Janice may be 'just' a cleaner, as her husband keeps reminding her, but she is an extraordinary cleaner and an extraordinary woman whose services are in high demand around Cambridge, UK. She cleans for an opera singer and an ex-spy, amongst others. Her neighbour used to play cricket for India, the shoe-shop assistant used to play squash for England. But then, Janice's own father was a university professor and the bus driver's dad ran a bookshop. It's quite a place, Cambridge!
I love the idea of writing about ordinary people: a cleaner and a bus driver, brilliant. But they weren't ordinary at all. Cop out.
Janice collects the stories which show that ordinary people have extraordinary backgrounds. She likes stories that show that good people aren't always perfect but she doesn't like stories that show that villains may have redeeming features. And, although she collects the stories of others, her own story is locked deep inside her.
The plot revolves around Janice's latest client, an old lady who tells her, in instalments, a true story about a Parisian courtesan. The old lady's son is trying to persuade his mum to move into sheltered accommodation. Janice also cleans for his wife and has fallen in love with his dog, whom she walks. She's also trying to help the son of another client come to terms with the suicide of his dad. At the same time, Janice's husband, 'the man of a thousand jobs', is seeking new employment and taking Janice for granted.
The narrative is third person past, told from the PoV of Janice. It is perfectly paced with the Parisian courtesan story starting at the 25% mark, a major change in Janice's life occurring at 50%, major revelations at around 75% and the end-game happening shortly afterwards.
This is the sort of book where the plot is very much in charge (there is a lot of foreshadowing!). The characters were carefully observed but were subservient to the needs of the plot and I'm not sure I ever fully believed in any of them, although I certainly enjoyed old Mrs B and the dog with attitude. The villains were too clearly villains, without redemption, and the heroes were heroes without flaw. Janice herself had issues with her self-esteem but she was fundamentally another in the long list of Mary Sue heroines who seem to litter modern fiction: good at everything she turned her hand at. The bus driver was not just a bibliophile but able to talk calm control in a crisis. Even the protagonist, Janice, didn't really have a character arc; rather she went on a voyage in which she discovered that her fears were fundamentally groundless. The ending was twee.
Perhaps the best character was husband Mike. Everything he did was to take Janice for granted. But it was everything he did. There was not a single spark of redemption in him, except, perhaps, that he didn't hit his wife.
Perhaps the problem was that there were simply too many stories for the author to focus on developing the characters beyond the superficial.
Spoiler alert
There is a remarkable similarity between the heroines of this book and Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Both of them are overlooked women, both of them have remarkable strengths, and both of them get away with murdering abusive men, not just in the eyes of the law, but in the eyes of the reader.
Selected quotes
- "the bus doors sigh as if exhaling and shudder closed." (Ch 1). Great, I thought. This is a nice original way to describe the bus doors. But then she uses the same description again. They doors shudder three times (in the first thirty pages) and sigh at least three times.
- "At a funeral people were often lost, not just in their grief but, being English, immobilised by the fear of saying or doing the wrong thing." (Ch 3) The 'being English' annoyed me. Really? Isn't this rather an over-generalisation? Couldn't the sentence be as powerful if those two words were omitted? These two words turned an acute observation into a cliche.
- "This morning's driver looked like a geography teacher." (Ch 4) Another cliched observation. If this had been 'Janice's idea of a geography teacher' it might be reasonable but as it stands it isn't.
- "It still amazes her how much he swears. For a fox terrier." (Ch 7)
- "She wants to ask if he's having an affair but doesn't know how to say it without sounding hopeful." (Ch 16)
September 2023; 375 pages
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