My Cleaner

I thought that I had touched the sky with Maggie Gee's previous novel, The Flood, but My Cleaner (perfect title) is even better, richly funny and moving. Vanessa Henman is a middle class writer who for the past 25 years has taught creative writing (instead of writing), who lives `in that big empty house, so much too big for only two people' and who has too many books that she doesn't read or need, too much of everything. She has raised her handsome, intelligent son Justin as a single-parent mother, but, blind to her failings as a mother, blames her ex-husband for what has happened to Justin. Justin has abandoned his job, mopes about the house all day and hates everyone except Mary, an Ugandan village girl who was Vanessa's cleaner when he was a boy. Mary now is a Makerere graduate living in Kampala, but somehow she has escaped the corrosive effects of education and urban life. Her preoccupations are the people she loves, her son who has been taken from her and her kabito (boyfriend). She believes in God and loves to sing and dance. She is grateful to be who she is. She needs money and, when Vanessa asks her to return to London to look after Justin, she accepts. Maggie Gee confronts in this novel (one is tempted to say parable) life as so many of us in Europe and America now experience it: a sterilized life separated from the soil that nourishes us, of neuroses and trivial preoccupations, godless and lonely. She juxtaposes Vanessa and Mary (choosing an African, one suspects, because an English rustic would be a less convincing foil), leads us through a fascinating story happy and painful by turn, and makes her case with convincing authenticity of detail, grace and wit. `It is strange how Mr Blair is always smiling (he seems happier than anyone else in Britain!). And he likes our President Museveni, and so does Mr Bush, who came to visit. They all like war, and so they all get on.' This reviewer believes that, with The White Family, The Flood and My Cleaner, Maggie Gee has secured a place in English letters that will survive our time. Another triumph.