Getting the knives out

It’s odd that this book should be about a cleaner, because it exactly conjures up the emotions I felt when I worked as a cleaning lady many years ago. Contemplating the grease-encrusted kitchen floor I was about to scrub, I’d cry aloud: ‘How long must I perform this thankless, gruelling task? Why me?’ These agonised expressions were wordlessly repeated as I waded through this dismal novel.

The main character is a girl called Agnes, and I spent many hours trying to work out whether she had no personality at all or too many personalities. She is wonderfully adept at managing restaurants, looking after babies and engaging in profound
philosophical dialogue; yet she remains disturbingly dim. She is illiterate, but works as an accomplished secretary. Occasionally, she tries to attack people with knives; yet we are supposed to like her. Every time I thought I had got her measure, she would metamorphose into an entirely different Agnes, duller than the last. She appears to be popular with everyone, but that’s not much of a recommendation, given the sorry state of the novel’s dreary characters. Not one single person springs to life.

To make matters worse, the story jumps confusingly in time and place. One minute Agnes is cleaning Chartres cathedral, whilst flirting with an antiques restorer; the next, she’s in a psychiatric hospital, attempting a Charlotte Corday impersonation, dripping knife in hand. A few grisly murders might have perked things up a bit, but tragically the lives of the lifeless characters are spared.

Chartres itself takes pride of place. The author has done an enormous amount of research, and there must be many fascinating things to say about this gracious edifice, but descriptions of it are unconvincingly plonked in leaden chunks into dialogue:

‘The farther spire,’ Mother Veronique gestured magisterially, ‘was built by Bishop Fulbert, who founded the famous Platonic School of Chartres.