Andrea Levy. The Long Song.

Headline Review

1. Biography

“Andrea Levy was born in London, England in 1956 to Jamaican parents. She is the author of
five novels, each of which explore - from different perspectives - the problems faced by black
British-born children of Jamaican emigrants.
Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994), is the
story of a Jamaican family living in London in the 1960s. Her second, Never Far from
Nowhere (1996), is set during the 1970s and tells the story of two very different sisters living
on a London council estate. In Fruit of the Lemon (1999), Faith Jackson, a young black
Londoner, visits Jamaica after suffering a nervous breakdown and discovers a previously
unknown personal history. Small Island (2004), set in 1948, explores the interaction between
a black couple, Gilbert, a former RAF recruit, who has returned to Britain on the SS
Windrush, and his Jamaican wife Hortense, and a white couple: Queenie, their landlady, and
her recently demobbed husband, Bernard. It won the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, the 2004
Whitbread Book of the Year, and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Small Island was
adapted for BBC television and broadcast in 2009.
Her latest novel is The Long Song (2010), set in early 19th-century Jamaica, telling the story
of July, a house slave. It was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Andrea Levy has been a judge for the Saga Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. She lives in
north London.”
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth149

2. YouTube Links

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3MUv5hO_zE (short film by BBC)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3mdysGaTIE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W-oV_fSChg (Interviews)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CSRN_qO2jM (TV Book Club Discussion)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOMREJLzrOc (Reading)

3. Reviews

a. by Kate Kellaway (07 Feb 2010)

Andrea Levy's Small Island – her fourth novel – has had a glorious career: it not only won the
Orange prize, but was voted "Best of the Best" novels ever to win that award. It was an
adroit, funny, tender book about a Jamaican immigrant couple, their big-hearted white

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landlady and her bigoted husband in postwar London and it beautifully described the
struggle to survive in a new country. A novel such as Small Island is a hard act to follow, but
in her new book Levy has moved into top gear.
Levy has turned her gaze away from British shores and set The Long Song in early 19th-
century Jamaica, on a sugar-cane plantation, in the turbulent years before – and just after –
the abolition of slavery. The novel is in the form of a memoir written by an old Jamaican
woman called July, once a slave on Amity Plantation. Her son, Thomas, is a printer who
learnt his trade in Britain after his mother abandoned him – felicitously – on a minister's
doorstep as a baby. We learn that he intends to publish his mother's book, nicely bound and
complete with sugarcane on the cover. But he and his mother – comically – do not see eye
to eye. July has her own views about style and tells us she will not dawdle over descriptions
of trees and grass. Her memoir will not keep company with gold-bound volumes filled with
the "puff and twaddle of some white lady's mind".
Slavery is a subject that has inspired some magnificent fiction (think of Toni Morrison's
Beloved or Valerie Martin's Property), but I had some misgivings: might it not, in this case,
make for over-serious writing, especially for a novelist as comically inclined as Levy? But she
dares to write about her subject in an entertaining way without ever trivialising it and The
Long Song reads with the sort of ebullient effortlessness that can only be won by hard work.
July is a mulatto, the daughter of Scottish overseer Tam Dewar, who raped Kitty, her slave
mother. July enjoys giving us alternative accounts of her arrival in the world and Levy revels
in storytelling itself, its sheer pliability. The memoir comes to its climax during the 10-day
Baptist war in 1831 and the slave uprisings that followed. She makes you understand how
chaotic and punitive this moment in history was, as well as liberating. Levy has researched
the novel meticulously, but July has no desire to weigh herself down with any historical
burden. Instead, she cheekily recommends that we do some homework ourselves but warns
against a publication called Conflict and change. A view from the great house of slaves,
slavery and the British Empire, observing: "… if you do read it and find your head nodding in
agreement at this man's bluster, then away with you – for I no longer wish you as my
reader."
But she does permit herself to describe the symbolic funeral that marked the end of slavery
on 31 July 1838, only then to admit that she was not actually present. She was still cooped
up with her white mistress, Caroline Mortimer, owner of the sugar plantation.
The heart of the novel is July's description of the ménage à trois between Caroline, herself
and Caroline's newly acquired English abolitionist husband, Robert. You despise, pity and
almost – but never quite – sympathise with Caroline. On first arriving in Jamaica, she appears
a twit – yet with a lively curiosity.
Robert is a clergyman's son with a pretty face, charming blue eyes and nicely muscled legs.
He smells attractively of woodsmoke. But although he starts off with some ideals, they are
spoilt by his patronising, naive, self-serving attitude. Caroline worships him. July likes the
look of him, too. He, to his Christian shame, is besotted with July – a forbidden fruit he can
only enjoy regularly by marrying her mistress. July might once have been a slave, but she is
no saint now (the slaves are all seen to be faultily human). Yet Levy never judges her
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characters. She leaves that to us.
As I read, I kept thinking how magnificently this novel would work in the theatre. Levy has a
talent for crowd control, ensemble work, comic timing. She loves to preside over chaos and
includes several scenes of virtuoso Jamaican farce, including conflict in the master bedroom
(July ends up under the bed). But you will need to crawl under there yourself to find out who
was with her – and why – and what happened next. And be prepared for the laughter to stop
suddenly. For Levy knows that there is nothing as seriously revealing as farce.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/07/the-long-song-andrea-levy

b. by Holly Kyte (27 Jan 2010)

In The Long Song, Andrea Levy explores her Jamaican heritage more completely than ever
before. This sensational novel – her first since the Orange Prize-winning Small Island,
recently adapted for the BBC – tells the life story of July, a slave girl living on a sugar
plantation in 1830s Jamaica just as emancipation is juddering into action. Levy’s handling of
slavery is characteristically authentic, resonant and imaginative. She never sermonises. She
doesn’t need to — the events and characters speak loud and clear for themselves.
The story is expertly fashioned around a metafictional conceit. The “editor”, Thomas
Kinsman, explains in his foreword that the book was written by his mother. It’s a well-worn
device, but here it has such conviction and idiosyncrasy that it feels irresistibly fresh. His
mother, it transpires, is July herself, and so intimate is she with her “reader” that she might
be leading them around the plantation by the hand. Her Jamaican lilt, which despite her
son’s careful Anglicising retains the rhythm and syntax of her dialect, is unfaltering and
immersive. And her seemingly artless testimony, which scorns “ornate invention”, is a
masterclass in storytelling and self-presentation.
She begins with her conception — the casual molestation of her mother Kitty by the
plantation’s vile Scottish overseer. It’s an “indelicate” way to open a novel, as her son argues
in one of their endearing squabbles, but it’s indicative of her petulant, assertive style that
she will not apologise for it. She is a woman “possessed of a forthright tongue and little ink”,
and tells the reader plainly that if we don’t like her story, we can go elsewhere.
As if we could! She goes on to relate how she was taken from her mother to “amuse” the
master’s sister, Caroline. And by the time she reaches the advent of the Baptist war, we are
so rapt by her story that laughter, tears and outraged splutterings tumble out involuntarily.
One minute we are giggling as July cheekily sabotages Caroline’s grand Christmas dinner by
swapping her Irish table linen for an old bed sheet, the next we are witnessing chaotic
scenes of suicide, injustice and murder as the Brits try savagely to quell the rebellion.
Given that Levy is dealing with such a shameful chapter in British history, it’s perhaps
unsurprising that her white characters are relentlessly indefensible and pitiful. For their
cruelty, bigotry and dependency they are privately mocked and manipulated by their slaves.
Caroline especially is ritually satirised for her petty prattling and social pretensions – one can
almost see her “big-big batty” caricatured in Punch. Even Robert Goodwin, the new, young
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overseer who arrives in the latter half preaching “kindness” to Negroes, fails to uphold his
fine principles, powerfully illustrating that abolition was neither an easy nor immediate
triumph.
Slavery is a grim subject indeed, but the wonder of Levy’s writing is that she can confront
such things and somehow derive deeply life-affirming entertainment from them. July
emerges as a defiant, charismatic, almost invincible woman who gives a unique voice to the
voiceless, and for that she commands affection and admiration. Levy’s aim, she says, was to
write a book that instilled pride in anyone with slave ancestors and The Long Song, though
“its load may prove to be unsettling”, is surely that book.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/books-life/7087391/The-Long-Song-by-Andrea-
Levy-review.html

c. by Andrea Stuart (05 Feb 2010)

Pity Andrea Levy. It is not easy to follow up a novel as loved and acclaimed as her Orange
Prize-winning Small Island. Not easy, either, to bear the weight of expectation created by
becoming one of the UK's most popular black writers, quietly creating a body of work that
explores and communicates the Black British experience to a mass audience.
Levy is the offspring of that pioneering generation who sailed from Jamaica to England on
the Windrush. Her enviable body of work includes the semi-autobiographical Every Light in
the House Burnin', which focused on the pressures of growing up black in a largely white
environment. Levy returned to this theme in her next books, the well-reviewed Never Far
From Nowhere (1994) and Fruit of the Lemon (1996). But it was Small Island that secured
her popularity and built the eager anticipation that greets The Long Song.
It is set in the world of the plantation, that tinderbox of race and slavery, sex and violence.
For an intelligent and nuanced writer, this is not without risk: like the Holocaust, slavery
offers ample opportunity for crude sensationalism and reprehensible voyeurism. Written
from a white perspective, it can too easily appear to mimic Gone With The Wind; from a
black perspective, it can echo Alex Haley's Roots. It is not easy to walk in the footsteps of
blockbusters. Neither is it easy to enter territory ruled by a literary titan: Toni Morrison's
Songs of Solomon and Beloved cast a long shadow. But the very drama and horror of the
plantation system can obscure understanding of what it meant to live within its norms and
strictures.
The Long Song is narrated by July, a female slave born and brought up on a Jamaican slave
plantation called Amity. From its tantalising opening line, "The book you are now holding
within your hand was born of a craving...", July uncoils her dramatic life. Born as the result of
a squalid rape, July is destined for a short and brutal existence in the cane fields. But her life
is transformed by the whim of Caroline Mortimer, the plantation owner's sister, who is
beguiled by the sight of this cute black child and demands July be given to her as a present.
July moves from the fetid slave huts to the luxurious great house, where she becomes a
privileged house slave. Her story continues through the dying days of slavery, including the
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Baptist Wars – when slaves on the island were inspired to withdraw their labour for ten
violent days - through to abolition, the faux freedom of the apprenticeship period, and then
early liberation. We watch July grow up, survive a slave revolt and then become enmeshed
in a relationship with a devoutly religious but tragically self-deluded English overseer.
It is a well-researched book that wears its scholarship lightly. All the realities of plantation
life are here: the social gulf between domestic slaves and those working in the field; the
extreme physical hardship of cane cultivation; the casual brutality of slaves' lives, whether in
field or house, where a slap, a punch or the whistle of a whip were commonplace. By reading
this book we come to appreciate the terrible psychological price that slavery exacted on
both slave owner and slave. In this world where cultivation and domesticity existed side by
side, oppression and intimacy were enmeshed. The two enemies – masters and slaves – lived
tightly entwined lives. Levy illustrates this with subtlety in what is an immensely readable
and well-paced book.
Levy has grown as a writer: her use of language and imagery have become more
accomplished than her earlier offerings. She has a real gift for comedy, which is very much in
evidence here. One character's smile is "as mangled and forlorn as one of the missus's
broken-down hair combs", while the blond curls on Caroline Mortimer's head "bounced like
small birds pecking on her shoulder." We are so used to depictions of the plantation that are
unrelentingly depressing that Levy's levity is at first disconcerting. But her approach acts as
an important corrective to the dominant representations of this subject. The Long Song is
simultaneously the life-affirming story of one woman's battle to survive in terrible
circumstances, and a tribute to the legions of slaves who did more than suffer and die, but
also managed to squeeze all they possibly could out of the bleakest of circumstances.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-long-song-by-
andrea-levy-1889489.html

4. other material

http://www.andrealevy.co.uk/index.php (Andrea Levy’s website)