Reviewed by Rt. Hon. Paul Boateng

'Oi darkie, show us your tail'

Andrea Levy in Small Island brilliantly captures a world before the Race Relations Act and multiculturalism. A mastery of dialogue and capacity to capture mood and place makes this novel a must-read. Levy sets her work in a 'Mother Country' defended by West Indians rallying, with the rest of Empire, to the call; in the Empire from whence they and others came, and in the post-war Britain which they rebuilt and settled.

It is this last of which I have some childhood recollection. The wonder with which complete strangers would pat my curly hair in the streets of fifties London. The repeated questions to my white mother “Is he yours?”. The defiance, born of sometimes bitter experience, of her reply “Of course he is!”. Just daring them to say what some certainly thought. How could she?

This is the context for a work that explores not just the reality of race relations during and immediately after the War, but the nature of migration and the movement of people itself. The dream, the disappointment, the dawning of new experiences for people unaccustomed to each other. A language shared but, at the same time, unfamiliar. Hortense, who joins her Jamaican ex-serviceman Gilbert in his mean little bedsitter, horrified at the place to which her husband has brought her, is simply not understood with her formal English. This is a West Indian for whom an idealised vision of Britain and its landmarks was as familiar as the Jamaica of her birth was as strange and foreign to the English. Queenie, the white landlady, has grown familiar and accustomed to the sound of the island. Many haven’t. Gilbert struggles with his own thwarted ambition, the white Bernard, Queenie’s husband takes up the White Man’s Burden in India, fighting in a world where his superiority is, as he sense, never again to go unchallenged.

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