In this delicately wrought and profoundly moving, multi-award winning novel, Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a lightness of touch and a generosity of spirit that challenges and uplifts the reader.
It is , and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street. London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh's neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but with her husband, Bernard, not back from the war, what else can she do?
Returning to England as a civilian he finds himself treated very differently. Gilbert's wife Hortense, too, had longed to leave Jamaica and start a better life in England. But when she joins him she is shocked to find London shabby, decrepit, and far from the city of her dreams. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was.
All her characters can be weak, hopeless, brave, good, bad - whatever their colour. The writing is rigorous and the bittersweet ending, with its unexpected twist, touching People can retain great dignity, however small their island' Independent on Sunday.
Andrea Levy was born in London, England in to Jamaican parents. Her first three novels explored - from different perspectives - the problems faced by black British-born children of Jamaican emigrants.
But when she joins her husband she finds a cold and woebegone place, with drabness and filth everywhere. People never smile, and seem unkempt and rude, taking no pride in their appearance. There is no colour or life. Even Gilbert is not the man she had thought he was. And she cannot understand Queenie at all. Hortense is the least sympathetic character.
She is a village snob, narrow-minded, and insecure; genuinely ignorant of the world. On arriving in England, she has every expectation that it will be an upmarket version of her teacher-training college in Jamaica.
Hortense begins by despising the apparently feckless Gilbert and the circumstances to which he has brought her. She looks down her nose at working-class Queenie, and firmly rejects the idea that she has anything in common with the other slum-dwelling migrants. But Hortense soon discovers that her precious qualifications are worthless in the British education system, and that her status is precisely the same as that of any other black migrant.
Queenie recognises the differences between white people and black people, but pays little attention to them. In any case, she has little choice about this, as she has been left on her own, not knowing when her husband will return, or if he will come back at all. She too has had her dreams dashed. To support herself, Queenie must rent out rooms. Gilbert and Hortense attempt to adjust not only to a new country but to each other. The structure of the novel lends itself well to creating a page-turner.
All four characters take turns in telling their stories, and the heading of each chapter is the name of the narrator, to avoid confusion. Not that there would be much confusion, as Andrea Levy has captured the voice and vernacular of each of the four perfectly. There is lot of confusion in Britain even now, about the nature of Caribbean dialects.
This has led to a kind of dumbed down homogenisation of a pseuodo-black accent. Black authors who grew up in London or Birmingham have tended to consolidate different types of speech, from different regions and classes in the Caribbean islands, blending it into a kind of street slang, or a language familiar from some pop music, complete with missing consonants and apostrophised accents. Even more impressive, she does the same for her English characters: American G.
Queenie sounds every bit like a Londoner brought up in the early part of the last century and Bernard sounds like a man who has served in the Far East. It is remarkably authentic. Many of the incidents of racism are unexpected to an English reader, even one like me, who can just remember a mere decade later. These few years after the war are largely forgotten in the history books, save for references to the continuing rationing, queuing and food shortages.
But the shameful way black citizens were sometimes treated, are often ignored, or pushed aside. There were reasons, or at least triggers. The British people were just not ready for large scale immigration. Newcomers were seen as taking much-needed jobs, or food, when the country was still getting back on its feet.
Most people will have been conflicted. Yet to expect another person to step aside because of the colour of their skin, was inexcusable, and a salutory lesson to those now who are complacent that Britain has been a country with comparatively little racial prejudice. Shortly after this was set, the British government began to actively recruit from the Caribbean and encourage people to come to Britain to live and work.
There were plenty of jobs in post-war Britain, so industries such as British Rail, the National Health Service and public transport began to actively recruit from Jamaica and Barbados. Even though Afro-Caribbean people had been encouraged to journey to Britain through immigration campaigns created by successive British governments, many new arrivals were, like Gilbert and Hortense a little earlier, to endure prejudice, intolerance and extreme racism from some sectors of white British society.
Some of the early Afro-Caribbean immigrants found that private employment and housing was denied to them, on the basis of race. Trade unions would often not help them, and some pubs, clubs, dance halls and churches would bar black people from entering. Housing was in short supply because of wartime bombing, and the shortage led to some of the first clashes with the established white community.
Clashes continued and worsened into the s, and riots erupted in cities including London, Birmingham and Nottingham. This Act of Parliament made it illegal to refuse housing, employment, or public services to a person on the grounds of colour, race, ethnic or national origins.
I have no doubt of the authenticity of the book, as it pertains to that time. Andrea Levy not only has the anecdotal reports of the time from her parents, who will have often told her of their migrant experience, but she rigorously adheres to historical fact, including many well-recorded details. For instance, Gilbert and Queenie are involved in a wartime incident where the US army attempts to impose a segregated seating plan in a local cinema.
In another part of the story, Bernard is involved in a mutiny in India. All these instances fit well into an historical novel, as well as providing greater substance to the characterisation, and giving a context to the attitudes of different parts of society at the time.
The reliance on historical fact allows Andrea Levy a distance, which enables her to be both objective and compassionate. They are exciting to read, as well as providing much food for thought, questioning attitudes to discrimination. There are many types of prejudice working in this novel, and they are not always the ones the reader expects.
Hortense is as prejudiced as any other character in the novel. While living in Jamaica, she does not feel a victim of this. Quite the reverse, as she seems to revel in the special attention she is given, because her skin is more golden than black.
Her father, who was light-skinned, had an affair with a dark-skinned country woman. Hortense may not up to now not been a victim of racial prejudice in her youth, but she is very conscious—and guilty—of social prejudice. She looks down on people who speak what she considers to be substandard English, whatever the colour of their skin. She cannot understand why she needs to constantly repeat herself to other British people, as if she were speaking a foreign language.
It takes living in London for a while, before she listens more carefully to people, and realises that she has a strong accent of her own. As Hortense used to look down on people in Jamaica for how they spoke, people in London now look down on her.
We see how even this covert English racism was all the more heartbreaking for those from the colonies, because it involved the crushing of their ideals. They had been educated to a high standard, and knew more about the different cities and areas of Britain than many who had lived here all their lives. Yet often they would meet with incomprehension, as the white British often assumed they were from Africa, and had never heard of the West Indies. She is stunned to find that ordinary people in the street cannot understand her carefully correct speech, and assume her to be stupid.
And when she reaches the employment office for teachers, clutching her excellent qualifications and references, she is mortified to discover that all her training and experience counts for nothing in England. No one will explain why; they merely refuse to interview her.
When she tells them that in that case she will enrol in teacher classes in London, they merely laugh at her. Her colour says it all. No one will hire Hortense because she is black. It would be easy to contrast the two very different lives of Queenie and Hortense, or the prejudiced Bernard with Gilbert, or even to make the two forge a miraculous friendship.
But Andrea Levy does not take the easy way out, in order to make a satisfying but predictable story. Gilbert is caught off guard by prejudice.
His supervisor explains to the Jamaican troops that they are special black people, different from US black G. American negroes have few rights in the States, and so are not treated as well, but the Jamaican servicemen are given special privileges, because they are different.
However, when they arrive in England, they find that they are not to be given the jobs they had been promised. Gilbert and others had wanted to fly, but instead they become clerks and drivers of jeeps and trucks.
The American bases are strictly segregated, with the black and white G. The black G. Not only that, but the leave is to be taken in different towns, unbeknown to the residents of those English towns. Gilbert, being both black and British, therefore presents the Americans with a problem.
His white RAF comrades have no problem, but the Americans certainly do. I was perplexed. No, we were all perplexed. Bernard has no claim upon the narrative's present — and, at its climax, he finds he has no part to play in the decisions that have to be made by the other three.
But he does have a past: the traumatic story of his wartime service on the India-Burma border. It does something to explain the twisted person whom Hortense, Gilbert and Queenie see. The back stories are not just about widening our sympathies and chastening our judgments. They shape the plot by giving the reader knowledge that some of the characters never obtain.
Why does Bernard disappear for two years after the war? Who is the father of the child born in the novel's final chapters?
By providing their own back stories, the characters answer such questions — but to the reader, not to each other. Crucially, we find out that Hortense and Queenie have both loved the same man — but neither of them ever realises it. In a novel about the barriers of racial prejudice, where mutual incomprehension seems the rule, the narrative method is appropriate. It allows us to see just how unknown these characters are to each other.
Small Island by Andrea Levy. Week one: the back story.
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