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A flower bud coming into bloom
LITTLE BEE
By Chris Cleave
271 pp. Simon & Schuster $24
Reviewed by Marty Carlock
One of the most engaging initial paragraphs I have ever read opens Little Bee:
Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming. Maybe I would visit with you for the weekend and then suddenly, because I am fickle like that, I would visit with the man from the corner shop instead—but you would not be sad because you would be eating a cinnamon bun, or drinking a cold Coca-Cola from the can, and you would never think of me again. We would be happy, like lovers who met on holiday and forgot each other’s names.
During the first chapter, Chris Cleave draws a picture of the strong and resourceful Little Bee, introduces three equally authentic refugee women, and leaves them all in a tense dilemma—unaccountably released from the Black Hill Immigration Removal Centre and standing in the sun with no place to go and no way to get there.
Because Bee’s voice is so likable, it was disappointing to find the second chapter is narrated by an English woman, Sarah. She is a successful magazine editor who nevertheless makes many fewer good decisions than Bee does. She is missing the middle finger on her left hand, a situation she wryly refers to as “a phantom digit that used to be responsible for the E, D and C keys on my laptop.”The way she lost it—an incident referred to at first as “what happened on the beach"—is horrendous, filled with helpless terror. It was also the first time she met Little Bee.
These two narrators alternate in telling the story. A crucial third character is Sarah’s son Charlie, who refuses to take off his Batman costume except for baths. Modeled on Cleave’s own four-year-old, Charlie’s true-to-life behavior brings a little levity, and a little hope, to what is essentially a tragedy.
If this review were to outline the story line, most readers would cross Little Bee off their lists. But the way Bee deals with life is much more important than what happens, and this is in no way a dismal read.
Bee has used her two years of detention in the Black Hill centre to perfect her English. She already spoke it: “it is the official language of my country,”she says more than once. But she senses that if she speaks it well and carries herself like royalty, she might fit into this alien place. As her model of diction, she takes the queen herself, and occasionally her linguistic skill serves her admirably. At one point she and Sarah are called to Charlie’s nursery school, where he is having a tantrum. One of the teachers gives Bee “a look which meant, I told you to stay by the door. I gave her a look back which meant, How dare you? It was a very good look. I learned it from Queen Elizabeth the Second, on the back of a five-pound note. The play leader took one step back and I went up to Sarah.”
Little Bee and the other African (and one Jamaican) characters ring true. The English—perhaps it is just their endemic personality—seem peculiarly colorless, except for Charlie. Sarah’s relationships with her husband, Andrew, and her lover, Lawrence, are conflicted, convoluted, and unconvincing:
Digging at the back of the cupboard for a refill of pepper, I found a half-full packet of the Amaretto biscuits that Andrew used to love. I smelled them, secretly, holding the packet up to my nose, with my back to Lawrence and Little Bee...I held Andrew’s biscuits in my hand. I thought about throwing them away and found I couldn’t...I felt horribly traitorous, suddenly. This is exactly why one shouldn’t let one’s lover into one’s home, I thought.
Cleave, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper in London, knows his craft well. He is a boffo writer, a master of foreshadowing and of disclosing crucial information at the right time. This book was inspired, his publisher says, by Cleave’s childhood in West Africa and his “accidental visit to a British concentration camp.”
How much should a reviewer reveal about a story that unfolds like a flower bud coming into bloom? The less, the better. Let’s just say this is a smart and contemporary book dealing sensitively and memorably with contemporary issues. It needs to be read.
Freelance journalist Marty Carlock, author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston, has published more than 1,600 articles in thirty-plus publications. At present she writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines and for her own amusement.
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