Chris Cleave: The author explores the tragicomic way Britain deals with asylum-seekers

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Considering the pivotal plot point of Chris Cleave's new novel, The Other Hand, it's disconcerting to be flown out to the south of France to interview its author. A trip down to the Mediterranean, where he has taken a summer house, is far from a chore. Yet Cleave portrays two journalists on just such a professional jolly who end up skewered by the sharp end of fate's stick. Thankfully, as we sit out on a terrace restaurant in Nîmes, the only thing I'm struck by is the searing Provençal sun.

Cleave navigates us smoothly through our order (his wife is French) with a jolly demeanour that belies a keen intellect. He's full of zeal and brings to mind one of those determined gentlemen code-breakers of Bletchley Park. It is this same mix of affability and inquiry that infuses his fiction.

In The Other Hand, Sarah O'Rourke, a women's magazine editor, and her husband, Andrew, accept a freebie holiday to a beach in southern Nigeria. There they encounter two Nigerian girls, Little Bee and her older sister, victims of the country's oil war. "What happened on the beach" (which I won't divulge here, but is truly nightmarish) ultimately destroys Andrew. Three years later, on the day of his funeral, Sarah and her four-year old Batman-obsessed son, Charlie, find Little Bee on their west London doorstep. Now 16 and, having escaped a detention centre, she's an illegal alien looking for a new family. One defining moment a continent away triggers a comic tale of acceptance and a neat critique of the British attitude to asylum-seekers.

"The Home Office aren't evil, there's no conspiracy," comments Cleave, although he couldn't get anyone in the department to see him when researching the novel. "There's just a general lethargy about the way these asylum-seekers are treated. Which means no one gets exercised that they're put in handcuffs, taken on to planes and deported back to places where they're going to die." He understands that not all of the media are complacent. He refers to The Independent's balanced look at "the numbers" and how the BBC "are making an effort". Yet there remains a stubborn group that confuses asylum seekers with illegal immigrants. "The Daily Mail can't say 'asylum-seeker' without saying 'foreign criminal' in the same sentence. I'm sure it's practically editorial policy." Cleave points out that Joseph Conrad, Sigmund Freud and Einstein were all asylum seekers and that "John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is a refugee novel, just inter-state. The same hate remains."

The ludicrous nature of two worlds colliding is tangible in the book. Sarah reflects: "We looked as if we'd been cobbled together in Photoshop ... the three of us, walking to my husband's funeral. One white middle-class mother, one skinny black refugee girl, and one small dark knight from Gotham City. It seemed as if we'd been cut-and-pasted."

Inspiration for The Other Hand came in part from an early childhood spent in West Africa and, more importantly, from a chance holiday job during his university years (Cleave studied experimental psychology at Oxford). "We painted underpasses, we did gardening, litter-picking. All good fun and I was thinking of writing a book about it. The last job of that summer was at Campsfield House in Oxfordshire. Now they call it an Immigration Removal Centre; at the time it was an Asylum Detention Centre," says Cleave.

"For three days I was serving this inedible food to people who'd come from Somalia, Eritrea, the Congo, from the Balkans. From war zones. They'd fled for good reason. I got talking with some of them and said why are you here? Why are you in prison? It's not illegal and yet we concentrate them in these places. It's a text-book definition of a concentration camp. The conditions are appalling. I was shocked enough for that to be the end of my light comedy book of my amusing summers working as a labourer." Yet The Other Hand is very funny indeed: "So often what happens to these people is ridiculous to the point of laugh-out-loud funny."

Cleave insists that he is not a political writer. However, he begins the book with a quote from a 2005 UK Home Office publication entitled United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship. "Britain is proud of its tradition of providing a safe haven for people fleeting (sic) persecution and conflict." If a government can't even successfully proof-read such a fundamental document, how seriously can we take its asylum procedure?

After university, Cleave spent a decade jobbing around, first as an online journalist for the Telegraph and then editorial adviser for the then fledgling lastminute.com. "Everyone at lastminute seems to go on to do what they really wanted to do," he laughs. Then his debut novel, Incendiary, exploded on to the publishing scene. It detailed the aftermath of a terrorism attack on London and was published by awful coincidence on 7 July 2005. "I don't think my book is unusually prescient," he stated a week after the bombings. "We all knew this was coming – but none of my months of imagining the horror prepared me for the reality of it."

Full of rage and humour, Incendiary was an international bestseller but divided opinion. "Dear Osama," it began, "they want you dead or alive so the terror will stop. Well I wouldn't know about that. I mean rock *roll didn't stop when Elvis died on the khazi, it just got worse." The New York Times called it "a simple case of tastelessness", a judgement that Cleave absolutely rejects. A similar salvo was directed at Jay McInerney when he published his 9/11 themed novel The Good Life. However, both authors celebrate what Cleave calls the public's "amazing refusal to bow". What rankles more are the snide comments on his literary ventriloquism (he has created first-person narratives of a working-class mother and a Nigerian teenager). "And I'm super posh?" he asks, clearly annoyed. He dismisses it as easy criticism. "Other people would do it if they were good enough."

Family life has been essential to the conception of both books. "I would never have written either of the stories without having been a parent. I'm a much better writer for being a father," says Cleave, who has two young children. If parenthood provides the trigger to his writing, it also provides the target. "You think, well look, I've changed your nappy, I've taught you how to swim, but all of that means nothing if you're going to grow up into a world that is callous and stupid. I do this," he says pointing to the copy of his novel on the table, "for the same reason I change nappies."

Both books feature sassy, unfaithful wives and marital shenanigans of lad lit proportions. "This thing with being lovers, it isn't like being married," states Sarah. "To remain in the game, one has to be considerate." Behind the quips, Cleave seems aware of the deeper motivations of infidelity. "When you are choosing a lover," he says, "you're choosing a philosophy; it's not about sex, it's not about marriage. With Sarah, her unfaithfulness is just one of the symptoms of the fact that she's torn and is going to have to make this strong moral choice."

Cleave is adamant that optimism and laughter are the necessary binding agents for humanity to overcome catastrophe. "The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don't always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn't have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I'm interested in the exceptions." Or as the Nigerian proverb that ends The Other Hand puts it: "If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man."

The extract: The Other Hand, By Chris Cleave (Sceptre £12.99)

'... I was still watching the girl. The wind blew at her yellow sari and I saw there was a scar across her throat, right across it, thick like your little finger. It was white as a bone against her dark skin. It was knotted and curled against her windpipe, like it did not want to let go. ... She saw me looking and she hid the scar with her hand, so I looked at her hand. There were scars on that too'