Book Review | Little Bee

Much as we may try to contain our tidy borders, the larger world seeps in.

That is the message of Little Bee, the second novel by Guardian columnist Chris Cleave. Little Bee recalls the on-the-run scenes and raw violence of Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone. It also recalls the illegal immigrant’s random capture in the film “The Visitor.” But finally, it is its own piece of art, a fiction employing alternating first-person narratives and treating themes of selfishness, greed and generosity.

Cleave’s first novel was, like this one, fueled by politics. About a terrorist bombing in London, Incendiary won the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award and, in the U.S., the Book-of-the-Month Club’s First Fiction Award.

Cleave writes with a journalist’s eye for the cutting and loaded detail and a novelist’s larger sympathies.

The new novel begins with the refugee called Little Bee, who speaks the Queen’s proper English, rounded by the musical and rhythmic influence of her native Nigeria. The chapters belonging to her read with the depth and wisdom of proverbs.

Little Bee has been stuck for two years in the Black Hill Immigration Removal Center in Essex, outside of London. The novel opens on the day of her release, a chance consequence of a bureaucrat’s trade for sexual favors with another detainee.

Little Bee is a refugee because she and her older sister witnessed the burning of her Nigerian village by men in the employ of shadowy players in an oil war.

But her story is not so different from the stories of others in the detention center, no matter where they came from.

As she says about the detainees: “All the girls’ stories started out, the-men-came-and-they. And all of the stories finished, and-then-they-put-me-in-here.”

How Little Bee survived to tell her story involves Sarah, a British magazine editor she chanced to meet on a remote beach in the southern part of her country. Sarah traveled there with her newspaper columnist husband, Andrew, in an attempt to rekindle the guttering flame of their marriage with a badly misplaced holiday.

Little Bee and her sister are on the run from killers wielding machetes. What happens that day on the beach appears to be a seemingly random collision of British tourists and Africans caught up in intertribal violence. But this chance encounter is propelled by a tarnished history of money and global politics.

At the end of the day Sarah has lost a finger, Bee a sister and Andrew his self-respect.

Two years later 16-year-old Bee shows up at the suburban London home of Sarah and Andrew, carrying Andrew’s long-ago discarded driver’s license as her passport to a better life.

Andrew has commited suicide, and her arrival on the day of his funeral is less a coincidence than a bid for redemption. How she achieves it is the story that unspools.

In contrast to Little Bee’s chapters, Sarah’s are more problematic. Despite all she has gone through, Little Bee has retained her innocence.

Sarah’s has been eroded by action and inaction since that violent day on the beach. She has indulged in an affair with a government press aide and allowed her magazine, Nixie, to blur into the rest of the glossy field with articles on sex and cosmetic surgery; politics sat in the dim margins, if at all.

Her 4-year-old son, Charlie, refuses to take off his Batman costume except for baths. His literal mask is a metaphor for how Sarah has been living — until Bee’s arrival: