Instead, she cheekily recommends that we do some homework ourselves but warns against a publication called Conflict and change. Levy has researched the novel meticulously, but July has no desire to weigh herself down with any historical burden. She makes you understand how chaotic and punitive this moment in history was, as well as liberating. The memoir comes to its climax during the 10-day Baptist war in 1831 and the slave uprisings that followed. July enjoys giving us alternative accounts of her arrival in the world and Levy revels in storytelling itself, its sheer pliability. July is a mulatto, the daughter of Scottish overseer Tam Dewar, who raped Kitty, her slave mother. Slavery is a subject that has inspired some magnificent fiction (think of Toni Morrison's Beloved or Valerie Martin's Property), but I had some misgivings: might it not, in this case, make for over-serious writing, especially for a novelist as comically inclined as Levy? But she dares to write about her subject in an entertaining way without ever trivialising it and The Long Song reads with the sort of ebullient effortlessness that can only be won by hard work. Her memoir will not keep company with gold-bound volumes filled with the "puff and twaddle of some white lady's mind". July has her own views about style and tells us she will not dawdle over descriptions of trees and grass. But he and his mother – comically – do not see eye to eye. We learn that he intends to publish his mother's book, nicely bound and complete with sugarcane on the cover. Her son, Thomas, is a printer who learnt his trade in Britain after his mother abandoned him – felicitously – on a minister's doorstep as a baby. The novel is in the form of a memoir written by an old Jamaican woman called July, once a slave on Amity Plantation.
Levy has turned her gaze away from British shores and set The Long Song in early 19th-century Jamaica, on a sugar-cane plantation, in the turbulent years before – and just after – the abolition of slavery. A novel such as Small Island is a hard act to follow, but in her new book Levy has moved into top gear. It was an adroit, funny, tender book about a Jamaican immigrant couple, their big-hearted white landlady and her bigoted husband in postwar London and it beautifully described the struggle to survive in a new country.
Andrea Levy's Small Island – her fourth novel – has had a glorious career: it not only won the Orange prize, but was voted "Best of the Best" novels ever to win that award.
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