FIRST FICTION

THE nostril-catching title of Clare Clark’s first novel is borrowed from the calamitous London heat wave of 1858, when the fetid Thames -- the escape route for the bodily wastes of 2 million souls -- was cooked into a foul stew and the city itself was smothered in a thick, miasmic fog.

From this aromatic true-life disaster, Clark -- a Cambridge-trained historian -- has fashioned an enthralling thriller that gamely plumbs the depths of Victorian London, descending into the dank underworld of the globe’s then-largest metropolis: a vast and increasingly overwhelmed sewer system, on the verge of a major overhaul that will, if successful, take its place among history’s great engineering feats.

Who knew that drainage could be so captivating? And, more to the point, that excrement could be so, well, lyrically malleable? “The Great Stink” is a trove of olfactory poetry. In a typical London lane, we inhale “the sweetish reek of rotting refuse spattered here and there with the hot grease of fried fish and the fart smell of boiled cabbage stalks.”

The waterfront is built, “reek by reek,” on “the pungent stinks of smelt, of bloater, of sole, herring, whiting, mussel, oyster, sprat, cod, lobster, turbot, crab, brill, haddock, eel, shrimp, skate and a hundred others.” And the river itself turns phantasmagoric in the unrelenting Great Stink:

“[W]eek after week, the Stygian pool of the Thames had stewed in the relentless sun and sent its putrid reproaches directly and powerfully into the House of Commons.” Solid waste -- the human kind -- appears so often (underfoot, splattering this way and that, sullying the trousers of the fearful) that we become variously inured to the stuff, astonished by Clark’s fortitude and nearly moved to tears by the miracle of modern sanitation.

In Clark’s telling, much of that miracle is the work of William May, recently returned to London from the Crimean War. William is an armchair botanist and committed engineer, one of those Victorians determined to transform the world in the name of science and empire.

He’s also seriously unhinged; the battlefields and war hospitals have left him with a slippery hold on sanity. Professionally devoted to the cause of waterproof bricks and a network of tunnels that will purge London of its waste, William -- married, with a son and another child on the way -- has begun to purge himself too, opening cuts on his arms with the nearest available blade, usually in the secret depths of the sewers, surrounded by rats, coursing filth and slimy walls sprouting mushrooms.

Amid the hardball politics and graft that attend the massive project, William’s compulsion makes him a target for blackmail. A brutal murder in the tunnels brings this claustrophobic and hugely addictive narrative into an explosive, nightmarish kind of daylight. Is William the murderer? Or merely a witness?

There’s a wonderful parallel narrative here too, of Long Arm Tom, a “tosher” -- one of the countless scavengers who make their living off the crumbling old sewer system. Tom pits his formidable mutt (her name is Lady) against rats in the sporting rings of London’s teeming pubs and is ultimately cheated out of this champion rodent killer by a shady gent known as the Captain.

The way that Clark joins these strands -- the crazy veteran, the salty Cockney and the elusive confidence man -- is, like the pipes and pump houses that promise to transform London, something of an engineering marvel.

“The Great Stink” is a crackerjack historical novel that combines the creepy intrigue of Caleb Carr, the sensory overload of Peter Ackroyd and the academic curiosity of A.S. Byatt. Clark gives us a ripely Dickensian London (in the manner of “Our Mutual Friend”) on the brink of modernity, where the taverns retain their medieval clamor, the asylums are glorified dungeons and public hangings are cathartic spectacles.

In acquainting us with the most private aspects of Victorian life, Clark gets into the very guts of London, and, by extension, of cities everywhere. And by putting us on intimate terms with “the stink of the gully holes” and “the stench of excrement and rotting seaweed,” she also manages to insinuate this wonderfully noxious tale straight into the most vulnerable of readerly faculties -- our sinuses.