SMALL ISLAND BY ANDREA LEVY

Readers Notes for Small Island by Andrea Levy

Who wrote this novel?

Andrea Levy was born to Jamaican parents in London in 1956. Her parents had come to London in 1948 and her father’s transatlantic crossing from the Caribbean was on the now famous SS Empire Windrush, a ship carrying about 500 West Indian men who came to England to start a new life. There was strong feeling about this in depressed post-war England, and talk of not letting the men land. But they did land and they changed the course of British history, being the first 20th-century migration which began to make Britain a multicultural society.

These tensions and their legacy are what Andrea Levy writes about in her novels, but she has famously said that she didn’t read any fiction herself until she was 23. ‘I only read non-fiction because I thought you couldn't learn anything (from fiction.)’ Until then she had grown up on television soap operas, but once she started reading she read avidly, and started writing fiction in her mid 30s. At that time there wasn’t much writing about the black British experience and, after going to some writing workshops, Andrea Levy set about writing the sort of novels she would have liked to read.

Small Island (2004) is her fourth novel and it won the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, the 2004 Whitbread Book of the Year, and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize. 

Click here for more biographical details, a bibliography and a critical review about Andrea Levy or visit the author’s own website. 

What is the novel and what is it about?

Small Island is a novel of 530 pages, first published in 2004. Andrea Levy had written her earlier novels about the experience of her own generation - the children of Jamaicans who had come to settle in England. In Small Island she goes back to her parents’ generation and sets her novel in London in 1948, exactly coinciding with the date of her parents’ arrival. There are many small islands in the novel: ‘small islands’ from a superior Jamaican perspective are smaller islands in the Caribbean, but then Jamaica itself becomes a small island to the men who return there after service overseas in the war. Even the mythical Mother Country England turns out to be a small island in its racism and shortage of economic opportunity. And in 1948 this shrinking feeling was beginning to permeate the English consciousness too, as the empire started to crumble.

Small Island is the story of arrival in London, told through the eyes of Gilbert and Hortense who are thrown together by their eagerness to emigrate from Jamaica to England, and initially not much else. And the other two narrative voices are Queenie and Bernard, a mismatched English couple whose home provides the Jamaican newcomers with decaying lodgings in Earls Court in London. Andrea Levy shows how immigration changes everyone’s lives, and while Small Island has instances of appalling racism, sometimes malicious and sometimes cruelly casual, the novel’s great strength is that Levy inhabits each character sympathetically. She has said: ‘One thing that I remembered whenever my parents talked about their early days in England was that they always mentioned the white people who took them in. And so from then, I always realised that immigration is a dynamic. It's about the people who came and the people who they came to. And so I wanted to look at the whole situation, and not just from one point of view.’
So she also shows the post-war economic problems and emotional adjustments faced by the war-wearied English people whom these Jamaicans have come to live among. Some of the Jamaican men who arrive in England in 1948 are not there for the first time because, like Gilbert, they have been in the services in the Second World War a few years earlier, contributing to England’s war effort. So their hostile reception is baffling to them. And the glorification of England in colonial Jamaica has led to distorted expectations which can only lead to disappointment. For Hortense it has been a fantasy land where ‘fish and chips bubble on the stove’ and daffodils bloom ‘with all the colours of the rainbow’.

What kind of read is it?

It’s a novel told from four points of view, a Jamaican couple and the English couple whose house in London they come to live in. What is unusual about it is that each narrator’s voice is not only distinct but they are equally compelling. The chapters have as headings the name of the person telling them (Gilbert, Hortense, Queenie, Bernard) and they are grouped into sections which alternate between ‘1948’ and ‘Before’. Sometimes the same event is later told from a different participant’s perspective, and new light is thrown on what might have appeared erratic behaviour. When Gilbert comes home and begs his wife not to wash the floor on her knees, he seems quite crazy in her eyes (‘How you wan’ me clean the floor then?’). We later learn from Gilbert that his hyper-sensitivity is because he has just experienced repeated taunting racial abuse at work for the Post Office. But a lot is unspoken between the characters, so we understand them better than they understand each other.

In the story there’s a disappearance and some extraordinary personal coincidences which link the two couples, even though they are not aware of them, so these create the page-turning suspense. And the structure never squeezes the story too tight so it skips along on a crest of verbal verve.
The language is quirkily specific and always colloquial. See Gilbert who is trying to creep past his landlady Queenie’s door: ‘Man, this woman’s hearing so good she must catch the sound of the stitching rustling in my socks’. But it’s not only the Jamaicans who have the good lines. English Queenie, who has had a tough upbringing in the family butcher’s business, can turn a phrase too, as she does when she describes a child from the East End of London whose family have been bombed out of their home: ‘If I turned the little boy Albert on his head the lice would have carried him away’.

When we’ve read it, how could we structure our discussion?

• Andrea Levy has said: ‘I love books that you feel, once you've read them, that they've added to the sum total of who you are. That you've learned something or you've been taken somewhere that was really worth going, because you understand something better now'.
Do you get this sense of understanding something better from Small Island? And if you do, what is it and how has it changed you?

• Do you always know who is telling the story (without having to check the chapter headings)? How? What characterises each of the narrators?
• Do all the narrators have the same interest for you? Do you have a favourite, and if so, why?
• Does Andrea Levy even manage to make the boring and emotionally stunted Bernard into a storyteller who keeps your interest? If you think she does, how does she do it?

• Often in the book we are given information that makes us understand the characters’ actions better than they can understand each other. What impression does this create of human relationships and behaviour? Do you find it convincing?

• Are there elements of the story, like the Michael Roberts plotline, that you can trace back to Andrea Levy’s youth watching soap operas on television? Do they work in the novel?

Reading group tip

For your group to have time to read a long novel like Small Island some planning ahead would be helpful. If you nominated and agreed on the titles of several books in advance, there would be more of a chance to fit in the reading. Perhaps select a considerably shorter novel, or even a long short story for the book you discuss at the meeting before you meet to discuss Small Island. 

If we enjoyed this, what other writing might appeal to us?

Andrea Levy’s three novels before Small Island deal with the experience of being a descendent of Jamaican immigrants in London, and of being black in a country that is predominantly white. 
Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994), is the story of a Jamaican family living in London in the 1960s. Her second novel, Never Far from Nowhere (1996), is set during the 1970s and tells the story of two sisters living on a London council estate. In Fruit of the Lemon (1999), Faith Jackson, a young black Londoner, visits Jamaica and discovers a previously unknown personal history.

Other writers who have dealt with the experience of migration to Britain from the Caribbean are Sam Selvon The Lonely Londoners (1956), George Lamming The Emigrants (1954) and Caryl Phillips The Final Passage (1985), based on his parents’ experience of coming to Britain in the 1950s.