Too Many Tears: A review of Little Bee by Chris Cleave

It's hard to quantify what makes writing bad, but about one third of the way into Chris Cleave's novel Little Bee, I had a wicked idea. I should count the instances of characters crying. The word, "cry" itself is used in abundance, but Cleave pretty much exhausts the Thesaurus for synonyms as the tears flow.

Crying punctuates every emotional conversation, along with gestures like turning dramatically away, holding one another, hitting things, holding one's own head in one's own hands, and so on.

Had I counted the cries, I would have a fact to substantiate my claim that Cleave took a great, relevant social concept, and wrote it into the ground. But I did not have the interest nor the patience.

So instead, I will just say so: Cleave took a great, relevant concept and wrote it into the ground. His characters acted in grand gestures, wore their symbolism loudly, overexplained their motivations, and seemed stuck in melodramatic loops that felt like they were created in a lab.

The story can be summarized like this: Two women, one Nigerian refugee and one English magazine editor, participate in the same horrible event in Nigeria. They end up together in England. Tears and revelations ensue.

Admittedly, the better I know a topic, the more critical I am about how it is presented. I work with refugees, and I have African friends. One of my closest ministry partners is Nigerian, specifically from the same tribe as the character in Little Bee. So when someone told me about Little Bee, I felt like I should read it. I was wrong.

What might have been an upsetting personal look at how rich countries deal with third-world suffering ended up feeling like a cross-cultural soap opera, with agonizingly obvious revelations, improbable twists that just kept coming, and some confounding moral questions which the author was, in my opinion, unqualified to address.

On the bright side, Cleave, a white man, made a lot of money off this piece about suffering women. Hopefully he spends it addressing the social problems introduced in the story, so that someone who the story purports to speak for will benefit from it.