Bridget Anderson’s Britain’s Secret Slaves (1993) unveiled the existence of slavery at the end of the 20th century in contemporary Britain, informing a shocked public opinion that in many a wealthy house of the UK domestic workers of Third World origin were systematically secluded, abused and beaten, sometimes raped. This paper traces the persistence of Anderson’s preoccupations in two examples of contemporary mainstream fiction, i.e. Ruth Rendell’s crime novel Simisola (1994) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopic work Never Let Me Go (2005), employing the ghost and the concentration camp as key interpretive paradigms.
The first case in point was explicitly based on Anderson’s research: Ruth Rendell’s Simisola (1994) is an Inspector Wexford bestseller that focuses on the mystery surrounding the identity of an African domestic worker. Local politics, class faultlines, and houses haunted by such domestic violence, all contribute to the creation of a complex social setting in a small community in quiet Sussex. The second one is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), an unsettling dystopian novel about an isolated college where test-tube babies are educated into their adulthood, in order to create a race of organ donors for ‘normal’ people in need. Ishiguro purges his novel’s setting from any postcolonial and multicultural connotation and depicts a visionary, a-historical (or alternative history) England that is also an allegory of the vampirist nature of contemporary society.