Maggie Gee: How clean is your world?

After her prophetic novel of London destroyed, Maggie Gee has written a satire on ethnic cleansing - in the middle-class household. Judith Palmer talks to her

It was Gee's first trip to Africa: surprising, perhaps, considering the extent to which she has explored issues of race in her fiction, and the fact that her husband grew up in Kenya. Her exquisitely observed e-mail diary relayed the daily excitement of her experiences. With great verve, she wrote about the irrepressible greenness of the vegetation, the modernity, the mobile phone shops, the national enthusiasm for Ugandan Big Brother, the doings of President Museveni, the villages devastated by Aids, the optimism and energy and the long hard slog of it all. Never far away were Gee's wry self-deprecatory digs at her own misconceptions, faux pas and near-misses.

She had gone to Kampala with the germ of a novel forming in her head, about the impulse to move away from one's hometown into the city, and the kinds of jobs one might do. "I am incredibly interested in Britain now, because that's where I am, and I want to understand it," says Gee. She never envisaged that Africa would end up inveigling its way into her story, but the Ugandan experiences took root in My Cleaner (Saqi, £12.99). "I started thinking it would be quite interesting to do a two-hander with two people looking at each other who really didn't get each other," she explains.

My Cleaner is a satirical novel, set in London, about shifting power-relationships and domestic misunderstandings. A black Ugandan woman, Mary, is unexpectedly called back to the UK by her former employer, Vanessa: a rather ghastly middle-aged writer. As a student, Mary had previously been the Englishwoman's cleaner and unofficial nanny to her only son, Justin. Now aged 22, Justin is having a nervous breakdown. Promising to pay handsomely, mean-spirited Vanessa persuades the African to come and help coax Justin out of his depression. Despite her new role, one of the questions Mary faces is whether or not Vanessa will ever treat her as anything other than "her cleaner". "It's not really a book about race at all. Though race is an interesting factor in the relationships," says Gee.

Among the other arenas is the raving hothouse of Vanessa's university creative-writing class. Gee surprised herself at how savagely she satirised the writing students and their lazy tutor, but considers that "writers are not necessarily the sanest and most balanced people in the universe, that's why they write - otherwise they'd just talk to other people and that would be enough. We're all a bit batty and when you get ten batty people together in a room, sometimes sparks can fly."

Like Vanessa, Gee has taught creative writing. Like Mary, Gee also worked as a cleaner in her late twenties, to support herself through studies. Wielding a duster for a few hours a day, with a rent-free room in which to contemplate Woolf, Beckett and Nabokov, initially seemed a good solution to the financial predicament posed by the PhD. But a dreadful stint as a live-in domestic for an ancient couple in Chelsea soon put her straight.

Rain poured into her basement room, ruining her books, and with no lock on the door there was nowhere to hide. She was never off duty, and the agreed three-hours-a-day turned into an Augean marathon. After that, she always worked in hotels: "Whatever you do, never live in."

Nowadays, Gee has a cleaner herself (euphorically and with deep gratitude). "I do think there's always this basic problem that as women we are freeing ourselves to do better-paid work by employing another woman (almost always a woman) to do worse-paid work," she admits. "The other thing about cleaners is that they know everything about you - more than anyone else... Any cleaner worth her salt is going to look in your drawers, try on your clothes. I would."

"I loathe housework and I'm bad at it," she confesses, glancing around her dining room. Our eyes alight on the cloth-covered table in the corner. I know about cloth-covered tables and the paperwork that the bulges are likely to conceal. Gee nods. It's a relief to note the possibility of hidden mess, because Gee is terribly well groomed: elegant, slender as a reed, with finishing-school bone structure and the neatest of blond bobs. This look she mercilessly self-parodies in Vanessa, My Cleaner's self-obsessed "writer-lady". It's as if she has bravely followed the exercise she used to set her creative-writing students - to describe yourself as your worst enemy might see you.

Perhaps the greater bravery, however, is for a headmaster's daughter from the Dorset seaside to write in the first person as a village-born Ugandan. Gee anticipates a few nigglers. "Obviously, it's a risk," she says, "but it would be a kind of ghetto, wouldn't it, if white writers could only write about white characters? Some people will say 'appropriation' and all that, but I feel we have got to imagine each other, or else it's hopeless. Women men, men women, black people white people, Muslims Christians. That's what I think fiction can do. That's the fun of it for me... You get to be somebody else. Because we all lead quite little lives, in a way, don't we - because they're short."

An arch-experimentalist in her early books, Gee now prizes clarity over complexity. My Cleaner is less overtly political, too. "There's the fear that people will think if you're political you're basically not literary," worries Gee, "and literature and words and sentences and rhythm are what I love. I have a very deep childlike sense of fairness and unfairness. That's what my politics is based upon," she continues. "I think life is such a mess, chaos and chance - but in a book you can have a benevolent authorial providence." She enjoys the control fiction gives her to tidy life up, make it fairer, reward her deserving characters, allow for redemption.

One of the literary games Gee has played over the years is allowing characters from previous novels to reappear. In The Flood, however, she swept them all away in an apocalyptic deluge. Why did she want to clear the decks? "I did want to bring it all together and say this is my fictional world that I've made up," she explains. "The Flood was the first book I'd written since September 11, and there was this feeling of fragility, that London could be destroyed. I suppose some unconscious part of me thought it could be my last book." Maybe it's a sign of hope, that after all the finality, one little character, a newsagent, manages to climb on board the novelistic raft, and wash up in an unobtrusive corner of My Cleaner.

With its London suicide bomber and its tsunami, The Flood was chillingly predictive. My Cleaner is a calmer, happier novel. Yet a gnawing tragedy lies in the shadows, all the more poignant for the deftness with which it's brushed aside. While Mary tends to Vanessa's broken son, the question remains, where is Mary's own son? Might he have gone to fight the Americans in Iraq?

Finishing her tenth novel feels like a milestone for Gee. She reckons she might now take a short break from fiction, and is currently contemplating a book about the influential evolutionary biologist WD Hamilton, whose work explained the genetic evolution of social behaviour.

"I wouldn't mind writing a book about him and how evolutionary biology has changed my life," says Gee. And how has it? "Realising we're animals," she replies. "Realising that human beings live in a succession of constructs ... Realising how much of what we do is not really what it seems, but is all about status display, or making a cohort, or power-groups, or trying to get advantage for one's children. It's a different way of reading life."

Conversation turns back to Iraq, and the effects of the terror attacks here. As a chronicler of multicultural London, isn't this the subject she would want to tackle next? "I don't want our beautiful London to be turned into a place of fear. It's a disaster," she says. "Perhaps that is the next. Oh, I do hope not. Please don't make me write about that..."

MAGGIE GEE: Biography

Maggie Gee was born in Poole, Dorset, in 1948. She wrote her first novel at 25, and was one of Granta's original 20 "Best of Young British Novelists" in 1983. She was a Booker Prize judge in 1989 and has taught creative writing at universities including East Anglia and Sussex. Her 10 novels include Dying, in Other Words; Light Years; Grace; Lost Children; The Ice People; The White Family (shortlisted for the Impac and Orange prizes) and The Flood. My Cleaner is published by Saqi Books next week. Maggie Gee is the first female chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Kensal Green, north-west London, with her husband, the writer and broadcaster Nick Rankin, and their daughter, Rosa. In Uganda, Gee spent time with the Femrite writers group: femrite@infocom.co.ug