I picked out Chris Cleaver’s “Little Bee” from the bookstore because it said #1 New York Times Bestseller on the front cover, and also because it said on the back cover, “We don’t want to tell you WHAT HAPPENS in this book. It is a truly SPECIAL STORY and we don’t want to spoil it…. Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens….”
Dear friends, this is what happened:
Little Bee a young Nigerian girl, and her sister had witnessed the ambush and massacre of her entire village by the oil company’s men- something to do with the discovery of crude oil deposits. The girls managed to escape but the oil company’s men gave chase and caught up with them on a certain beach where there happened to be an English couple who just happened to be vacay-ing in Nigeria. The couple could have saved both girls if they were both willing to cut off a finger each from their respective hands, but since it was just the wife who had the courage (and the humanity to make a sacrifice for a strange girl) to do so, only Little Bee of the two sisters lived to tell the story.
Anyway, years later the paths of the couple and Little Bee (“LB”) cross in England, where LB is an illegal immigrant. Man of couple kills himself on seeing LB (he can’t live with himself knowing LB’s sister was killed due to his cowardice), woman of couple invites LB to live with her and her litttle son, LB later gets deported, woman of couple follows LB back to Nigeria, where LB gets picked up by the Nigerian government’s soldiers. End of.
A truly special story this isn’t. I’ll admit, I was sold on the promised intrigue, and it is fair to say that the first half of the book delivered. After that though, it just started to drag, and I couldn’t wait to get it over with (and not in a good way). My first thought was that this is a story that could have been better told by a Nigerian (think Chimamanda Adichie). While it is pretty standard for people to tell other people’s stories, this particular effort wasn’t convincing. Although it is a work of fiction loosely based on factual events, the problem is that the supposed actual events did not and could not have happened like that, and there are enough people who know that or who can figure it out.
First of all, a company massacring a village where oil deposits have been discovered does not exactly equate to obtaining an oil prospecting licence or oil mining lease from the government. It beats my imagination how the oil company could have thought that sacking a village was all the permit they needed to drill for their oil. It is true that there are always disputes between governments, big oil companies and the indigenous peoples, but a sponsored massacre by an oil company is not something that I believe has ever happened, or could happen. The government, possibly! (Odi killings etc). But the oil company’s men? I think not.
Something else I found puzzling was the events that occurred after Little Bee returned to Nigeria. Why would the Nigerian government send soldiers after a young (sixteen year old) girl who was denied immigrant status by the UK government, many years after the atrocities of the oil company’s men? What kind of threat could she pose to them? How did they even know about her?
I won’t even go near the finger-for-a-life barter.
After concluding to myself that the book is riddled with inaccuracies in addition to not finding the story convincing in any way, I wondered whether The Kite Runner a book that I thoroughly enjoyed, could be another such book, guilty of taking liberties with actual events. It turns out that I was not the only one comparing Little Bee and The Kite Runner; the Library Journal, one of the reviewers of Little Bee said, “book clubs in search of the next Kite Runner need look no further than this astonishing, flawless novel …” There is a teeny weeny difference however- Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner is Afghan and therefore should be competent to speak on Afghan matters, or at least can be pardoned for taking such liberties. But when an English man takes such liberties with Nigeria’s story; that I think, is much harder to ignore.
Nonetheless, I may be the only one who feels this way about the book, because the people who know these things had nothing but high praise for the book –
“Little Bee will blow you away”- The Washington Post
“Immensely readable and moving …”- The New York Times Book Review
“Beautifully staged …”- Publisher’s Weekly
Oh, and this one –
“An ambitious and fearless gallop from the jungles of Africa via a shocking encounter on a Nigerian beach to the media offices of London and domesticity in leafy suburbia …”- The Guardian (UK)
Plus, the book is *soon to be a major motion picture*. I must not know what I am talking about.
