"The Cleaner of Chartres" by Salley Vickers

I have already enjoyed Vickers' Miss Garnet's Angel (five out of five) and Mr Golightly's Holiday (4.5 out of 5); she is an excellent novelist with an unusually lyrical style and an interestingly religious perspective on the world.

In this book, Agnes cleans Chartres Cathedral and private homes for a variety of interesting characters. Her story is interwoven with flashbacks to her history: her foundling origin, her convent upbringing, her illegitimate child, her alleged crime and her stays in mental hospitals.

In the present a variety of individuals, from villainous Madame Beck to heroic Abbe Paul, interact with Agnes and with one another. The past haunts the present. The tragedy builds. Will the holy innocent become the sacrificial scapegoat?

If you have read Vickers before you will recognise themes and characters. As in Miss Garnet's Angel there is a good-looking young man on a scaffold restoring art. As in Mr Golightly's Holiday and Miss Garnett's Angel, religion is an important theme; people consider and reconsider the nature of their relationship with God. Organised religion gets a bad press: the convent probably does more harm than good and most of the priests and nuns question their vocation. Paganism comes out well: there was a Platonic school at Chartres and Agnes cleans the famous labyrinth.

Some characters develop and grow but others (the good Abbe and the villainous Madame Beck are the obvious) are stereotypes.

All in all, therefore, this book disappointed me a little; it seemed to be a reworking of ideas Vickers had already explored. Nevertheless, it is a good read; I finished it within a day. Most of all it retains flashes of the Vickers beauty: the luminous and numinous prose which makes one want to slow down to savour.

August 2013; 297 pages

"Miss Garnet's Angel" by Salley Vickers

Julia Garnet is a virginal school-marm who lives with her friend (but emphatically not lesbian lover) Harriet in a flat in Ealing. Then Harriet dies two days after their joint retirement and Julia rents an apartment in Venice for six months. Here the cautious, waspish, Julia comes face to face with beauty, passion and religion and the winter of Venice warms her wintry heart.

This charming tale of a barren old prude coming to terms with loneliness and barrenness is told with simplicity and elegance. Miss Garnet is so out of place in this modern, sensuous world and nowhere more so than in Venice, yet she is the rock of sense round which the other characters in all their foibles and weaknesses whirl; to whom they cling. Yet she is not a saint. Looking back on her empty life she realises that she has been spiteful, and damaged, and scared; that she has retreated from life and that this is a sort of sin.

Miss Garnet's unfolding is paralleled by a retelling of the Apocryphal Book of Tobit, in which Tobit's son Tobias travels with a spotty dog and the Angel Raphael to win a bride.

We learn a lot about Venice and about the Zoroastrians.

Delightful. November 2012; 335 pages

August 2016: This is one of those books that stay in your mind. Vickers has also written
The Cleaner of Chartres
Mr Golightly's Holiday which is simply superb!