in a small parish near Newcastle, Eliza Tally, a headstrong girl of 15, embarks on a reckless love affair that will prove her undoing. When her lover casts her off, denying their union, she is forced to travel to London, a city that attracts and alarms her in equal measure. There she takes up a position in the house of an apothecary, Grayson Black, whom she trusts to salvage what remains of her reputation.

From the highly-acclaimed author of The Great Stink comes a gloriously-written tale of consuming passions and obsessions. Set against the clamour and roar of eighteenth-century London, The Nature of Monsters brings vividly to life a world where the line separating science and madness is dangerously blurred, and where a single life counts for little in the relentless pursuit of progress.

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Clare Clark talks about her latest novel, The Nature of Monsters

Following the success of your first book, The Great Stink, did you find the prospect of sitting down to write a new novel daunting?
It is true that it can be very daunting to set about writing a second novel, particularly if, like me, you have already signed a binding contract to produce it – and received some of the money! As it turned out, though, I was lucky. As a result of timing, there was a delay of almost a full year and a half between Penguin buying The Great Stink and its publication. At the time I was slightly depressed by that – I could hardly wait to have my first book in print – but it did have one great advantage which was that, by the time my first novel came out, I had already almost completed a first draft of The Nature of Monsters. There was a great deal more work to do before it was finally finished but it meant that the positive reception of The Great Stink had less impact upon the shape and feeling of the new book than it otherwise might have done.

Both your novels include love stories in the narrative but the love is of an unconventional sort (in your first novel it is between a man and his dog, in your second it is the friendship between two young women). Did you deliberately avoid the conventional love story when writing these two books?
It is not easy to work out what is deliberate in the writing of a novel and what is driven by the requirements of the story you end up telling but, on the whole, I think the answer to this question has to be yes, it probably was a deliberate decision to avoid a more conventional love story. My novels are historical, the first set in Victorian London, the second more than a century earlier, and I was certainly very wary of the morass of clichés that made up much of the genre’s romantic territory, all flushed cheeks and heaving bosoms. I was also chary of anachronism. In neither Georgian nor Victorian England was it expected that a woman would marry for love, though it was to be hoped that husband and wife might come to feel affection for one another. And yet there is a fundamental human urge to love and to be loved in return. What drew me to both of my stories was the question of how my characters might seek to satisfy that need not through the unlikely channel of marriage but elsewhere in their lives. Freed from the particular requirements of sexual love, I was able to concentrate not on love’s physical aspects, too often unhappily rendered in print, but on its spiritual effects. I was able to tell a story that I hoped was not only truthful but fresh.

The premise of The Nature of Monsters, the ruthless pursuit of progress in the eighteenth century, is a fascinating subject. What attracted you to it?
The very first inspiration for the novel was an invitation, by a wall-painting conservator friend of mine, to visit her latest project, the cleaning of the eight frescoed panels in the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Naturally I leapt at the chance. Her working conditions were by any standards spectacular – the scaffolding was suspended from a central pillar hundreds of feet above the marble floor – but even as I tiptoed tentatively about in my hard hat I could not shake from my mind the knowledge that the men who had painted these frescoes in the early eighteenth century had worked at this height on rickety wooden platforms, held aloft by ropes and pulleys. It filled me with a kind of queasy awe that ordinary men had risked their lives for this commission so that London’s great cathedral might be the finest example of its kind in the world.

Given the practical limitations of the time, the construction of St Paul’s was an astonishing achievement and testament to the power of will over adversity – its architect, Sir Christopher Wren, was not only accused by Parliament of corruption and had his salary suspended but was even required to advance £2,000 of his own money, a small fortune at the time, to see it completed. Although I became distracted by my research and did not, as I initially expected, end up writing a novel about the cathedral itself, I found myself profoundly influenced by Wren’s sheer bloody-minded determination. It is that determination, warped and misshapen by the apothecary’s own weaknesses, that underpins Black’s ambitions in The Nature of Monsters.

In addition, the cathedral, a monument not only to God but also to the wealth and might of England’s first city, seemed to me to encapsulate the intriguing tensions in the early eighteenth century between superstition and science, between religion and reason, between the ties of convention and the lure of capitalism. In attempting to understanding those tensions I found myself fascinated in particular by the contradictions of the medical profession in which an increasing commitment to empirical proofs, and a passion for patent medicine, was set against a deep-seated belief that illness was a matter of trial or punishment by God and death a kind of divine retribution. These contradictions created a framework in which every physician was out for himself and the sticky issue of medical ethics was a matter of private conscience. What novelist then would not be tempted to explore exactly where it might be that an individual doctor or apothecary might come to draw that line?

What is the strangest thing you discovered while researching the background to The Nature of Monsters?
The joy of researching a novel is in the strange things you discover and this book was no exception. Of course the whole orthodoxy of maternal impression, in which it was accepted that the passions felt by the mother would imprint themselves physically upon her unborn child, seems bizarre to us today. The fact that this was not only an old wives’ tale but a medical theory expounded and explored by the most eminent scientists of the day under the auspices of the Royal Society and only seriously challenged in the 1720s defies modern belief. However, despite that, I think I was more shocked by the discovery that, in the early eighteenth century, a married woman had as little right under the law as a child or a madman. Everything she owned, down to her undergarments, became the property of her husband; he maintained the legal right to beat his wife as long as the stick was no thicker than a man’s thumb. It is as a result of this law that the expression ‘rule of thumb’ was to pass into the language. As Lord Chesterfield opined, the prevailing view among men was that ‘women are children of a larger growth … [a] man of sense only trifles with them.’ Needless to say, this made me determined to write a strong woman heroine.

The nature of obsession is a very strong theme in the book.  Do you have any personal obsessions?
No, I don’t. There is nothing remotely obsessive about my personality. In fact I think I am rather the opposite, something of a gadfly, always picking things up and putting them down, which is why I love writing historical novels. You can immerse yourself entirely in a world quite alien to your own for a year or two and then simply walk away and find another time and place to inspire you. I am, however, fascinated by the obsessive personality, the character who is so utterly driven by their passion for something that he or she can conceive of no boundary beyond which they are not prepared to go. Obviously such fixation is frightening but it is also fascinating and even, in some cases, admirable. For Grayson Black it is obviously a manifestation of his growing madness but I wonder if it is not also a condition of greatness to be in the grip of a single-minded obsession.

Your first two novels are both set in London. What is it about the city that attracts you?
London is in my blood. I grew up there, went to school there and, after a short break in the USA, am now raising my children there. So it is a place I am both very familiar with and endlessly curious about. And of course London has more stories to tell than could ever be written. It has been one of the largest cities in the world for centuries and, as a result, has always embodied to the full all that is best and worst in city life. And, because it is a chaotic accumulation of its history rather than a homogenous whole like, say, Paris, there is always something new to discover, some strange anomaly or hidden surprise to find. When I was researching The Nature of Monsters, for example, I discovered Denis Severs’ house in Spitalfields, an original Huguenot silk weaver’s house where an American artist, sadly now dead, has, with extraordinary attention to detail, created a house – complete with half-eaten meals, unemptied chamber pots and discarded clothes – that appears to be still occupied by a family of the eighteenth century. As he said to his visitors, ‘I'm going to bombard your senses. I will get the 20th century out of your eyes, ears and everything.’ I was sceptical but it works brilliantly, partly, I think, because London is full of the ghosts of untold stories and this is a place for them to come alive. If I was never to write about any city but London, I know I will never run out of stories to tell.

What are your favourite historical novels?
I was slow to enjoy historical fiction and I think I rather ducked away from it when I was younger, believing it to be either dry and dreary, or all histrionic high drama and heaving bosoms. The first historical novel that truly blew me away was Hilary Mantel’s extraordinary A Place of Greater Safety, an exploration of the bloody French Revolution of 1789. Mantel’s three protagonists are Danton, Robespierre, and Desmoulins, the three real-life men at the heart of the Revolution, but, though she bases the novel on meticulous research, she freely extrapolates from what is known of the three men’s personalities and relationships with each other to construct their pasts and create a novel of dizzying intelligence and complexity. I understood from Mantel that great historical fiction does not use the past for its colourful costumes and settings but to elevate contemporary themes out of the personal and private realm – against an unfamiliar backdrop they gain greater clarity and depth. There are too many wonderful historical novels to list here but some of my favourites include both Music and Silence and Restoration by Rose Tremain, Pat Barker’s Restoration trilogy, Waterland by Graham Swift, The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields and, of course, the granddaddy of all historical novels, Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

When you are writing reviews do you try not to think of yourself as a novelist?
When I am writing reviews I try not to think of anything except the book and my connection with its characters or, if it is non-fiction, its arguments. Obviously one reads a book one is going to be required to produce an opinion on more closely than a book one reads for sheer pleasure but ultimately one is just another reader, providing one’s honest opinion of a piece of work. I tend to read a book straight through, making notes of thoughts that occur to me along the way, and then put it away for a day or two. When I then return to it I find that my opinions have crystallized and I am able to set down the four or five points I would like to make about the book pretty quickly, using the notes I have made to support my views. Of course there are moments when you think that, if it had been your book, you’d have done this or that differently, but I think that, if a book is flawed, every reader has those feelings. Anyone who reads a book is given temporary custody of its characters and, if you feel they act out of character or that the story loses its way, you want to change it whether it is in your job description or not.

What are you working on now?
I am working on a novel set in French Louisiana. When I was researching The Nature of Monsters I found myself fascinated by the South Sea Bubble, the first ever stock market crash, which convulsed London in 1720. It bankrupted thousands of investors but London’s crash should not have come as the shock it did for it had been presaged, some six months beforehand, by a similar crash in Paris. London’s financial disaster was a result of fraudulent behaviour; in France the situation was somewhat different. A Scottish economist, John Law, had persuaded the Regent that a modern economy should be built not on gold but on paper and credit. He established a royal bank to oversee this, which he intended to finance through the wealth he was sure could be generated by the new French colony in America, Louisiana. As it happened, the French colony was a disaster. The colonists were, for the most part, soldiers or adventurers, hoping to make easy fortunes. No one was interested in cultivating the land. The climate was hostile. In the first twenty years of the colony a vast area of land (covered now by 13 American states) had a population of fewer than 500. In the winter, when food was scarce, the soldiers were billeted with Native American tribes so that they might survive. 
John Law knew that he had to change that. Between 1717 and 1721 he dispatched 6,000 French men and women to Louisiana, some transported from prisons and orphanages, others hand-picked as wives for the colonists already there. For the latter the state provided trousseaux to the value of 200 livres and a daily salary until they could find a husband. These women undertook a dangerous voyage of more than 3,000 miles to a hostile land to marry men they had never met. As you can imagine, my only difficulty is with knowing exactly which of their stories to tell!

Inspiration for The Nature of Monsters

The sheer volume of literature on the subject of maternal impression and ‘monstrous births’, produced for the most part during the 16th and 17th centuries, is prodigious. The woodcuts shown here are taken from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Historia Monstrorum, an encyclopaedic and profusely illustrated volume first published in 1599. Aldrovandi was one of the foremost zoologists of the Renaissance and, although his book doubtless traded off a fashionable fascination with freaks and curiosities, it was considered by contemporaries as a learned and comprehensive compendium of every sort of ‘monster’ ever born, from conjoined twins and hermaphrodites to strange amalgams of human and animal forms. Mermaids and werewolves were among the more exotic creatures to feature in its pages but it was the illustrations shown here of children born with the heads of animals that provided the direct inspiration for Black’s experiment in The Nature of Monsters.