Small Island - Andrea Levy

I read this book back in January and owing to being busy at the time, a review never made it to my blog. This is the third Andrea Levy novel I have read, and I loved both The Long Song and Fruit of the Lemon, which each tell really important stories. Small Island follows the character of Hortense Joseph, who arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948, after agreeing to marry Gilbert Joseph suddenly and then not seeing him since their wedding day. Gilbert has returned from the war having served for England expecting to be welcomed as a hero, but instead he soon realises that a black man in Britain is a second-class citizen.

He lodges with a white landlady named Queenie and they soon befriend each other pending Hortense’s arrival. Queenie’s husband Bernard returns from the war and experiences his own problems, trying to deal with the emotional fallout from his time in combat. The chapters in the novel alternate between these four voices, each narrating very different experiences, which adds a dynamic aspect to the portrayal of a heart-wrenching, moving and eye-opening story of what it means to be an immigrant in Britain.

This novel will throw a whole lot of emotions at you - you’ll be laughing (I was in hysterics when Hortense and Gilbert shared their first night together as man and wife and she was horrified when he tried to proposition her); you’ll be moved by the aspects of friendship and allegiance which form in a world of prejudice and segregation; and you’ll definitely feel anger at the acute injustices presented by Levy in the book. For example, Gilbert has just served in a war and risked his life for a country whose inhabitants shun him, look down upon him and treat him as an other - when he should be celebrated as a hero, he is thanklessly ignored and avoided.

Levy incorporates Jamaican Patois (or Jamaican Creole) into the novel as well as themes of empire, colonialism and immigration in the 1940s, which was extremely eye-opening and poignant particularly given the aftermath of WWII which acted as a backdrop. The West-Indian immigrants were taught to think of Britain as the ‘mother country’, which is often referred to in the novel, and the fact that they are so unwelcome is truly heartbreaking and unjust. In many ways, this is also a portrait of marriage - both women in the novel have married for reasons other than love, which also says something about the book’s historical context. The themes of interracial love and friendship during a time of overt prejudice are interestingly explored by Levy.

As always, Levy’s language is rich, colourful, decadent, yet easy to read - I devoured this book despite its size. If you haven’t read any Levy I urge you to do so, as her themes and narratives are truly timeless. Although they are primarily historical novels, they teach us a lot about the world we live in today.