My Cleaner Maggie Gee Saqi Books, 318pp, £12.99 ISBN 0863565441

Maggie Gee is rare among novelists writing today, in that she is not afraid to use her imagination. She has no fear of getting into the mindset of white racists, as she did to powerful effect in The White Family, which was shortlisted for the 2002 Orange Prize, or of imagining the consequences of a monsoon that envelops London in water for good, as in last year's The Flood. You can almost imagine her saying, in the same terse, unaffected style in which she writes: "Well, surely that's the whole point of writing."

Her tenth novel, for certain, has a point, one that Gee makes superbly well. It's all very well for white, middle-class people to feel magnanimous by giving the job of cleaning their houses to African migrants, but what happens when the balance of power shifts and a once-meek African woman not only starts telling her employer what to do, but shows that she has a personality, a life and a role beyond that of "cleaner"? My Cleaner is another successful attempt on Gee's part to inhabit the mind of someone who is quite unlike her: in this case, a black Ugandan.

Vanessa Henman is a neurotic and, at first impression, rather pathetic white English writer whose literary inspiration has dried up, forcing her to churn out Pilates manuals, which sell well but embarrass her. Her only child, Justin, has reached the age of 22 and decided to take to his bed for good after a short-lived career as an advertising copywriter. This tiny family lives in a vast house that cannot clean itself - and Vanessa sees herself as being above the job of cleaning it.

Justin's depression and the state of her home lead Vanessa to seek paid help in the form of Mary Tendo, a Ugandan whom she once employed as a cleaner but who ended up becoming Justin's full-time nanny (on a cleaner's pay). Mary is a cherishable character, formidable and self-propelling, fixated on the goals of seeing her half-Libyan son and saving enough money while in London to make a proud return to the Ugandan village she left many years ago. Nothing can stop her, whereas her English counterparts are - literally and figuratively - constipated. Clogged up with soggy white food and burdened by choice, they retreat into themselves, never smiling, rarely leaving the house, fearing sentiment and noise. How can they say no to life, wonders Mary, as she thanks God for making her an African woman.

Mary enters the Henman household for the second time, on her own terms: she will not clean, but she will cook, and she will cook only good, fresh, healthy African food. If the pasty English people don't like it, they can cook for themselves or starve. If they don't want to hear her fart in the night, they should go somewhere else. If they want her to work hard, they must raise her pay. If "The Henman", as Mary refers to her statue-like paymaster, wants her son to recover from his depression, she must allow Tendo to laugh with him, to smoke with him in the garden (at least it gets him out of bed), to sleep in his bed.

This leaching of power from employer to employee could turn nasty, as it does in Joseph Losey's vaguely sadomasochistic film The Servant, but Gee restrains herself, allowing Mary's often galumphing efforts to bring some life into the house to have the desired effect without too much conflict or melodrama. Vanessa reacts with as much bemusement as fear, and in any case is so lost in her own self-justifying world that she finds a way of convincing herself not only that Mary is still her inferior, but that it was always her intention to devolve power to this unfortunate African.

Gee has said that she likes to offer not so much a clean-cut resolution in her novels as "a little way out of the woods". The fuzzy, messy search for light amid darkness is more recognisably human than any happy ending, and gives all her characters, white and black, male and female, the dignity of knowing that they live according to the choices they have made.

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