Small Island by Andrea Levy
Aug. 25th, 2006 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
It is 1948, 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?
Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men whojoined the RAF to fight against Hitler. 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.
Small Island explores a point in England's past when the country began to change. In this delicately wrought and profoundly moving novel, Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a superb lightness of touch and generosity of spirit.
This novel won both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction Best of the Best in 2005 and it's easy to see why. Narrated in the first person by each of Hortense, Gilbert, Queenie and Bernard, it is a very human look at people who want to take the opportunity thrown up by the war and make a new and better life for themselves. There's a lot of humour in the book but at the same time, the portrayal of prejudice in England at the time is very painful to read on the page, particularly when that prejudice is exhibited in such a casual manner.
There are only a couple of criticisms that I have to make.
Firstly, I think that Hortense comes across as such an unsympathetic character for much of the book that even when she finally meets the humiliation the reader is quietly wishing for, it's still a little difficult to believe in the move that she makes towards changing her personality. This is particularly in respect of her marriage to Gilbert, which you are led to believe all along as having been nothing more than a marriage of convenience on her part - given her contempt for him, it's difficult to believe that she'd invite him into her bed so quickly.
Secondly, there are aspects of Bernard's story that never quite ring true - particularly the fact that he doesn't come home straight away. Whilst I could believe that someone of his character would be ignorant of sexual diseases and could well believe themselves to have contracted syphillis, his refusal to see a doctor seems at odds with his somewhat fastidious nature and smacks of Levy looking for a deliberate reason for him to stay away for 2 years.
Thirdly, given the racism that they face on a daily basis, I never really felt that I knew what Gilbert and Hortense were staying for - whether they believed that attitudes might change or whether they figured they could make a go of things regardless. When each considers their lives back in Jamaica, it seems that there was more opportunity for them there than in post war Britain, especially when they were denied the education and other advantages that demobbed men were given.
On the whole though, I found this book to be moving and sensitive and certainly something that makes you think about the Britain we were and what we became.
The Verdict:
Absorbing and moving, definitely worth a read and especially if you want to see ethnic characters written in a sensitive and credible way.
It is 1948, 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?
Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men whojoined the RAF to fight against Hitler. 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.
Small Island explores a point in England's past when the country began to change. In this delicately wrought and profoundly moving novel, Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a superb lightness of touch and generosity of spirit.
This novel won both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction Best of the Best in 2005 and it's easy to see why. Narrated in the first person by each of Hortense, Gilbert, Queenie and Bernard, it is a very human look at people who want to take the opportunity thrown up by the war and make a new and better life for themselves. There's a lot of humour in the book but at the same time, the portrayal of prejudice in England at the time is very painful to read on the page, particularly when that prejudice is exhibited in such a casual manner.
There are only a couple of criticisms that I have to make.
Firstly, I think that Hortense comes across as such an unsympathetic character for much of the book that even when she finally meets the humiliation the reader is quietly wishing for, it's still a little difficult to believe in the move that she makes towards changing her personality. This is particularly in respect of her marriage to Gilbert, which you are led to believe all along as having been nothing more than a marriage of convenience on her part - given her contempt for him, it's difficult to believe that she'd invite him into her bed so quickly.
Secondly, there are aspects of Bernard's story that never quite ring true - particularly the fact that he doesn't come home straight away. Whilst I could believe that someone of his character would be ignorant of sexual diseases and could well believe themselves to have contracted syphillis, his refusal to see a doctor seems at odds with his somewhat fastidious nature and smacks of Levy looking for a deliberate reason for him to stay away for 2 years.
Thirdly, given the racism that they face on a daily basis, I never really felt that I knew what Gilbert and Hortense were staying for - whether they believed that attitudes might change or whether they figured they could make a go of things regardless. When each considers their lives back in Jamaica, it seems that there was more opportunity for them there than in post war Britain, especially when they were denied the education and other advantages that demobbed men were given.
On the whole though, I found this book to be moving and sensitive and certainly something that makes you think about the Britain we were and what we became.
The Verdict:
Absorbing and moving, definitely worth a read and especially if you want to see ethnic characters written in a sensitive and credible way.
