Release Date: Expected 31st August 2023
Publisher: Headline | Wildfire
'I clean the offices and bathrooms and lobby five nights a week, but my actual job is to take care of everyone. They need so much help.'
At night, in a corporate office block in an unnamed metropolitan city, a cleaner begins her shift.
As she cleans Sad Intern's desk, she throws away some of her more alarming health supplements, and leaves her healthy snacks instead. Mr Buff's desk is immaculate, but he seems to have a secret smoking habit - not conducive to his fitness journey - which she's going to help him kick. She confiscates the knitted coaster that attractive, sensitive Yarn Guy has given to Cola Woman - someone who clips her nails in the office doesn't deserve his gifts.
But tonight, while scrolling through your emails, she'll discover the secret you've been hiding - the one that will threaten her job, and the jobs of everyone she takes care of. And you're about to find out that, sometimes, your most powerful enemy is the one you don't even see.
At night, in a corporate office block in an unnamed metropolitan city, a cleaner begins her shift.
As she cleans Sad Intern's desk, she throws away some of her more alarming health supplements, and leaves her healthy snacks instead. Mr Buff's desk is immaculate, but he seems to have a secret smoking habit - not conducive to his fitness journey - which she's going to help him kick. She confiscates the knitted coaster that attractive, sensitive Yarn Guy has given to Cola Woman - someone who clips her nails in the office doesn't deserve his gifts.
But tonight, while scrolling through your emails, she'll discover the secret you've been hiding - the one that will threaten her job, and the jobs of everyone she takes care of. And you're about to find out that, sometimes, your most powerful enemy is the one you don't even see.
"That's how most of these people know each other. It's all very surface level: faces and names. Not much else. It must be an empty way to live, to be so vapid and forever unknown. But of course, I know them all. I understand them, for better or worse."
The Cleaner is a subversive, speculative commentary on human connections and corporate culture that both engrosses and alienates it’s reader at the same time. It’s full of irreverent, dry humour and uncomfortably strange prose that just gives it such character and charm.
Our faceless, nameless narrator speaks right to us in a crude, blunt voice — a voyeur that we watch as they watch others. This singular narrator has a strange quality, with limited interaction with others and just one location — just a single moving strand of thoughts that move fluidly from one moment to the next. Their personality remains largely a mystery to us, only ever seeing what they want us to see. It’s isolating and eerie, especially as the mystery starts to take hold of the story and the uneasy tensions almost feels like they are really holding into our own secrets.
For the first half of the book, it’s almost plotless, a repetitive cycle of night shifts and subtle observations — something that usually would bore me with its slow, quiet pace but was actually quite charming. And when it picks up, it remains quiet and calm but with an added intensity and feverishness as our narrator finds more secrets, more problems to fix under the cover of night.
This wickedly clever story makes you wonder; how many people do you know, do you think about — but in return you’re a stranger, a faceless nameless figure especially in a hyper-connected world? And how much of your personality, of yourself, has been borrowed or stolen from the people you’ve known?
A delightfully strange and deeply unsettling read - if you don't absolutely love this, at least it'll make you think about checking your passwords aren't left on your computer monitor.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I was gifted an advanced reviewers copy of this title in return for an honest review.
Comments
Post a Comment