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PookyGurl
read and liked
Shannon's
review of The Nature of Monsters:
"I am definitely guilty of wanting to read a book simply because I love the cover, though I do take into consideration the plot as well. But here we have a dark, gothic novel set in the early 1700s, more twisted and mad than Mr Rochester's crazy wife,...more
I am definitely guilty of wanting to read a book simply because I love the cover, though I do take into consideration the plot as well. But here we have a dark, gothic novel set in the early 1700s, more twisted and mad than Mr Rochester's crazy wife, complete with resourceful heroine and beastly experiments done in the name of science and medicine, set against the stinking refuse, pollution, grime and decay of London, as well as the political and religious freedoms, traditional superstitions and swaggering success (and plummeting fall) of the stock exchange.
Why wouldn't I want to read it? What's not to love?
Eliza Tally is the only child of a village midwife and herbalist, who knows she doesn't have long before the villagers openly declare her a witch, and so seeks to set her daughter up. She misjudges though when the young merchant's son claims they're not lawfully wed, and his father arranges for the pregnant Eliza to be sent off to London, to work as maid servant for an apothecary whom he is paying to keep her out of the way. Eliza goes willingly, expecting the apothecary, Grayson Black, to give her an illegal abortion.
Mr Black, however, has other uses for Eliza. Born with a disfiguring birthmark covering half his face, he is of that society of physicians and scientists looking for proof between the then-popular theory of maternal impressions and deformed babies. A pregnant woman who has a hare cross her path will give birth to a child with a harelip, things like that. It gets more and more grotesque, though, and by frightening Eliza with her fear of dogs Black expects her to give birth to a dog-like monster.
In his household is another maidservant, Mary, an idiot with a cleft palate, hairlip, little sense, and a childlike wonder for things, especially small animals. When his experiment with Eliza fails to bring the results he craves, and his addiction to opium becomes more and more pronounced, he turns to Mary, encouraging her love of monkeys.
It is not until Eliza looks at the pictures inside one of the books Mr Black has her return and collect from the bookseller, a French refugee with his own designs on the servant girl, that she realises what the nature of her master's work really is. A prisoner of his house, which is ruled over by his forbidding wife and the apothecary's assistant, Edgar, Eliza must find a way to rescue herself and Mary, before Mary's baby becomes a freakshow. (Even Eliza believes it will be a monster.)
The story is narrated by Eliza with all her lower-class frankness, nothing dressed up or masked or hidden but all the vulgarities on display, creating a very vivid portrait of the period, the people and her own predicament. Her chapters are separated by Grayson Black's journal entries and "scientific" notes, by letters to and from the apothecary or his wife, playbills for tonics and the like, giving us an added insight into what was going on in Grayson's mind, and what has happening beyond Eliza's knowledge at the time. They are brief but insightful, allowing the reader to piece things together and know more than Eliza, in some respects. (How she came by these documents is explained at the end.)
The prose is engrossing, and while there is little actual dialogue you don't even notice because Eliza relates all with no embellishment, her perspective at once ignorant and astute, her hopes gleaming through the cracks in her awful situation. The characters are morbid and, in their own way, grotesque - surely an irony they failed to see. The question of, who is the real monster? is an apt one - ethics, Clark says in her note at the back, weren't even considered while the emminent scientists of the day vivisected living dogs for study. There was no need for the story to visit a real freakshow; the house of Grayson Black is freakshow enough, simply by dint of its inhabitants being so grotesque. It is frightening what was considered medicine not so long ago, even though it is a foundation of sorts for modern medicine, but all the bleeding, cupping, leeching, and idiotic ideas regarding giving birth are terrifying.
As a historical novel, The Nature of Monsters is alive with detail and a great portrait of the time, albiet from a particular perspective and class of society. As a story, it's at once tense, chilling, gripping and absorbing, its natural morbidity softened by Eliza and Mary, and the hope of a happy ending. It's not a love story, more a story of survival, and the real fascination comes not from the medical freaks, but from those who study them and think to blame all the problems and defects of newborns on women and the theory of maternal impression.(less)
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