“Little Bee,” by Chris Cleave, is the “story of two women,” as it says on the back cover, and how their “lives collide” at two points, two years apart. The back cover implores the reader not to spoil the book for others because “the magic is in how the story unfolds.” I won’t give away the ending, but I can summarize its impression on me in one phonetically spelled non-sentence: Double-yew-tee-eff.
“Little Bee” begins in an imaginary immigration detainment center in Essex where our first protagonist, Nigerian Refugee Little Bee, has been held for two years. Her only belongings are the donated clothes on her back, a bottle of red nail polish, a pocket dictionary, a UK drivers’ license and business card belonging to a man named Andrew O’Rourke.
It is thanks to Andrew’s wife, Sarah Summers, that Bee is even alive. Sarah, without thinking, traded her left middle finger for Bee’s life two years before on a Nigerian beach. When a fellow inmate “persuades” one of the guards to let her go early, Bee is also “accidentally” released. With no papers and nowhere else to go, Bee calls Andrew and begins the long walk from Essex to Kingston upon Thames. When she appears on his doorstep five days later, Sarah is dressing for his funeral. Andrew killed himself not long after getting the phone call. Sarah realizes that the fragmented pieces of her ordinary life are all tied back to one split-second, a life-altering decision in Nigeria.
The book begins in the middle of the plot and continues in a non-linear fashion, narrated in turns by Little Bee and Sarah. The narration is poignant and often funny, in spite of the dark subject matter. Little Bee and Sarah are both introspective characters navigating the divide between the childish world of good and evil, represented by Sarah’s son Charlie in his endless crusade as “the batman” between “goodies” and “baddies,” and the adult world where justice and morality are suspended in fear. Little Bee’s narration is punctuated by asides to the imaginary girls-back-home, all killed by “the men,” which serve to highlight the strangest differences between her new and old life. The horror of Little Bees’ past belies her internal stability and humor, throwing into sharp contrast the trivial lives of the everyday English and vilifies their unconscious racism and indifference to abject suffering of those in other nations.
Sarah’s narration is intensely cerebral. She and her husband were both writers and Sarah edited a cosmo-esque magazine called “Nixie,” which she started in an attempt to hide serious “issues” in ladymag packaging. She’s disillusioned with modern life, her shallow job, motherhood, suburban life and her husband – but not her lover Lawrence, who she picked precisely because there were no illusions to be had; she is perturbed by an overall sense of her disconnectedness between one aspect of her life and another. While Sarah is highly intelligent and caring, she’s prone to self-absorption and rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It makes her a bit stereotypical for a 32 year old, working mother character.
Cleave did a great deal of research for the novel, especially on alternative English dialects for his immigrant characters and it is possible that inspiration for Sarah came partly from “Sex in the City.” “As a man, it requires concentration to write from a female perspective [since] I’m consciously writing from someone so different from myself,” Cleave says. Unfortunately, this attitude permeates the entire work and although it was not the author’s intention, it subtly grates on believability of the narration.
In the final third of the book, Little Bee is deported as Cleave’s deadline apparently caught up with him. The plot is put on fast-forward and the contemplative narration struggles to keep place as Sarah, Little Bee and the batman attempt to resolve conflict in the last 35 pages of a 260 page book. The end of “Little Bee” is ironically both predictable and out of the blue while failing to deliver any sense of closure. The book ends with a scene on another Nigerian beach where little Charlie removes his batman costume and Little Bee tells him her true name. Meant to be a powerful statement about facing the fear of oneself and the “baddies” within, the scene is robbed of its impact by the hurried ending and the narrative feels unfinished.
This isn’t to say that Little Bee isn’t worthy of its acclaim – perhaps only every third gushing review is unwarranted. It’s the kind of book that may have been great with only one more draft.