Then she attended a conference on the legacy of slavery in London. It felt like too shocking and difficult a subject for me. So, was I going to write a book about slavery? Not if I could help it. “The answer of course was slavery-they were brought there against their will. What led to The Long Song? “So after that I began to ask that awkward question ‘Why were black people in the Caribbean in the first place?’” she explained. Levy, who was born in London of Jamaican parents, explored her own heritage and the intimate links between Britain and the Caribbean, in particular the experience of her parents’ generation, in Small Island and her three earlier novels. That pernicious, pseudo-scientific racism was something that Europeans had to invent.” “I do feel strongly that modern racism is a legacy of slavery. I looked forward to meeting her, but our plans to chat in person fell through when the Icelandic volcanic ash played havoc with her May book tour in the U.S., so we shared an email dialogue.
The BBC miniseries just aired on Masterpiece Theater. Small Island won England’s 2004 Orange Prize for fiction, the 2004 Whitbread Prize novel award and book of the year award. (In a starred Kirkus review, I called it “an enthralling tour de force that animates a chapter in the history of empire.”) The quartet of voices Levy orchestrated-Hortense and Gilbert, a Jamaican born Royal Air Force volunteer and his teacher wife Queenie, their landlord in 1948 London, and her husband Bernard, returned from the war after being presumed dead-have had staying power. I approached Andrea Levy’s new novel, The Long Song, as a fan of Small Island, her fourth novel and her first published in the U.S.
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