Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl.” begins The Other Hand, a narrative that grips you almost immediately. The story of a Nigerian girl — Little Bee is the name she assumes to escape mercenary killers in her own country, Nigeria — who finds her way to the UK as an illegal refugee, the book is written like a thriller but has the emotional depth and complexity of a classic.
No wonder then that it comes with almost two pages of recommendations from the foreign press (“A powerful piece of art…,”says The Independent, “Ambitious and fearless… powerful and emotive,” gushes the Guardian and so forth) and, unusually enough, there’s even a special reco from the book’s editor who, without giving away any of the plot, expresses the hope that “you love the book as much as I do.” It would be easy for any book to not live up to such great expectations. But Chris Cleave, who won the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award for his debut novel Incendiary, pulls it off quite well.
The story is told in two voices. One is that of Little Bee herself, who effortlessly pull us into her world of refugeedom: We get glimpses of her life in custody — illegal immigrants are detained for varying lengths of time at a facility where they must absorb the British way of life before their fates can be decided. Little Bee, we learn, has spent two years in such a “jail”. Her efforts to pick up English as a way to survive and her paranoia at a fate worse than death are brought out quite skillfully but in a very understated manner.
Little Bee tells us quite cheerfully, as it were, that she has taped down her breasts and dresses in worksman clothes so as to not draw attention to her sexuality. She also mentions casually enough that she first figures out a way of killing herself when confronting any new scenario and place — just in case the “men (be) coming”. It is obvious that there is a great horror that she is fleeing but since this a narrative interspersed with gentle doses of humour, the effect is even more emphatic.
The other voice is a more sophisticated one: Of Sarah Summers, a British journalist, educated and worldly wise but just as marred by tragedy as Little Bee. A strange fate unites these women who have met just once before on a beach in Nigeria on a day that will have repercussions for both of them (and here, I must stop from telling you the entire story). Four years down the line, their paths intersect once more as Little Bee turns to the only person she knows in Britain, Sarah.
While the book reads like detective fiction in places and is entertaining enough for you to not want to put it down, don’t be deceived by the easy read. This one is a tragic tale, a horrifying one that forces everyone from a “civilised” world to sit up and think about the world order and our place in it. It forces light on an issue — and a geographical place, Nigeria, that few of us immmersed in our daily lives like Sarah would even think about. But brutal violence and atrocity is just round the corner in a globalised world.
The book’s success lies in the fact that it can draw so much empathy from us for a character whom we may not have been able to relate to at all in the ordinary course. The plot and the twists in the tale will do any writer of mystery proud but it is the character portrayal that finally impresses the most. Little Bee is not an exotic creature despite belonging to an alien order. But then perhaps, our own world is not so different. Cleave traverses these various worlds with ease: A third-world country, a land of plenty of middle-class people who cannot fathom loss, a tribal society, brutal, irrational, a sophisticated dissembling world... and many such scapes. The pace lags somewhat towards the end but that’s a minor complaint.
THE OTHER HAND
Author: Chris Cleave
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Pages: 430
Price: Rs 295