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Andrea Levy
interview
What sparked Small Island?
In 1948 a ship called the Empire Windrush sailed from the Caribbean to England. On board were approximately 500 West Indian men who were travelling to start a new life in the UK - the Mother Country. Rightly or wrongly this event has been set down in British history as the point where Britain began to change into a multi-cultural society. My dad was on that ship. I wanted to look at that period because it meant a lot to me personally – it’s very much part of my family history.
Immigration effects not only the people who come to a new place but also the people they come to live amongst. For that reason I wanted to write about the experience of that immigration from both of these perspectives. So I had two couples - one black and one white in a house in Earl’s Court in 1948; what brought them there? What had just occurred to make this change happen? It was in asking these questions that I realised how close it was to the end of the Second World War when my parents came to live in Britain. And the book was born.
How does that compare with the genesis of your other work?All my novels have started from a place that is in some way personal to me. Although my novels are not autobiographical they have all been about exploring what it is and means to be Black and British.
Queenie, Hortense, Gilbert and Bernard, the four main protagonists, get to tell their own stories, and they all do so in highly individual voices. Did these voices – and personalities – evolve naturally, taking on a life of their own, or did you need to adopt specific tactics to achieve and maintain the differentiation between them?They both evolved naturally and were created by adopting tactics to sustain them. Whenever I write I read back what I have written aloud. For all four characters I have a different accent and way of speaking that I would hear in my head as I wrote and then speak out loud as I read them back. The process was akin to an actor getting into part. For example, with Hortense I would sit up straight and imagine I was wearing a Sunday-best hat and white gloves. I enjoy writing like this and it is one of the reasons I love using the first person - there is no gap between the narrator and the character.
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You have said this book took four-and-a-half years to write and you loved it. What did you enjoy most about the whole process? What, if anything, did you find frustrating?
I enjoyed the finding out. It was a wonderful discovery to think myself into the world that my parents and people like them had had to live through. I came to have a great deal of respect for that generation that went through the second world war and it helped me understand the generation I had been brought up by.
The frustration is in having a huge, fat reference book to wade through to find the information that is relevant for you. I wished I could just put a little chip in my brain and have the data transferred into my memory. There were just not enough hours in the day to read everything and take it in; hence it took me much longer to write than I at first hoped.
The novel has obviously been meticulously researched: it feels utterly authentic, and yet the historical detail never swamps the story. How difficult was it to balance the two?Sometimes I would research something for days only to realise that I would not put any of it in the book - it was just enough that I knew what happened. Leaving stuff out is the hardest bit. There was a point where I and two doctor friends were researching the treatment of a particular illness. We spent a day researching and all that appears in the book are two letters - WR. But anything else and it would have felt wrong. When in doubt leave it out, was my motto.
What are you working on now?Another novel. But I’m not saying any more than that as I am a little superstitious about talking about work in progress. Although my ‘progress’ on it is not as fast as I’d like because I’m still promoting Small Island. But if my editor is reading this…it’s marinating… honest.
Please could you tell us about what’s on your bookshelf? The old stuff, the unread stuff, the favourite books, the passing enthusiasm....Oh so many books, too many to rattle off. I love contemporary fiction but recently I’ve been trying to catch up on the classics - that is the books I should have read at school but was too busy sitting in the toilets talking about boys. So I’m currently listening to an audio book of Moby Dick (unabridged) whilst actually reading Girl with a Pearl Earring and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. Not all at once of course. I am also reading for research on my next novel (but I can’t say what, but let me just tell you that it’s big and fat and very interesting indeed).
Is there one book by a woman (that isn’t eligible for this year’s prize) that you’d like to recommend to website visitors?Oh what a difficult question - only one book! I’ve just re-read Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and I really enjoyed it a second (or is it a third?) time round. She’s better known for her scripts for Merchant Ivory films but she is a very good novelist as well.
Why that book?Because that’s the one I chose today – if you ask me tomorrow I’ll say something else because there are so many fabulous books written by women.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell website visitors?As a writer I feel I am still learning my craft and will be until I stop writing (which I hope is never). One of the greatest lessons I was given was thanks to the Orange Prize for Fiction. I was a judge on the prize in 1997 when Anne Michaels won with Fugitive Pieces. Whilst judging I had to read over 50 books - books that I may otherwise have overlooked because I didn’t know the author or hadn’t read a review. The Orange Prize opened up fiction for me in a way that I shall never forget. Reading can be very self-selective; taking a chance on a book you wouldn’t normally think of reading can be a very rewarding experience.
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