I started reading this book last night after supper, and I've just finished it - at 3:15 pm on Monday. I chose it because I figured I could get it read between last night and Thursday morning, when we leave for the winter - but here I am left with having to choose another book to read! What a tough life!
Anyway, it was easy to read because it's short - only 246 pages, but also a good story, and well-written. This novel won the Governor-General's Award for Fiction in 2009. The three main characters in this story are based on real people - Lady Lucie Duff Gordon, member of the English aristocracy in 19th century London, Sally Naldrett, her maid, and Omar Abu Halaweh, her dragoman in Egypt.
Lucie suffers from tuberculosis, and is ordered to leave England to spend time healing and recovering in Cairo, so she leaves her husband and family, and takes Sally, her maid, to be her sole companion and nurse. In Egypt, she is advised to hire a male helper, and this is how Omar comes to be part of the household. He and Sally fall in love, she becomes pregnant, and has his baby. In the time leading up to the birth of the baby, these three have become very close and the lines of class have all but disappeared, but discovering Sally has "betrayed" her turns Lucie completely and ruthlessly against her, while making Omar even more indispensable in the meantime.
The story then, is summed up by Sally, the narrator, on the first page of this novel.
1. "The truth is that to her, I was not fully human."
2. "The truth is that she hated me for being happy."
Having had some recent - and ongoing - experience with ruthlessness based partially at least on class differences myself, I identified strongly with Sally, and it could have been me asking the question Sally poses at the end of the novel:
"Why is the world full of people who see fit to dispense with others as soon as it suits them? But I stop myself from having these thoughts, from thinking these things, and I get on with the task at hand. I'm very good at getting on with the task at hand - it's what suits me".
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