It is to Andrea Levy’s credit that for this, her eagerly-awaited fifth novel, she adopts a narrative approach strikingly different from that of the best-selling, prize-winning, televised Small Island.
It is to Andrea Levy’s credit that for this, her eagerly-awaited fifth novel, she adopts a narrative approach strikingly different from that of the best-selling, prize-winning, televised Small Island. The Long Song is also an historical fiction, but it is as much a critique of the way history is made and distorted as it is an evocation of time and place.
Miss July was born a slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation. She experienced the Baptist war and the abolition of slavery, but, for her, ‘freedom’ was an ambivalent concept; in old age she is rescued from destitution by her pious son, Thomas Kinsman, whom she abandoned at birth. Thomas, a printer-publisher, is a model of a successful black businessman, making the most of post-abolition possibilities.
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