In Depth
Shock and awe
23.05.08 Alice O'Keeffe
“A nightmare” is not how most authors would describe the publication of their first novel, but then Chris Cleave’s experience was unique. His début Incendiary, with its central plotline of a terrorist attack on London, came out on 7th July 2005—the day 56 people died in the London bombings. All advertising was pulled and the book was withdrawn from sale by many retailers. However, Incendiary went on to garner critical acclaim, win the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award, and is due to be released as a film starring Michelle Williams and Ewan McGregor later this year.
His second novel, The Other Hand (Sceptre, h/b, £12.99), will be published in August, and it tells the story of two very different women: Little Bee, a young African village girl, and Sarah O’Rourke, a British magazine editor in her 30s, who first meet on a Nigerian beach in the novel’s pivotal scene. When Little Bee makes the journey to England following their encounter, she intends to track Sarah down, but finds herself in an immigration removal centre—an environment the author had come across years before.
When Cleave was 22 and “taking any job in the [university] holidays to pay my way”, he recalls sitting on a minibus with other casual labourers, being driven through a series of perimeter fences. “There were these thin, frightened-looking people, banging on the windows of our van. We had no idea what was happening.”
It turned out Cleave was there to serve food in the canteen; the catering staff had walked out in protest at conditions. He was shocked: “It was the first time I had an inkling that there was such a thing as an asylum-seeker and that they were kept in concentration camps. It’s the textbook definition of one: you concentrate people together behind barbed wire and then deport them to places where they are mostly going to die.”
The experience stayed with him: “I thought these people are just human beings. There’s no way this should be happening in this country that I’m proud to be a citizen of.”
As with Incendiary, Cleave is not afraid of writing about issues he sees as central to the world we live in now, but notes wryly: “When you say immigration, people’s eyes just glaze over.” So he’s keen to stress that The Other Hand isn’t a campaigning or political novel: “I’m just a writer trying to find a story. It’s the duty of a novelist first of all to entertain readers. If readers learn something, then that’s great, but it’s their choice.”
Reflecting, he observes: “The book is not really about immigration, it’s about love and identity, how people discover who they are and which layers of identity they are prepared to give up.” It has a strand of humour, mainly drawn from Sarah’s four-year-old boy Charlie (who refuses to remove his Batman costume).
The Other Hand also grips like a thriller. The story is narrated in alternate chapters by Little Bee and Sarah. The challenge of writing from the female point of view was one Cleave relished. “I like to write in the first person, and I didn’t find it any more difficult than writing any human being. What really defines someone is their voice and their speech pattern, the language they use and the way they express themselves.” As part of his extensive research, he interviewed refugees, asylum charities and those running the immigration system.
“I was struck by the number of stories which started: ‘The men came and they . . .’ Peace-loving villagers would have these groups of itinerant men descend upon them and cause chaos. The only non-combatants are women, so structurally it had to be a woman’s voice—hence Little Bee. And when she comes over to the UK, she’s most likely to befriend another woman—hence Sarah.”
On graduating from Oxford, Cleave undertook a variety of casual jobs, including delivering yachts. One memorable trip was with “an Israeli guy, who was about 70, who hired me to sail his boat from Marseille to Tel Aviv . . . he would sit drinking beer and tell these amazing stories”.
After a spell in Australia working as a barman, Cleave returned to the UK to work on the Daily Telegraph’s fledgling internet site, then with a staff of two and a single Mac. This was followed by Lastminute.com, which Cleave quit in 2003 in order to write full-time. “I saved up some money and gave myself 18 months to get published. I scraped in at 17 months—I had £222 left in my bank account when the first cheque came through for Incendiary.”
Leaving a job in order to throw yourself into writing is a risk. And after the saga of Incendiary’s publication, Cleave felt he needed to throw the dice again, changing his agent (from Laetitia Rutherford to Peter Straus) and publisher (from Random House to Hodder). But the signs this time are promising: the first set of proofs for The Other Hand were snapped up so quickly that Hodder had to reprint.
He, however, is just delighted to be able to write. “I’ve always been between three days and 18 months of having to stop and get a proper job. I love writing, but I don’t do it to change the world, I do it to entertain people. But I don’t see why I shouldn’t write about something that moves me at the same time.”
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