A slave to her past

It is to Andrea Levy’s credit that for this, her eagerly-awaited fifth novel, she adopts a narrative approach strikingly different from that of the best-selling, prize-winning, televised Small Island.

It is to Andrea Levy’s credit that for this, her eagerly-awaited fifth novel, she adopts a narrative approach strikingly different from that of the best-selling, prize-winning, televised Small Island. The Long Song is also an historical fiction, but it is as much a critique of the way history is made and distorted as it is an evocation of time and place.

Miss July was born a slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation. She experienced the Baptist war and the abolition of slavery, but, for her, ‘freedom’ was an ambivalent concept; in old age she is rescued from destitution by her pious son, Thomas Kinsman, whom she abandoned at birth. Thomas, a printer-publisher, is a model of a successful black businessman, making the most of post-abolition possibilities. His daughters, who squabble over the colour of their hair-ribbons as frivolously as any pampered white girls, have no knowledge of their grandmother’s brutal past.

But old July has ‘a story that lay so fat within her breast’ that it must be told. Her white mistress taught her basic literacy so that she could do the estate accounts; nonetheless, in July’s youth, ‘writing the letters ABC could have seen her put to the lash’, and she must rely on her son, educated in England, to shape her narrative, as well as to supply her with paper and ink. ‘My particular skill’, says Thomas, ‘is to find meaning in the most scribbled of texts’; from the start, we are aware that, in historical documents, ‘meaning’ can be constructed as well as found.

July warns us to expect no beauty or poetry; she has ‘a forthright tongue and little ink’.