Review: Chris Cleave's The Other Hand

Plagued by the stereotypes and tropes of the African continent this is an uneven book that feels like it’s been written by numbers.   

The characters are dislikeable, the storylines unbelieveable – and I really wanted to believe them but they were just too ‘pat.’ The narrative didn’t have the detail, tone or style that make a story sing.  For anyone who’s spent any time in Nigeria, so much of the detail is incorrect – as if the implied European reader can be hoodwinked, as if no one from Nigeria would actually read it themselves. There is a ridiculous marketing ploy on the back cover that won’t tell you what the book’s about because it’s so incredible and about-to-change-the-world and builds the book up to a level it can’t possibly attain. And falls very far short of. 

There is a four year old son whose persistently ungrammatical speech sounds just like padding and is far more annoying than it is endearing. There is the central character Little Bee who we are expected to believe can be naïve village girl one moment, then wise African mama the next and it simply isn’t convincing. There is the monumentally dull character Lawrence. And there is Sarah, about whom we should care very much, but don’t. The twists and turns in the plot feel like brutal devices to push the story further but do nothing to add depth to character or theme. I hate to barrack another writer when I know how much hard work goes into a novel but it's not often a book annoys me this much – I’m so glad it’s over.

How To Write About the West Country

Always talk about the West Country as if it were a single place, the rustic wilds beyond the M4 corridor aspic-ed in real ale and cream teas. You wonder where it begins and ends – does it include Dorset? The Cotswolds? Shrug off concern with geographic precision and waste no more time. No one really cares. When writing about the West Country, litter your prose with adjectives and phrases such as ‘timeless landscape,’ ‘rolling hills,’ ‘blousy hedgerows,’ ‘rough banks’ and ‘lush meadows.’  It is the land of long grasses, wildflowers and larks.

Never show West Country characters as well-rounded, intelligent individuals (unless they live in Bristol and listen to triphop – see below).  They have neither the technology nor the brainpower to invent, create or pioneer any products or services that others might want. Except cheese. They live like Laurie Lee in a bucolic paradise where the second world war has not yet happened.

People in the West Country generally fall into two camps: wurzels or aristos. Aristos wear pink trousers or have hair like Princess Anne, spend their weekends hunting and are, naturally, to be despised. They are the polo-playing jetset, appearing each week in the backpages of Country Life magazine. Tory politicians, hedge fund managers with weekend cottages and celebrities are a subset of this camp. There are no subsets of the former camp, though a query remains over women wearing round-toed sandals, patchouli and knitted rainbow scarves. They are usually addled on homegrown.

Everybody in the West Country is white – unless they are immigrants funnelled into urban centres where children point at them in the street and parents respond with unabashed, frowny stares. In exceptional circumstances, immigrants can be white and from Eastern Europe.  These people steal jobs from the locals, live in static caravans on farms with upturned trolleys in the yard and are known for stealing the road-signs to sell as scrap.

Young people are to be seen as dim, deprived and disenfranchised. They are trapped in a monotonous wasteland of arable or dairy farming from which they feel alienated and thus race around in pimped-up Ford Escorts, an action which inevitably leads to early and tragic death in an RTA.  Grey-faced, football-shirted fathers shake their heads in graveyards as young girls lay solitary red roses and sentimental cards written in big round letters with circles over every ‘i.’ Girls / young women never feel alienated like this. They are too busy nursing their multitudinous babies and sponging off the state. This is the endgame for the lusty wench, last seen serving ale in pewter tankards and lolloping her breasts over unlaced corsets under the rafters of roadside taverns.

No one you’d ever want to write about lives in a provincial town. Nor do they live in the following cities: Gloucester, Exeter, Cheltenham, Truro, Taunton or Bath (especially not Bath). They can, however, live in Bristol. In Bristol, they listen to triphop and may go to edgy warehouse raves in St. Paul’s. St Paul's is to be treated as per Peckham or Brixton – transfer cultural references across (no one will notice). In Bristol, they have art and art-house cinema and arty music which they listen to /watch / look at in horn-rimmed spectacles and ethical jumpers. They have been to the dark side.

People who live in the middle of nowhere are likely criminal and not to be trusted. Unless they are downshifters from London who’ve gone west to start a small-holding. These people are romantic idealists, idiots in dungarees with double-barrelled surnames.

Make knowing jokes about sheep and lonely men living in valleys.  Or bring it bang up to date with a scene about dogging in gravel pit car-park. 

West Country people spend their time at village fetes, farmer’s markets or car boot sales. The knowledge they all drink cloudy cider hardly bears repeating, so well understood is this fact. The only people who don’t drink cloudy cider are middle aged card-carrying members of CAMRA with beards and leather jerkins. This demographic accounts for a high proportion of wurzels and may be linked to the women in round-toed sandals.

None of this applies to Cornwall, which is equivalent to London with a coastline and must be treated accordingly. People there go surfing before breakfast, eat lots of mackerel (cooked by Rick Stein) and have bunting permanently strung between the trees in their gardens.

Finally, conspire with your reader by adopting a patronising tone when talking about people from the West Country - never countenance the possibility that they might be reading your book / article / blogpost too. Don’t be afraid to cash in a bit of nostalgia capital - end your book / article / blogpost wistfully with a quote from WH Davies about life being incomplete without having the time to stand and stare. 

(with apologies to Binyavanga Wainana)