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It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh's neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but Queenie doesn't know when her husband will return, or if he will come back at all. What else can she do? Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Returning to England as a civilian he finds himself treated very differently. It's desperation that makes him remember a wartime friendship with Queenie and knock at her door. Gilbert's wife Hortense, too, had longed to leave Jamaica and start a better life in England. But when she joins him she is shocked to find London shabby, decrepit, and far from the golden city of her dreams. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was.… (more)
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Hortense Roberts is the illegitimate daughter of a highly respected Jamaican government official and an illiterate country girl. She is blessed with the "warm honey(ed)" complexion of her father, and looks down upon her mother, with her "bitter chocolate hue" and simple ways. She is raised by her father's relatives, and graduates with distinction from a teacher's college. She desires to become a teacher for students of privilege in a private school in Kingston, but her mother's background eliminates her from consideration. Her good friend and former classmate, Celia Langley, helps her to obtain a teaching position in a local school. Celia is beloved by her students and fellow teachers, but Hortense is sickened by the "wretched black faces" that she encounters in her classroom.
Celia's beau is Gilbert Joseph, a handsome Jamaican man who joined the Royal Air Force during the war and was stationed in the UK. He seeks to return there, as job opportunities in postwar Jamaica are severely limited. When he proposes to Celia, Hortense sees Gilbert as her ticket out of Jamaica. She brazenly and deftly positions herself between the two lovers, and Gilbert agrees to marry her, in exchange for payment of his fare from Jamaica to the UK.
Gilbert has great difficulty in locating a place to rent, until he turns up unexpectedly at the door of Victoria "Queenie" Bligh, who cares for her ailing father-in-law in her husband's absence. The war is over, but it is 1948, and Bernard Bligh has yet to return home or contact his wife. Queenie rented rooms to Jamaican airmen during the war to make money, and agrees to let a room to Gilbert, despite the protests of her neighbors, who are dismayed by the influx of "wogs" into their neighborhood. His wife joins him after several months, but is appalled by the room he expects her to live in. Her spirit is ground down by the appalling racism that comes from Londoners, who she thought would be civilized and welcoming to her, and she slowly begins to understand the difficulties her husband and countrymen will have to overcome to survive there.
Shortly afterward, Bernard turns up, unannounced and quite unexpectedly. Due to his traumatic experiences during the war and his ingrained prejudices he is disgusted by the Jamaicans that have taken up residence in his home. Queenie refuses to allow him to kick out the intruders, and she will not allow him to share a bed with her. She does not give him a clear reason why she wants to remain distant from him, but all is made clear a few weeks later, after a shocking event that turns the Bligh house inside out.
Small Island, the winner of the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, the 2004 Whitbread Prize, and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Fiction, is an unforgettable, humorous and painfully sad story of the experiences of whites and blacks in postwar Britain. Levy brilliantly captures the shock and despair of the first wave of West Indian immigrants to the UK in a passage that compares England to a distant and dear relative, who calls the visitor to come to her aid. Instead of the refined and welcoming Mother, our visitor is met by a haggardly, dirty woman who looks at him askance and asks, 'Who the bloody hell are you?' Levy does an excellent job in portraying both sides of the story, as Londoners are traumatized by repeated invasions during and after the war: immigrants from war-torn Europe, soldiers from America and elsewhere, citizens made homeless from the London Blitz, and the massive postwar influx of Poles and West Indians to the UK. The novel's end was a bit too tidy for me, but not enough to affect my rating of this highly recommended and important book.
So it is that the experience of WWII has split the world for the characters in Andrea Levy’s Small Island. Gilbert and Hortense Joseph, and Bernard and Queenie Bligh, alternately narrate the story by
Jamaican Gilbert Joseph is an honest and ambitious young man who volunteers with the RAF during WWII to fight for his “Mother Country.” England, he knows, has opportunities to offer that his small island cannot; and in 1948, he dreams to emigrate. Hortense Roberts, a haughty, young school teacher also dreams of a better life in England. Gilbert becomes her ticket off of her native island, and they enter into a marriage of convenience. In England, Queenie Bligh, an compassionate and liberal-minded woman whose husband, Bernard, has not yet returned from war, agrees to board the Josephs. But the reality of their new life is far removed from their dream. Their one-room accommodation is a hovel; and England, far from a land of opportunity, is a nation struggling to recover from the ravages of war. But most humiliating for Gilbert and Hortense is the hateful prejudice which blindsides them, and the incomprehensible reality that they are not welcome in their esteemed “Mother Country.” When Bernard Bligh, a timid, bigoted bank clerk, returns home from the war, what had been an untenable situation becomes unlivable.
“And at that moment I longed to be once more in Jamaica. I yearned for home as a drunk man for whiskey. For only there could I be sure that someone looking on my face for the first time would regard it without reaction. No gapes, no gawps, no cussing, no looking quickly away as if seeing something unsavoury. Just a meeting as unremarkable as passing your mummy in the kitchen. What a thing was this to wish for. That a person regarding me should think nothing. What a forlorn desire to seek indifference.” (315)
Small Island is beautifully written and hauntingly real. Levy develops a cast of unforgettable characters who navigate empire, prejudice, war, and love in an unforgettable story. A must read!
Gilbert Joseph is anxious to get away from a life with no future in Jamaica. He joins the RAF and goes to England where he is first exposed to blatant racism, as well as the wonders of the modern world. While there, he meets and becomes friends with Queenie Bligh, an English woman married to a man who doesn't know she exists.
Queenie tells the story from her point of view beginning when she was a child growing up on a farm in Great Britain. When Gilbert comes back to England after the war, she rents a room to him in her house which helps her to survive since her husband, Bernard has not returned from his posting in the East.
Hortense Roberts, the third storyteller, is a very proud Jamaican school teacher, who is also anxious to leave the poor island and go to the Mother Country, where she feels opportunities abound. She offers to give Gilbert the money to return to England, after he returns from RAF duty, as long as he marries her and then sends for her after he earns some money in England.
The fourth storyteller is Bernard Bligh, Queenie's husband, who returns from duty in Burma and India as an airman, a changed man.
Levy is masterful at weaving the story through time, location and the four voices. Her description of London during the blitz is stunningly realistic and places the reader on the streets of the city. Bernard's experiences in Burma and India leave you breathless.
But the real stars here are the characters that Levy develops with exacting adroitness. Her use of lyrical language ("I had dreams of attending a university, studying law and acquiring a degree. But my station was lowly-my ideas soared so high above it I could see them lamenting and waving good-bye."-Gilbert Joseph, page 121), Jamaican dialect and attention to detail left me longing for more. 2004 Orange Prize Winner. Absolutely wonderful read.
I want to thank my friends here on LT, for this recommendation and now I’ve found my favorite read of the year…so far!
Set during and immediately after World War II,
By moving between time periods and points of view, Levy reveals connections between the characters' lives, some of which the characters themselves are unaware of.
The plot includes many surprising twists, and I do not want to reveal much in this review. For me, the characters made the novel. I especially liked the strong female protagonists, Hortense and Queenie. Hortense, recently arrived from Jamaica, joins Gilbert as a lodger in Queenie's house. She is young and naive, with high expectations that are dashed when she sees where Gilbert lives, and when she encounters certain realities about being a Jamaican woman living in England in 1948. Queenie has transformed from young wife to independent woman and, being unusually open-minded on issues of race, has made a living renting rooms primarily to "coloureds." She refuses to give in to her neighbors' objections, which leaves her somewhat isolated in her community. She remains strong while also fighting the loneliness of having lost her husband. Bernard's sudden reappearance upsets Queenie's comfortable routine and challenges the relationships she has forged in his absence. The bonds between Queenie, Hortense, Gilbert, and Bernard are strengthened in surprising ways as the novel reaches its climax.
Highly recommended.
Hortense and Gilbert come to England from a completly different background and set of circumstances .Gilbert has lived as a somewhat happy go lucky fellow in Jamaica. By contrast, Hortense, also Jamaican, has been brought up by a caucasion family , and has been sent to school by the family that took her in as a child. When the caucasion family falls on hard times - Hortense is sent packing to make a life for herself. Hortense is a proud person. She barely knows Gilbert, but when she discovers that Gilbert is going to England to fight with England as part of the Commonwealth, Hortense pays Gilbert's way to England and marries him purely as a way to get to England in the hopes of a better life.
Many shocks and conflicts await all parties in the story. Racial prejudice within the Army itself and racial and class tensions and prejudices with in England serve to futher make life difficult for all during WW2.
To say more would spoil the plot. But all of these threads eventually come together, and we get an insightful look into Jamica and England during and before WW2 , as well as an inside look into the four different perspectives of each protagonist.
This is sweeping book- crossing times, cultures, and countries. Conversely, it is so personal as each protagonist tells his or her story . While the topic matter is serious, Andrea Levy never gets bogged down with over sentimentality , and she injects a certain amount of levity. I thoroughly enjoyed this wonderful story. It's a " cracking good read".
Hortense Roberts is the bastard child of a country girl and a man of quality in Jamaica. Her grandmother takes her to live with her father's relatives because her skin is golden, and that gives her a chance for a golden life. Her grandmother loves Hortense, but her grandmother is the cousins' servant. Hortense grows up knowing what is right and good within a narrow definition of right and good, and she gives herself to it.
Hortense eventually persuades Gilbert Joseph, her only friend's fellow, to marry her. Gilbert has experienced racism during WWII, but he hopes anyway to make a life for himself in England better than the one he might expect in Jamaica. He is the one open character in the novel. In England he meets Queenie Bligh, the daughter of a village butcher who married Bernard to escape her mother's life. Queenie is a curious mixture of generosity and cruelty. Bernard is a bank clerk, son of a repressed and repressing mother and a father who returned from WWI when Bernard was eight, shellshocked and unspeaking. These four eventually end up in the same house after the war, and their needs begin to change them or change my attitude toward them.
Small Island is an indictment of racism, but it ends with some small hope for common humanity.
This novel focused on four main characters: Hortense, a stubborn Jamaican woman whose dream was to always live in England; her husband, Gilbert, who served in the RAF and tried to carve a living in London; Queenie, Gilbert’s landlord; and her husband, Bernard, who was missing for three years before turning up at home. Through these narratives, the reader received a hard look at the racist treatment of Jamaican people – it was definitely reminiscent of how African Americans were treated in our country during this time. If Small Island succeeded at anything, it clearly showed how Jamaicans (and other minorities), despite their service during World War II, were not given a fair shake in British society.
While I enjoyed most of this novel, I felt dragged down by Bernard’s narrative. He was the most unenlightening of the four, and he was a hard character to like (racist, sexist and meek). Additionally, I did not like the “surprise” aspect to the ending. It was a little predictable and weighed the story down.
However, despite these reservations, Small Islandtaught me something historically that I did not know before, and for that, I am glad to have read this book.
The sections about Bernard were my least favorite of all, and at first I would have called it a fault of the novel, but now I wonder if that was Levy's intention - he certainly seems to aggravate everyone he comes into contact with, so perhaps the reader is meant to be just one of many. I found the last quarter or so of the novel to be a slog as a result, and I almost wish Bernard had been replaced with another character entirely.
I'll admit I was put off at the beginning with how Levy attempted to capture and describe accents. I can't say for sure how accurate it is, so I'll leave that for someone else, but I personally don't care for that technique in general. Slurs are used incredibly frequently which, while realistic, can also be a turn-off, and sometimes I just needed to put the book down for a little while and go do something else for a bit to not feel quite so gross. Ultimately, however, I'm glad I stuck this one out, although I can't say I enjoyed the read or would read it again.
Winner, Whitbread Book of the Year 2004
Winner, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2005
Andrea Levy wrote Small Island as a way to research her Jamaican parents’ immigrant experience. The title, Small Island, is apt as it refers to both Jamaica and Britain. The book takes place
The novel covers several issues: war, immigration, prejudice, and class. I love historical fiction because history is so much more interesting when it’s portrayed in the personal experiences of the men and women who lived it. I’ve always wondered why England didn’t have as much of a racial problem as the U.S., but in this book we discover that there were, in fact, prejudices that needed to be overcome. While Bernhard was so proud to be a part of Mother England as a Jamaican citizen, enough so that he went to war for her, his ‘Mother’ not only didn’t appreciate his efforts, she didn’t even recognize him as her child.
Each character in the book is so well defined. I got a kick out of Hortense and her ‘white-gloved,’ prudish ways. I appreciated that Queenie was ahead of her time in terms of racism, and even though Bernhard was quite the opposite, I felt sorry for him. Gilbert was perhaps the star of the novel as just an overall good-hearted person and patriot.
Not only did Small Island win the Orange Prize, it was also voted The Best of the Best out of all the winners by the Orange Prize committee chairs. While my favorite Orange winner so far is probably Half of a Yellow Sun, I do understand why Small Island has a strong following as well.
I can’t say that I can recall reading other books about Jamaica, let alone Jamaicans in WWII England and beyond. Levy has taken her own history (her parents moved to England from Jamaica) and made it into an engaging story. The story focuses on two husband and wife pairs: Hortense and Gilbert, newly arrived from Jamaica and Queenie and Bernard, an English couple who Hortense and Gilbert rent their room from. But all is not well – Bernard is absent and nobody knows why, Hortense and Gilbert don’t seem to get along and Queenie has her secrets. What are they?
Levy tells the story by moving back and forth between 1948 (when the story is set) and Before, giving us each character’s backstory and unravelling some of the mysteries occurring in 1948. The ‘Before’ sections deal primarily with World War II for Gilbert (he was in the RAF), Bernard (also in the RAF in India) and Queenie (who was dealing with the London bombings). They also delve back into childhood and early adult years, revealing how the two couples came to meet and why things are so awkward. In fact, the majority of the book takes place in the past – I’d be interested to see how the television series copes with this – moving forward and back like the novel or telling the story in a linear fashion. A lot of the suspense comes from not knowing a character’s past, but catching glimpses of problems in 1948. Back in 1948, there are a few bombshells where my mouth was hanging open in surprise – I didn’t see those twists and turns!
The characters in Small Island are flawed. Bernard is very racist by today’s standards, while Queenie is a lot more open-minded. Hortense is very particular with her visions of what England should be like, while Gilbert rolls with the majority of unfair things that happen to him. It was interesting to see the Jamaican couple’s perceptions of what they believed England to be like and the reality they were faced with, not to mention the racism from the English and Americans. The English are quite ignorant in their knowledge of Jamaica, to Hortense and Gilbert’s disgust (England is so important to them, why is Jamaica not so?); it made me think if other countries in the Commonwealth suffer from the same inflated image problem (can you tell me much about Australia?) Which country is the ‘small island’ with all its connotations?
This was thought provoking and original as well as an entertaining book – thoroughly worthy of the awards it won. Well done Andrea Levy.
Why the title, Small Island? Because I don't think it gives me the right memory of the book. There are four main characters who interact in
That's it for 'small island', the best I can do. It stilll doesn't feel like the right title, even after I've managed to connect it to each character, and maybe an overall theme. I think if it was called 'Queenie', it would be more memorable about the character, the Britishness of the book, and the nickname that I could probably hear in a Jamaican accent.
I loved how Hortense was more British than anyone in the story, and yet was looked upon as a barbarian immigrant by the locals. Bernard was an idiot, who had the least growth, unless growth is considered waking up to his world around him and participating in his own life. Nah, still a stiff-upper lip, totally clueless in his unaccountable superiority, naive idiot. Queenie and Gilbert were the most realistic about life, and were charming, wonderful characters dealing with a terrible hand that life dealt them, and yet improving their situations somewhat.
All the good things I've heard about Small Island were true - a wonderful book (with a lousy title).
My favorite quote from this talented author: "Her face was so pretty wearing merry, I wanted to kiss it. But no, no, no, no. Don't get carried away, man. One thaw is not the summer."