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Small Island
Andrea Levy
Rt. Hon. Paul Boateng MP
was born in Hackney, London in 1951, but spent much of his childhood in Ghana, West Africa, where his father was first a lawyer then a member of the Government of Kwame Nkrumah. After the military coup of 1966, Paul returned to the UK aged 15.
He worked as a solicitor before being elected to represent Brent South for Labour in 1987, becoming the first person of African descent to be elected to the British Parliament.
He was appointed to the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in May 2002. -
Reviewed by Rt. Hon. Paul Boateng (cont…)
This is a carefully crafted story of interwoven lives. Levy writes with remarkable insight into the meanness, cruelty and pettiness of lives caught up in conflict and circumscribed by race, class and circumstance. There is passion and anger, but also warmth and humour in these lives and in her acute observation of their workings. This is an England and a world far removed from our current experience. Today’s London might truly be another country. And yet Burnley is not so very far away. We have come far and yet difference still has the capacity to stir up fearfulness. As Gilbert says ‘For me, I had just one question - let me ask the Mother Country just this one, simple question… How come England did not know me?”
Panic and emptiness, the failure to connect lurk beneath the surface. We continue to live our lives locked in the legacy of Empire. This is a largely neglected period. Levy, in this great novel, does it justice.
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