Andrea Levy: Small Island

Reviewed by SUSAN JACOBS

Four distinctive characters narrate this brilliant fourth novel by celebrated British Jamaican author Andrea Levy, whose work draws on the experience of migration.

The first voice we encounter is Queenie's, as she describes a childhood visit to the African Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition, where she shakes hands with a man "who looked to be carved from melting chocolate".

Then we jump to tired, war-ravaged Britain of 1948 where Queenie, her husband Bernard still posted as missing, survives by taking in lodgers from Jamaica. But here the amiable, slapdash Englishwoman is seen through the prim eyes of Hortense, newly arrived from Kingston to join her husband Gilbert.

She is horrified by the shabbiness of the mother country, whose subjects expect one bowl instead of three to be used for vegetable scraps, dish-washing and personal ablutions. To make matters worse, no one understands her refined, carefully nurtured "King's English", or realises that Jamaica is not part of Africa.

But the story really belongs to Gilbert. Among several hundred Jamaicans who eagerly joined the RAF to fight for King and country during World War II, he soon became aware there was another war to combat.

His dreams of becoming a flight engineer were thwarted from the outset, as a black man could only be assigned menial tasks on the home front.

Still, the condescending racism of the British paled into insignificance compared with the brutal segregationist policies of the United States military. But Gilbert, son of a black mother and a Jewish father, knew anything was preferable to his future under Hitler.

In the meantime, he has enough on his hands with the snobbish, disappointed Hortense and the unexpected appearance of Bernard, who believes the war was fought so people might live among their own kind in their own place, only to find his childhood home occupied by "darkies".

Weaving back and forth in time, these narratives create worlds within worlds, each segment structured to literally flesh out its narrator's histories. The detail is intricate but never superfluous, serving to make the characters' lives, thoughts and the places they live in more vivid.

Levy has a superb ear for dialogue that captures the nuances and quirks of speech and achieves the remarkable feat of both distilling and bringing into sharp relief the weighty themes of race, war, colonialism, migration and love.

Richly funny, angry and poignant, the novel, through these unforgettable characters, records England's painful displacement from its own myths as it wrestles with inevitable change.

When all four come together in a dramatic yet tender finale, the last word goes to Gilbert. Upbraiding Bernard on his sense of superiority, he demands, "You wan' know what your white skin make you, man? It make you white. That is all, man. White."

Point taken.

Review, $34.99

* Susan Jacobs is the author of Fighting With the Enemy: New Zealand POWs and the Italian Resistance.