FICTION
A grand double for Small Island
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`Levy's book is bearable and enjoyable for its light touch on weighty themes.'
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MAKING headlines this year as a formidable winner of the 2004-05 Brit-fiction, Andrea Levy is the first writer to carry off the double trophies of the British Orange Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for her Small Island within the same year.
Changing times
Levy's abounding narratives of immigrant and native existence in London "before" and "after" 1948 are astoundingly attractive. The stories revolve around the troubled conditions of a modern cosmopolis rising from the bombed-out ruins of war. Levy captures the changing times, which were transforming the character of England and shrinking the nation into a "small island" owing to the new wave of immigration. Pitching the disintegration of modern life against the sordid images and colours of war, Levy depicts a picture of England's dramatic contraction in terms of its space, time and human awareness. In the words of Bernard Bligh, one of Levy's main characters, who returns from war and finds himself lost in his own country: "England had shrunk. It was a smaller place than the place I'd left... And behind every face I saw were the trapped rememberings of war".
21, Nevern Street, London, is Levy's centre-stage which unfolds a lively drama of conflicts, humours and manners. The main protagonists of the book are the young English landlady Queenie Bligh, her husband Bernard Bligh who is posted to India with the RAF during war, Gilbert and Hortense, the Jamaican immigrant couple who are Queenie's new tenants.
Interlocking narratives
Levy moves her story on four interlocking first-person narratives voiced by the main protagonists, achieving a complex structure which is both intriguing and engaging. Set mainly in the years before and after 1948, the narratives travel through locations ranging from the island of Jamaica to the post India-Pakistan partition period in Calcutta and to the post-war times in Britain. Undeviating in its narrative line, the book seamlessly blends the main stories, evoking humour, struggle, suspense and the horror of devastation, exile and shattered dreams.
Within this well crafted design of time and space, Levy opens her book with the story of Queenie Bligh — her most endearing character. As a means of survival in a hard-pressed economic situation, Queenie admits coloured tenants in her lodge much to the disapproval of her neighbours. Her friendly and adaptive nature soon makes her a serious sympathiser of the new immigrant society. Her indignant protests against the racists in support of Gilbert who fills in her loneliness as a friend is truly moving. Levy's wry sort of humour and the ironic use of an English woman's perspective to describe the problems confronted by the immigrants is both clever and sensitive. There is a touch of pathos in Levy's vivid description of how England was desperately trying to cope with utter ruin and impoverishment on one hand and the sudden appearance of "darkies" on their streets, on the other hand. The war was over but not its impact; and on Nevern Street, it was clear that the other war had only just begun — the war of colour and difference.
Poignant irony
Gilbert Joseph is a good-humoured guy whose dilemma as a coloured airman working for the English Army is acutely ironic. His realisation is poignant: "Man, this is the white man's war. Why you wanna lose your life for a white man? For Jamaica, yes. That is worth the fight". When he looks for the meaning of the word "anthropoid" in the dictionary — a word used by Hilter to describe Jews and coloured people, Gilbert's discovery is hilarious: "I got a punch in my head when the implication jumped from the page and struck me: `resembling a human but primitive, like an ape'. Two whacks I got. For I am a black man whose father is born a Jew". Levy provides a comic sense of social displacement here.
Hortense is a stiff and prim character pumped with a great deal of ironic humour. She prides herself as a product of English upbringing in Jamaica, adopting the English language and values through a sound colonial education. When confronted with the reality of a shabby and hostile England unlike the England of her dreams, she is utterly horrified. Her English qualifications are unacceptable in British Schools and she is absolutely crestfallen when she realises that very few people share the "English" values she was taught back home in Jamaica. A rather chilly Hortense with a Miss High Class attitude is well contrasted with the warm-hearted and generous spirited Queenie Bligh. Levy achieves a splendid reversal of stereotypes by interchanging their cultural traits. Describing the different societies of England and Jamaica with equal measures of affection and criticism, Levy steers her novel well clear of any prejudices or whims — personal or political.
The scenes at Nevern Street do stir a few literary ghosts such as Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Sam Selvon's Londoners and George Lamming's Emigrants. However, Levy's narrative style and her art of characterisation bears the traditional flavour of fiction echoing much of Toni Morrison's and Caryl Philips' writing. Her love for language is strikingly evident in her delightful mix of the Jamaican patois with English. Though the book moves without flagging, the plot structure is flawed at times by an incredible load of coincidences. It does mar the overall ambience of realism in the novel. For instance, Queenie's "secret" pregnancy and the coincidence of Michael being the father of the child who also happens to be Hortense's former boyfriend, appears far too contrived to uplift the readers. However, with not-so-much-required dose of drama, the story does move towards a wonderful apotheosis of Queenie's sacrifice and the familial fulfilment of the Josephs in adopting the "mulatto" baby despite their slender means of existence.
Light touch
Against the recent spate of books on multi-cultural troubles and distresses, which has taken on an intolerable mounting rate in Brit-fiction, Levy's book is bearable and enjoyable for its light touch on weighty themes. Her artistry of story telling is welcome as it is thankfully free from any obtrusive stylistic aerobatics. It may not be the best book but certainly is an engaging book breaking out into extraordinary flashes of sympathy, awareness and insight.
RENUKA RAJARATNAM Small Island, Andrea Levy, Review, 2004, p.448, price not stated.
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