Little Bee

Little Bee by Chris Cleave
March 15, 2011

Today we had a good discussion about this book at our book club, and I want to make some notes about our response.
A quick summary would be to say that we all enjoyed this book, even though we felt it has several flaws.
Why did we enjoy it?
~It brings an important message about the plight of refugees trying to enter 1st-world countries and made us wonder what refugee centres are like in Canada. Our interest was aroused in the topic.
~ We found it moving and the characterisation memorable if not always convincing.
~We enjoyed Cleave’s elegant writing style.
~We sympathised with Little Bee and her situation.
~We enjoyed the complexity of the character, Sarah.
~We found the themes interesting. The treatment of refugees is the main theme, but we also discussed some other themes in the book:
~Globalization and how open borders apply to money and ideas but not to people. The current unrest in autocratic Arabic countries is an example of the new face of globalization.
~Personal accountability and the responsibility of the British characters to the situation of the Nigerian girl.
Our discussion ranged over several aspects of the book. We talked about the dual narrative which was distracting for some and decided that as the book is the story of two worlds, it was appropriate to hear it from two points of view.
We talked about Cleave’s challenge in adopting female voices to tell his story, remembered other books we had read in which a male author spoke through women, and decided that he had done a convincing job.
We found the character of Sarah interesting and found many scenes in which she displayed an impulsivity that we decided was her driving personality trait.
We felt there is a lot of coincidence in the plot, especially the contrived setting of the ending, on the same beach where the story started.
We found that the character of Little Bee, while very sympathetic, was not consistent. We found it surprising that she was able to manipulate Lawrence and behave so appropriately at the daycare centre and yet lose her cool with the policeman and use such inappropriate language with the taxi driver. She berated herself for not calling the police when Andrew was hanging himself and yet she did not know how to call them when Charlie went missing. We found the whole theme of her responsibility in Andrew’s death was unconvincing as we felt that she made strong efforts to save him within the limits of her ability.
Some members had read about the author and we were pleased to find out that he had researched his topic thoroughly and spent a summer working in a British refugee facility.
We agreed that the novel is a good organ for publicizing human rights issues that remain statistics when they are reported in a news format.
We discussed the difference between novels that depict gratuitous violence such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the horrific violence in the rape and murder scene of Little Bee’s sister, which was terrible to read but yet necessary to understand the danger of the character’s situation.
We were surprised by the internet reviewers who described the book’s ending as hopeful. We were unanimously certain that Little Bee was captured by the soldiers and would be tortured and killed. We found the book to be ultimately depressing because all efforts to save Little Bee failed. Furthermore, we were disappointed with the author who at the end shifted his theme from atrocities and the plight of the weak and intertribal warfare in Africa to focus on a future when black and white children would play together. The conclusion did not arise from the previous concerns of the novel and left the readers unsatisfied.
For all the faults that we found in characterisation and plot, we hated to pick the book apart because we all enjoyed reading it, found it moving, enjoyed the prose, and would recommend it to others.