Small Island

The Book Club met on Wednesday to discuss Small Island by Andrea Levy. Krysia Bell opened the meeting and gave this astute summation of the book.

‘Small Island’ by Andrea Levy doesn’t really need to be unearthed and analysed like some of the previous books we have read because it speaks for itself. The novel is about the arrival of Jamaicans in England just after the war, the racial discrimination and hostility that they encountered and the disappointment in a land which they regarded as their mother country. As Jamaica was part of the British Empire they couldn’t understand why they were not welcomed with open arms. The characters and events are based on the experiences of the author’s parents who sailed from Jamaica to England in 1948. The author skillfully moves backwards and forwards in time using multi narratives to create the four main protagonists in the novel.
Gilbert, who has come to London from Jamaica to make a better life for himself and his new wife Hortense. Their landlady Queenie rents out the rooms in her grubby Earls Court house and is frowned on by the neighbours for accommodating ‘darkies’ and bringing down the neighbourhood. Queenie has waited three years for her miserable husband Bernard to return from the war and by now considers herself a war widow. The opening chapter of the novel tells of Queenie as a child when she is taken to the Empire Exhibition. She follows the smell of chocolate to the African village where a black man who is manning the stand shakes her hand. Her father reassures his frightened daughter that the man would have been a chief or a prince in his own country ‘you can tell he’s been civilised says her father, because he speaks English. The story starts with Hortense’s arrival in the middle of winter on a boat from Jamaica ‘on the boat women were in their best clothes, cotton dresses, hats and white gloves, jumping up and down waving, being met by black men in scruffy coats and hand knitted scarves hunched over in the cold’. The scene is set. The contrasts made. You know what awaits them.
However the discrimination which pervades this book is quite shocking at times. Queenie says to Hortense when she first arrives at the house ‘I hope you are not bringing anything into the house that will smell’.
Mr. Todd, a neighbor relates the story of how his sister is approached by two black women who, in passing, force her to step into the road. He says, ‘don’t they know that it should be them that steps into the road and not a white person.’
Then of course there is the scene in the cinema where the black and white GI’s are segregated, and the heart wrenching scene when Hortense goes to the Council offices to apply for a teaching job and ends up walking into the broom cupboard. But horrible bigoted Bernard is the most dislikeable character in this book especially at the end when he walks into Gilbert and Hortense’s room and looks at the curtains ‘The curtains grubby and ripped. He thought Those coloured people don’t have the same standards....the war was fought so that people might live amongst their own kind. Everyone was trying to get home to be with kith and kin except for those blasted coloured colonials. I’ve nothing against them in their place but their place isn’t here. Mr. Todd thought they wouldn’t survive another cold winter. I hope he was right.’
For me this was an award winning book. A story, simply written, with brilliant dialogue, big characters, funny, moving and above all memorable. Yes, I did find the Michael Roberts connection and the baby rather incredulous but it’s a good story.

An animated discussion ensued and the reviews were mixed. In many ways the book succeeded in capturing a sense of the times which was rendered in excellent use of description and dialogue, but there was a minority opinion that it missed an evocative rendering of Jamaican life. Some felt that, despite an overall successful telling of the tale, there were aspects which lacked continuity, while at the same time being strongly written. At the end, one wonders to which small island the author was referring. An interesting read nonetheless.

The book chosen for the May meeting, which will be held Wednesday 5 May, is The 158 Pound Marriage by John Irving. The book selected for June is The Tehran Conviction, by Tom Gabbay.

A huge thanks to Margaret Moore for hosting the meeting and providing several delicious dishes and equal thanks to everyone who participated and contributed.

We look forward to seeing you at the next meeting.