In the same media release, Cleave stated this about Britain's policy of returning refused asylum seekers to their native countries: "Mass deportation continues to this day. It doesn't take a genius to point out the parallel with the Holocaust."

Hence, I posed this statement to him: "You draw a parallel with the Holocaust. I am of a different generation than you are and find this parallel rather horrific. No matter that it is inhumane to keep people locked up without hope in such centers, I cannot make such a comparison. I find it almost insulting to the Holocaust victims."

Cleave's reply was long and I wish I could have responded directly to his comments. Here is what he had to say: "Please, then consider the converse position that the real insult to the Holocaust victims would be to fail to draw such comparisons when they are needed. Let's remember why we remember the Holocaust. First we remember it for its own sake, in humble contemplation of the countless lost souls. Second, we remember it so we can be alert for the signs of any repetition in our lifetimes. We remember the horror with dread in our hearts and one resolution on our lips: "never, never again."

Here I find it necessary to interrupt Cleave in his lengthy comment with this remark, "Of course, we must remember and we must say and feel, never again. But, do we not minimize what happened in the Holocaust by overuse of the word? Is this not similar to youngsters now constantly peppering their sentences with four-letter words that no longer have any effect other than to annoy because they are unrelated to the subject and irritate with their repetitiveness?"

Cleave, however, makes some good points as he continues. "Now let us consider what is being done on an industrialized scale to asylum seekers in many of the Western countries today. The horror is not that asylum seekers are being detained. The horror is that they are being forcibly deported, en masse, and delivered into the arms of regimes that in many cases torture or murder them. I do not believe that the citizens of our Western countries, if they knew that this was being done in their name, would allow it to continue. This is why I have sometimes drawn the comparison with the Holocaust because I believe that the deportation of populations based on their ethnicity is an institutionalized evil which will grow like a cancer if we keep silent about it, but which can readily be reversed if we confront it at a sufficiently early stage. (Here, of course, I am in mind of the well-known poem 'First they Came . . .' by Pastor Martin Niemöller)."

Let me interpose here. For those unfamiliar with Niemöller [1892-1984], he was a German Lutheran theologian who managed to attract the ire of Hitler and spent time in concentration camps, but survived and was released by the Allies in 1945. The poem that is often quoted as having been written by Niemöller actually arose out of many speeches he made after WWII to various groups. Just who wrote it has never been established, although in 1971, when asked what he considered the correct version, Niemöller said he preferred this:

But, back to Cleave's own words. "Please note that I do not draw comparison with the Holocaust lightly, nor do I draw it glibly. I am not comparing some pet peeve or bee-in-the-bonnet with the Holocaust. I am comparing a minor genocide only in terms of its scale—or stage in its life-cycle—and not in terms of quality. No one should doubt the degree of cruelty from which some asylum seekers are fleeing, nor the inhumanity to which many will be subjected when deported. Nor should we fool ourselves that we—as privileged onlookers on the refugee deportation—do not face a moral challenge of the same quality as that faced by those who quietly acquiesced first to the demonization of Jewish people, then to their ghettoization, and finally their extermination.

"Do I believe that the Holocaust was a horror without compare in modern times? Yes, absolutely. Do I believe that it could happen again in our lifetime? Yes, also. And now I am interested in what you believe. Surely you don't believe that the Holocaust closed the ledger on human brutality. And that being so, is it really insulting to draw upon the greatest lesson of our recent history in order to address the greatest horror of our present age? The instant anyone can explain to me why the comparison is insulting, I will immediately apologize and stop making it. I have absolutely no wish to hurt or insult anyone."

Cleave put out a challenge that is not easy to reply to, yet I will try.

"Before me, under my monitor, lies a slowly fading sepia photograph of a very happy family group taken in the fall of 1927 in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. There are eight people in all. Three of this group were directly affected by the Nazi obsession of total destruction of what it saw as its enemies. One was a Christian, whose ancestors happened to be of the Jewish faith, one was a Lutheran pastor-to-be, and the third a doctor-to-be who believed in the sanctity of life. Of course, the remaining five were indirectly affected in that they lost love-ones.

"The meaning of holocaust, going back to Middle English of the 14^th century, and deriving from the Greek, holokauston (that which is completely burnt), referred to the biblical sacrifice of animals burned at the altar to worship God. By the 17^th century it had broadened to mean 'something totally consumed by fire'.

"We apply the word, holocaust, to various things, such as a nuclear holocaust to imply what might happen if nuclear weapons are unleashed. But Holocaust with a capital letter refers to that single event in which the most systematic destruction of human beings ever was unleashed in Nazi Germany and wherever its forces gained a foothold from 1933 to April 1945. Millions died. Some succumbed in concentration camps where conditions were of unspeakable horror; they died either from starvation, medical experimentation or were gassed and then burned in special ovens to totally obliterate them. They were, as Cleave stated earlier, 'lost souls'. But, an additional horror is that each one of these individuals, Jews, communists, trade unionists, Protestant and Catholic preachers, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally and physically handicapped individuals, and those of Slavic origin, was registered in carefully kept logs. The Nazis had an obsession with keeping records, though many were burned either deliberately as the Allies approached or destroyed through bombing. Of course, there were also mass murders of various groups as Nazi troops moved ever deeper East of whom no records were kept.

"The horror, and the uniqueness, of the Holocaust is that it was a combination of fratricide, genocide, of homophobia, of paranoia and willing abnegation of democratic ideals, not by a few but almost a whole nation and its satellites. Can it happen again? Unfortunately, in a different form, yes. Human nature has a tendency not to learn from the past because we fail to either teach it in its fullest depth or we grow immune to the suffering of those different from us.

"There have been many genocides in the 20^th century. Let me start with the deliberate killing through depravation of Turkish Armenians that began in 1915 when they were forced to march in the desert to what is now Syria without food or water. It is estimated that anywhere from one million to a million-and-a-half Armenians were killed this way. No records were kept, however, but one might apply the word holocaust here because dying in the heat of the desert might well be seen as being consumed by fire. No records were kept so it has been possible for Turkey to continue to deny this genocide. To speak of it in Turkey is punishable by imprisonment.

"One of the largest fratricides/genocides in history is perhaps Stalin's in the Soviet Union where it is estimated he ordered the killing 30 million of his people, some Russian, others of different ethnic groups within the USSR, such as the Georgians, Stalin's own people. While the KGB may have records of some, most died ignominiously in the Gulags.

"What happened in Rwanda was a genocide which we might have prevented if the UN, of all bodies, had listened to Canadian Lieutenant General Romeo Dellaire, Forces Commander of the ill-fated UNAMIR. But the only fratricide that comes to mind that might be comparable with the Holocaust are the killings by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. They killed about one fifth of that country' s population, and at Tuol Sleng prison, they, like the Nazis, kept meticulous records, including photographs of those who died there. There are, of course, more genocides happening even now. There is Dafur, for one, but that is an old story that goes back hundreds of years.

"These are the human realities we face. Each has its own name and characteristic, but the orchestration of the Holocaust is unique in a way that leaves no room for comparison. Just think of lampshades made from human skin that to this day may hang unknowingly on some ceilings in German homes. The Holocaust is a warning that human beings have not managed to tame their darker side, that evil does exist, even though many people scoff at the word.

"I am not siding with Claude Lanzmann, who after his lengthy film/documentary Shoa said that any attempt to try to understand the evil of Hitler is immoral. If we do not seek to understand that evil, we will learn nothing. But I still say the Holocaust must not be denigrate by constant use of the word for other sad or horrific events. I am sure, though, Cleave will not be convinced by my words, nor by the photograph in front of me that the Holocaust deserves to remain a unique statement of history."

Now, back to my other questions, which are more concerned with the story and characters of Little Bee rather than the philosophy of its writer, and that of the interviewer.

"Having put this controversial comment aside, let me ask you what made you choose two female characters as the 'protagonists' in this book? You have drawn them vividly, and they both resonate within me. Did you discuss these two women—one adult, the other semi-adult—with your wife, or female friends? Or did it help you that you studied experimental psychology?"

"People often express surprise that I can write female characters, bit it doesn't seem like a big deal to me," Cleave responds. "Women are people too, after all. When I talk with a person and I'm motivated to understand them, I try to discover what was the worst and what was the best day of their life. These are the things that define people far more than their gender: their most extreme life experiences—at their azimuth and their nadir—and also whether they like Cormac McCarthy, or Virginia Woolf, or Annie Proulx, or George V Higgins, and whether they're attractive or plain, and whether they prefer Boxers to Dalmatians, or whether they like Spring or Fall best, and whether they've ever been in love, and if so was it requited or does their heart still give a dull ache whenever they think of it? Those sorts of things. Everything else is just anatomy."

I next posed this comment to Cleave: "I cannot, however, see what Sarah saw in Lawrence (a character in the book with whom she has an affair) despite your description of how he appears to her in opposition to Andrew (Sarah's late husband). Deep down, do you really believe that a woman of Sarah's character would have made such a choice in a lover? This is the one discordant note I find in the book that I cannot reconcile with the flow, so to speak, of the story."

Cleave's response is honest and self-effacing. "Fair enough. If you don't buy it, the chances are I haven't written it well enough? What I intended to show was that starting a relationship with Lawrence was an easy mistake to make, but Sarah was a fool for allowing it to drag on for so long once the flaws in his character became obvious."

Admittedly, I liked little Charlie in this book, prompting this question. "Then there is little Charlie. That Batman obsession reminds me of the young son of a cousin who decided he was Peter Pan. Scottie climbed onto the roof of his parents' four-storey Victorian home and it took his mother an hour to talk him out of 'flying' down. Would you call Charlie your comic relief in this story?"

"Wow—that must have been terrifying. I can hardly bear to think about that. Scottie sounds like a headstrong little fellow. Should serve him well though in later life, though! As for Charlie, he is definitely comic relief. He is also the book's emotional center—on more than one occasion he is the only reason why the two women don't just disperse and leave the situation. He is their reason to care. Finally, in a book that is about the levels of human identity and longing, I thought it poignant to include a young child engaging in his first experiments with identity. This is what kids do—trying successive masks and costumes, either physically or metaphysically—until eventually they find one that fits. At which point, of course, they become 'grown up'."

Sometimes writers drop the ending of their story in the readers lap without resolution. Not Cleave. "I like the way you use Charlie to 'resolve' Little Bee's fate. Did you plan it that way or did the story dictate it to you as you progressed?"

"I never plan my stories. I research the issues and I develop my characters and think up a seminal event, and then I simply start writing in the hope and the expectation that I will find my protagonists as interesting on page 300 as I did on page one. If I'm not intrigued by my characters, I don't see why the reader should be. So that's what you get with my writing. I think: the plot is a rough canvas because I don't really care about it, but the characters seem so real to me that I feel they could walk off the page and into the mind of the reader quite seamlessly. A novel for me is a vehicle for the transcendent delivery of character."

Much of my next question has been omitted as it will reveal too much about the event discussed. "Your description of the scene on the beach, which will not be revealed in my review, is amazing in its clarity. . . . How did you research this scene? I found, I had to stop reading the book for a while to recapture my composure. Do you think other women readers will react the same way? Do you think male readers might react differently?"

Cleaves answer has also been somewhat abbreviated. "Interesting you should mention the Soviets in Berlin. Those are some of the most horrible stories I've ever read. . . . What is chilling is the inventiveness of the cruelty. The disgusting way in which victims are forced into complicity . . . . speaks to a very dark genius operating at some level of the human soul. It was in contemplating some of these stories that I finally came to believe in evil as a real force in the human heart, rather than as a descriptive form of behavior that we find cruel and incomprehensive. It also convinced me that there are things much worse than death in this world, and from which suicide would certainly be an appropriate refuge . . . . I needed to make the scene just bad enough so that readers would have some understanding of the kinds of situations from which some refugees are fleeing, but I didn't want to make it one degree worse or one degree longer than was absolutely necessary to make the point . . . ."

I next asked him about a very short, but important scene, "I find it interesting that you have the leader of the 'gang' walk into the sea. Did you choose this end for him because he knew he was dying anyway, or did you choose it because he realized—as an educated man—that he had sunk below human acceptability?"

"Nicely put. The latter."

"Do you believe that all individuals who come to Britain as 'refugees' should be accepted? Do you make exceptions?"

Cleave replies: "Imagine Britain as a life raft and that there are drowning people in the sea nearby. The logical point at which to stop allowing more people on board is when the raft is overloaded and in danger of sinking. To stop ahead of that point—and we are millions and millions of people ahead of that point right now—is to preside over preventable deaths. It is wrong, and it also makes our won survival less sweet."

My own reply concerns the murky question of proving if one is a true refugee from a country that is by many not seen as having a large human rights issues. "I do believe that Nigeria has a human rights problem, so I do feel with Little Bee. However, how can she prove she is truly a refugee. What criteria do you suggest your government sets up to give her and those like her a chance?"

"First, let's not forget she could be as useful to us as we could be to her. When I was a teenager in the 1980s, we were brought up to think of asylum seekers as heroes. The hundreds who died while trying to cross the Berlin Wall, for example. Or the pilots, performers and scientists who defected the Soviet Union. Or the heroes of previous generations—Siegmund Freud, who fled to London to escape the Nazis, or Ann Frank, who could not flee far enough. Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, Joseph Conrad(I don't think he qualifies)—all of them refugees—I could go on. When horror and darkness descend, asylum seekers are the ones who get away. They are typically above average in terms of intellectual gifts. Far-sightedness, motivation and resilience. These are the people you want to have on your side. It will be a monument to our hubris if we allow ourselves to start thinking of them as a burden.

"So, having said that, if we must have selection criteria, I'd say it's more a question of who administers those criteria rather than what those criteria are. The criteria as they stand are perfectly okay—you simply have to be a bona fide refugee. The problem is that the asylum seekers' cases are not tried in open court or by a jury. Instead their cases are heard and decided in secret by junior civil servants with varying degrees of training, so who is to say how often they get it wrong, or how often they abuse their power? I think life-and-death decisions about human beings should be made in open court by a jury of ordinary citizens. Let them decide whether or not to believe an asylum seeker's story. Ordinary people are good judges of character, in my experience."

I have to interject here that Cleave is talking about the process in Britain, which is very different from that in Canada.