Vickers and Cathedrals
Leo Mercer
A hundred people gathered in Manchester Cathedral on Thursday night – not for a bible reading, but for a book reading, party of the Manchester Literature Festival. There could be no more appropriate place in town for author Salley Vickers to introduce her new novel, The Cleaner of Chartres, which is set in and around the cathedral in Chartres, in central France.
At the heart of the talk was a subtle, sensitive reflection on her writing process. She opened by announcing that whilst she hoped we had read at least one of her books, ‘I have to tell you that I have never done. The author never reads her book in the way she hopes her readers will’. For Vickers, writing a novel is never a perfectly planned project. She begins with a particular place or life experience that she is intimately familiar with. She shared some of those stories, like the time got lost in Venice as an arrogant, young girl and being struck, suddenly, powerfully, by the Basilica. This novel, telling the story of a cleaner of the cathedral, is rooted in her own student memories of being a cleaner in Earl’s Court, and her unexpected early-morning encounter with a real cleaner at Chartres. These ideas and encounters grow with time into something much bigger.
There are some themes Vickers finds herself drawn to in each of her novels. Not least are sacred spaces. Her best-selling Miss Garnet’s Angel is rooted in her experiences at the Church of St Raphael Angel in Venice. Delphi, which she called one of ancient Greece’s ‘numinous’ places, is at the center of her Where Three Roads Meet. And in the new novel, the Cathedral. Vickers fondly recalls that her parents were ‘committed atheists, but equally committed cathedral visitors’, which is how she first encountered the cathedral at Chartres. For Vickers, there is no particular religious vision behind her work, but she does believe that there is a dimension in all people that senses something beyond the purely material.
Myth is equally important. ‘The way in which stories are re-created and re-interpreted is present in all my novels’. Miss Garnet’s Angel features a retelling of the ancient Hebrew story of Tobit. (Vickers was excited to note that earlier on Thursday, the Cathedral Poetry Prize was awarded to another retelling of that same myth). Where Three Roads Meet focuses on the Oedipus myth. It has Tiresias come and retell his fascinating behind-the-scenes account of that story to Freud. Indeed, she admitted that she wrote that book precisely to force Freud to accept her understanding of the story. And in The Cleaner of Chartres, we are reminded of the statue of Theseus, that used to stand in the middle of its remarkable labyrinth in the center of the cathedral. This informs one of Vickers literary fascinations: examining, and being part of, the way in which we recreate the past, interpret it into things radically different from what they are.
A third significant theme is time. Her novels always employed what Vickers called a ‘double time scheme’. In Miss Garnet’s Angel, we are between Tobias in 720 BCE, and Miss Garnet in the present day. In Where Three Roads Meet, we straddle between Oedipus in ancient Greece and Freud in late 1930s London. In The Cleaner, a brief time span between the beginning and end of its protagonist’s life.
Vickers is an enthralling storyteller and engaging speaker. If The Cleaner of Chartres is anything like her, we’re in for a treat.
Salley Vickers, The Cleaner of Chartres, is out on November 15th.