THE LONG SONG by Andrea Levy (Hamish Hamilton), 310 pages, $32 cloth. Rating: NNNN
Andrea Levy is one crafty writer.
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Her new book, The Long Song, the follow-up to her brilliant Small Island, is told from the point of view of Jamaican slave July. She goes from house servant to overseer’s mistress to author in the course of the rollicking narrative she’s penning at the behest of her printer son.
Levy offers the kind of details that only a skilled researcher can, but at the same time slyly makes a point of mocking the reliability of her narrator. July sometimes gives many versions of one story. She likes to embellish, and often she’ll try to pass over the tough stuff.
And there’s a lot of that: her domination by Caroline, the almost ditzy female head of the Amity plantation household, the sad end of her mother’s life, the disappearance of two children, and more.
In many ways, though, this is a primer on Jamaican slavery, the 1831 Baptist War during which sugar plantation owners rooted out blacks who were squatting on land they’d worked for generations, and the complex by-products of abolition.
Levy conveys the sights, sounds and smells of plantation life in arresting prose. A section about July’s mother, Kitty, whose job it is to haul donkey shit to fields where it’s used as fertilizer, is guaranteed to curl your nose.
The Long Song is also a fascinating study of human weakness, especially that of Robert Goodwin, who comes to Amity as its idealistic overseer but gets corrupted by his lust for July.
July herself can be hard to love, especially when she begins to use Goodwin’s attentions to her own advantage. I wish she had commented on that, but that’s a small complaint about a great novel.
Andrea Levy joins the Harbourfront Reading Series Wednesday (April 21). See Readings.
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