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‘The Other Hand’ is a book you’ve probably heard plenty about. It’s the book with the blurb that says ‘We don’t want to tell you what happens in this book’. It’s a clever piece of marketing that not only makes the book seem more mysterious, but also makes it possible for anyone to pick it up without prejudging it. The blurb is meant to make you think the book is special, that it stands out from all the other stories you could choose. Of course my cynical take on the world made me wonder why the book needed such creative marketing.
‘The Other Hand’ is a book that’s going to make people want to get involved with political issues. It would be hard to stand back after hearing Little Bee’s positive, vigorously practical story and seeing the extreme damage done to her by her flight from violence. Her voice is articulate, warm and straightforward. She can be bitingly confrontational, but these moments are surrounded by an extremely generous and spirited narrative so that readers do not feel alienated by extreme anger. She is the right kind of character to make readers engage with the problems of refuges, as her story encourages action rather than pity. There is also a certain amount of middle class heckling and some smug, placid western characters that will irritate people into action, just to prove they are not smug and placid. ‘The Other Hand’ is a valuable book, because it is a novel that compels people to change their behaviours to benefit the whole human race.
However while ‘The Other Hand’ is undeniably powerful I found the quality of its narrative a bit mixed. Some details made me feel like Chris Cleave really inhabited the skin of the female characters he created:
‘Learning the Queen’s English is like scrubbing the bright red varnish off your toes the morning after a dance. It takes a long time and there is always a little bit left at the end, a stain of red along the growing edges to remind you of the good time you had.’
Did he wear and remove nail varnish himself, or is he just super observant? It’s these miniscule things that amazed me and made me feel like Cleave was a guy who knew how to wholeheartedly write another gender.
Then he would switch to Sarah’s narrative and her thoughts seemed clumsily written; the maleness of the author started to intrude. In fact whenever the book switched to Sarah’s narrative, in about the first 180 pages, I got twitchy. Her narrative in these pages often seemed self-conscious, or falsely self pitying:
‘I wish I was a woman who cared deeply about shoes and concealer. I wish I was not the sort of woman who ended up sitting at her kitchen table listening to a refugee girl taking about her awful fear of the dawn.’
Apparently Sarah is the only person in the whole of middle class England who cares about the rest of the world. She is certainly the only western woman in this book portrayed as being interested in substance. She realises she hates the suburbs. She has to make a stand against the shallow magazine she’s created. She likes to make sure the reader remembers how she is not like other people. I think she is suppoused to be a woman struggling to regain her soul and as the book progresses she grows as she questions her existence, but the time spent in her company up until she relives a taunt, violent encounter on a Nigerian beach is extremely frustrating. After this scene Sarah’s sections become more alive and by the end of the book I was almost as interested in reading about her as about Little Bee.
‘The Other Hand’ is a book that’s going to make people want to get involved with political issues. It would be hard to stand back after hearing Little Bee’s positive, vigorously practical story and seeing the extreme damage done to her by her flight from violence. Her voice is articulate, warm and straightforward. She can be bitingly confrontational, but these moments are surrounded by an extremely generous and spirited narrative so that readers do not feel alienated by extreme anger. She is the right kind of character to make readers engage with the problems of refuges, as her story encourages action rather than pity. There is also a certain amount of middle class heckling and some smug, placid western characters that will irritate people into action, just to prove they are not smug and placid. ‘The Other Hand’ is a valuable book, because it is a novel that compels people to change their behaviours to benefit the whole human race.
However while ‘The Other Hand’ is undeniably powerful I found the quality of its narrative a bit mixed. Some details made me feel like Chris Cleave really inhabited the skin of the female characters he created:
‘Learning the Queen’s English is like scrubbing the bright red varnish off your toes the morning after a dance. It takes a long time and there is always a little bit left at the end, a stain of red along the growing edges to remind you of the good time you had.’
Did he wear and remove nail varnish himself, or is he just super observant? It’s these miniscule things that amazed me and made me feel like Cleave was a guy who knew how to wholeheartedly write another gender.
Then he would switch to Sarah’s narrative and her thoughts seemed clumsily written; the maleness of the author started to intrude. In fact whenever the book switched to Sarah’s narrative, in about the first 180 pages, I got twitchy. Her narrative in these pages often seemed self-conscious, or falsely self pitying:
‘I wish I was a woman who cared deeply about shoes and concealer. I wish I was not the sort of woman who ended up sitting at her kitchen table listening to a refugee girl taking about her awful fear of the dawn.’
Apparently Sarah is the only person in the whole of middle class England who cares about the rest of the world. She is certainly the only western woman in this book portrayed as being interested in substance. She realises she hates the suburbs. She has to make a stand against the shallow magazine she’s created. She likes to make sure the reader remembers how she is not like other people. I think she is suppoused to be a woman struggling to regain her soul and as the book progresses she grows as she questions her existence, but the time spent in her company up until she relives a taunt, violent encounter on a Nigerian beach is extremely frustrating. After this scene Sarah’s sections become more alive and by the end of the book I was almost as interested in reading about her as about Little Bee.
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