The Long Song by Andrea Levy
Headline, $38.99
I loved this book. I loved it because it deals with one of the more brutal periods of history and yet is never grim or depressing. I loved it for the voice of its narrator, the irrepressible and salty Miss July. But mostly, I loved it because it achieves that rare thing - it is both powerful and playful.
The Long Song is a story about slavery on the sugar cane plantations of Jamaica in the 1800s. Miss July is an old woman, a former slave whose printer son has persuaded her to write a book on her life. Possessed of "a forthright tongue and little ink", she tells of the rape of her cane-cutter mother Kitty, of her own birth and the way life suddenly changes when the plantation's "white missus", Caroline Mortimer, takes a fancy to her.
Miss July is torn from her mother's side and turned into a house slave at a crucial point in Jamaica's history, the time of the slave rebellions and their eventual emancipation. But these things happen around her, not to her. She's just an ordinary girl trying to serve a vain and idle mistress, avoid beatings and survive.
When Levy was in New Zealand recently, she told audiences that this book was especially challenging to write because there are no accounts of the period except from a white perspective. Three hundred years of slave history were never recorded.
The Long Song is her attempt to remedy that, to tell the stories that went untold and set the record straight. The white settlers may have thought of Negro plantation slaves as childlike and lazy, yet essentially biddable, but Levy shows us their true spirit, their quiet rebellions and courage through the never self-pitying, sometimes not entirely reliable, voice of Miss July.
This isn't a strident, hectoring sort of book. Yes, the white characters are mostly repugnant or at best misguided, but Levy treats them with humour as much as disdain. She is brave enough to underplay her hand and, by not laying it on too thick, by leavening the tragedy with comic moments, she gives her work that much more clout.
There are some shocking moments, some quicksilver switches from farce to horror, but this is an enjoyable read from start to finish. An entertaining book about slavery may sound incongruous, but somehow Levy manages it.
