FICTION: The Long Song, by Andrea Levy, Headline, 312pp, £18.99
SLAVERY IS NOT an easy subject to write about; nor does it usually make for comfortable reading. Last year's tide of literary novels washed up Strange Music, by Laura Fish, a fictional insight into Elizabeth Barrett's family told from a Creole and slave's perspective, and Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots, in which the world is turned upside down and the Europeans become enslaved.
The Long Song, Andrea Levy's fifth novel, is another attempt to explore the subject. Levy made such a gigantic splash with her postcolonial novel Small Island, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction and was the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2004, that it must have felt like a hard act to follow.
Writing in the style of a fictional memoir, “born of a craving”, Levy takes her reader by the hand and for more than 300 pages journeys skilfully through dark Jamaican terrain. The passage is indeed long. It starts before the Baptist War in 1831, covers the uprising of the slaves and ends after the abolition of slavery when our narrator, July, is finally living comfortably with her successful printer son, Thomas Kinsman, and his family. Levy occasionally allows Thomas to step in and “edit” his mother’s tale.
July is the offspring of a white overseer father, Tam Dewar, who casually rapes her enslaved mother, Kitty, a giant of a woman with legs “so dark and stout like the trunk of a tree they looked to have grown through the solid earth”. Levy offers a wonderful description of the newborn, freshly dropped from her working mother in the field, “viewing the nightmare of tall canes that loured dark, ragged and unruly around her” while feeling “the hem of a rough woollen skirt drag its heavy wetness across her naked body”.
One afternoon Caroline Mortimer, her master’s sister, sees the cute child picking flowers and is enchanted. She plucks her, like some cuddly exotic pet, from her mother’s side and whisks her away to the great house, all the while averting her nose from the child’s “pungency”. Caroline renames the little girl Marguerite, because she enjoyed “the way the name tripped upon her tongue”, and keeps her as a personal house slave.
Caroline is described as a “big batty” loathsome English woman, reminiscent of a pantomime dame or an ugly sister. Her blond curls bounce “like small birds pecking at her shoulder”, her red cheeks are plump and she is likened to a frightened pig. But then, apart from the vicar and his wife, who provide a home for July’s abandoned child, the white characters are all pretty foul and despicable.
July grows up to be a sassy, “dusky skinned negro” girl with narrow lips and a thin nose. She pilfers and lies while becoming an indispensable companion to her whining, twittering mistress. It is July who advises Caroline on the shirkers and the sick when the workers limp to the house on Monday morning. It is July who pulls her plump mistress from the cane-bottom dining chair when it splits. Only July knows how Caroline likes her coffee thick with sugar; that she would not tolerate pickled tongue on the breakfast table. “Saltfish, yam and cured pork but no pickled tongue.” When her mistress takes to her sickbed with a pimple, July is her trusted nurse.
But it is also July who seduces her mistress’s future husband, blue-eyed Robert Goodwin, when he arrives fresh from England, full of optimism and good intentions. Their relationship is passionate and heady: July calls him “husband”, he refers to her as his “real wife” and she bears him a child. When the workers rebel, Robert abandons his ideals and their romantic attachment is shattered quicker than July can say “cha”.
The Long Songis full of pain: many die along the way; there are despicable acts of cruelty. Before she is hanged, Kitty's beaten face is swollen and "bulged to the size of a breadfruit"; she cannot close her split lip around her bloated tongue. A white missionary is stripped naked, daubed with tar and covered with feathers. A man is hanged for burning down his master's house; another is hanged for watching. And yet our light-hearted companion, "our July", with her playful and mischievous nature, tells her story in a way that we never feel too troubled for long. Levy writes like there is a horse beneath her, in lively, vigorous and lyrical prose.
ONE PROBLEM WITH The Long Songis when July speaks directly to her reader, a frequently distracting literary device. "Reader, I must whisper you a truth. Come, put your ear close to this page. Lean in a little closer still . . . " and I stumbled from the path, suddenly aware that I was not deep in Jamaican 19th-century plantation life, after all, but reading a novel.
The hardback book is a delicious gold, decorated with bronze sugar cane and tendrils of tall grass; I imagined it would be heavy to carry, but it is surprisingly light in weight. In many ways the same can be said of its narrative.
The Long Songis not, as I had feared, a dark and accusing novel bound to elicit guilt or shame. (My great-grandfather owned a plantation in Trinidad, though not with working slaves.) It is not a discourse on the atrocities of slavery, nor a whip for white readers to lash themselves with. The Long Songis an inspiring, optimistic and beautifully written tale of one spirited woman's emancipation.
Amanda Smyth’s debut novel, Black Rock, is out in paperback from Serpent’s Tail
