Small Island

Andrea Levy's Small Island is a tragicomedy of emigration and exile, set on the "small islands" of Jamaica and England before, during, and after WWII.  The nonlinear plot interweaves four distinct voices, two English and two Jamaican: Victoria "Queenie" Bligh, an escapee from life as a butcher's daughter; her husband, Bernard Bligh, a hapless bank clerk; Hortense Joseph, a Jamaican teacher wholly in love with all things English; and her husband, Gilbert Joseph, a Jamaican soldier increasingly disillusioned with English racial attitudes.  All four willingly or unwillingly uproot themselves from their familiar cultural surroundings, the better to achieve some idealized form of "Englishness."  By the end of the novel, all four have failed to find their dream, in varying degrees, but they nevertheless manage to readjust themselves to the more complex reality. 

For Gilbert and Hortense--especially Hortense--Englishness amounts to imperial fantasy, a dream of elegance and breeding inculcated in colonial versions of boarding or finishing schools.  (The novel's attack on this kind of transplanted Englishness is somewhat akin to that in Picnic at Hanging Rock.)  Although Gilbert initially strikes Hortense as a garrulous fool, his own narrative sections suggest something quite different: a man who uses the play of words to protect himself from a hostile world.  While Gilbert gives up on "Englishness" relatively early on, Hortense insistently clings to her vision of upper-class ladyhood.  They have been educated to see themselves as full-fledged citizens of the British empire, but their Britishness quickly loses meaning once their racial differences become all too visible on English soil.  Even without the difference in skin tone, however, they would still be indelibly marked as colonials by their language (in one running joke, Hortense and Gilbert find it impossible to make the English understand anything they say), their historical awareness (they know more about English history than the English themselves), and their clothing (too dressy for middle-class gentility).  Moreover, both Hortense and Gilbert have been educated for intellectual pursuits--Hortense is a teacher; Gilbert wants to be a lawyer--and yet in England, the promised land, they're seen as unfit for anything but menial jobs. 

But Bernard and Queenie aren't exactly at home in their own country.  Bernard, whose father collapsed from shellshock during WWI, is an apparently mild-mannered bank clerk who occasionally erupts into sudden and intense rages.  Someone has clearly thwarted him, and yet he never precisely manages to articulate who it is; in any event, he desperately retreats behind a veneer of middle-class propriety whenever he is under siege.  Queenie, indoctrinated early on in the magic of class differences (as a butcher's daughter, her social status is higher than that of the miners' children), leaves the farm for the more ladylike occupation of store clerk--and leaves the store for the yet more ladylike occupation of wife to Bernard.  While Queenie is, in some ways, the earthiest of the four characters--she's closer to Gilbert in conception than to Hortense--she is still partly in love with the escapist vision of middle-class Englishness, the identity that would allow her to remain safely urbanized and relatively leisured.

Levy carefully builds her parallels.  Both Gilbert and Bernard serve during WWII; both suffer varying degrees of humiliation.  Hortense and Queenie fall in love with the same man, Michael Roberts (Hortense before meeting her husband, Queenie afterwards), but their eventual marriages are for escape instead of love.  Bernard and Hortense hang on to Englishness as a means of making sense out of an otherwise chaotic world, while Gilbert and Queenie achieve a degree of distance from it earlier on in their respective journeys.   Hortense and Queenie are exceptionally aware of accents.  Gilbert is the product of an interracial relationship, as is Queenie's son Michael; Hortense is illegitimate, again like Queenie's son.  And, of course, all four of them move, both literally and figuratively.  What they find when they arrive at their final destinations, however, is never what they anticipated.

It's easy to make this novel sound like a postcolonial critic's dream, and Levy certainly invites such an approach; this is, after all, a novel very much concerned with physical and cultural dislocation, racial tensions, the definition of "Englishness," and so on.  But while all this sounds very Serious and Important, it's also superbly constructed and often very, very funny.  Gilbert is especially given to teasing, as in this exchange with Hortense:

..."I can cook."

"No, you can't."

"My teacher, Miss Plumtree said my cake was the best outside the tea-shops of southern England."

"Your teacher taste it?"

"Of course."

"And still she say it better than one she eat in a tea-shop."

"Yes."

"She tell you where this tea-shop is, because we must be sure not to go there?" (385)

Levy can be cruel to both Bernard and Hortense, who are probably the most self-deluded characters--and certainly the most humorless. But she's also capable of great tenderness as well; Hortense's humiliating attempt to find a job as a teacher is one of the novel's truly tear-jerking moments.  It's a truly fine novel.