Revenge is, apparently, a dish best served cold. But in her novel The Cleaner, Mary Watson asks whether it is worth serving at all.
Esmie, her protagonist, arrives in Ireland with a vendetta; she is there to avenge her brother Nico’s death. Nico had been a lodger in a wealthy suburban neighbourhood, the Woodlands, but after an affair with an unknown woman returned home traumatised and tortured. Determined to discover what happened, Esmie, disguised as a cleaner, infiltrates homes in the area. Forensic in her fury, she vows to “hurt” Nico’s one-time lover and “destroy her, hair by hair, bone by bone”.
For Esmie, this is all in good faith. “Actions,” she shrugs, simply “have consequences”. Repeated throughout The Cleaner, her claim of almost cosmic certainty threatens to make the novel’s “moral terrain” (Esmie’s term) slightly flat. She helpfully rehashes her motive at regular intervals and dissects her own dilemma with disarming lucidity. Is revenge “majestic”, she asks, or a “sign of moral weakness”? The moments scan as set pieces of vengeful self-consciousness and, at times, resemble Hamlet-levels of hand-wringing.
As if to temper this predictability, Watson turns to whiplash-inducing plot twists. Esmie is “foreign”, “invisible” and seemingly unsuspected by her Woodlands clients. Watson’s cast of characters here is somehow simultaneously compelling and caricatured. It includes the manicured, manic woman who flits through flings with considerably younger men, the charmingly obsessive professor with a fawning PhD student, and an abusive GP whose desperate wife has a grim penchant for prescription drugs. Esmie may be an interloper in these privileged, paranoid circles but she is also quickly implicated in their cruelty and carelessness. The Cleaner becomes all the more propulsive as her vigilantism veers off course.
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The Cleaner is Watson’s adult debut; her previous, YA novels have been met with acclaim, nominated for the Irish Book Awards and the Carnegie Medal. At times, Watson cannot quite cast off this earlier mode of writing. This novel is probing on class and privilege but perhaps has a tendency to overexplain its efforts. The novel’s twists resemble a “deus-ex-machina” kind of deliverance from an extremely dense plot line. But, as a whole, The Cleaner is no less compulsive and ambitious for that.
Philippa Conlon has written for the TLS, Prospect, and The Oxford Review of Books
