The long song

by Andrea Levy

Paper Book, 2010

Status

Available

Call number

823/.92

Genres

Publication

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

Description

The child of a field slave on the Amity sugar plantation in Jamaica, July lives with her mother until a recently transplanted English widow decides to move her into the great house and rename her. She remains bound to the plantation despite her "freedom." The arrival of a young English overseer dramatically changes life in the great house.

Media reviews

Trouw

Daarvoor is ’Het lange lied’ een te menselijk verhaal, over vrouwen en kinderen die weten te overleven in tegenspoed, die leven en liefhebben, die geboren worden en sterven onder de heldere zon, omringd door de weelde van de tropen. Thomas, zoon van de verteller en trots op (maar niet verblind

door) zijn Engelse opvoeding, drukt het zo uit: „De enige troost voor het geleden onrecht is de volledige waarheid”. Dat wil zeggen: een onsentimenteel portret van een gebroken samenleving, waarin de fouten van degenen die eerst tot slavernij en daarna tot armoede veroordeeld waren net zo eerlijk en met net zoveel sympathie worden beschreven als die van hun onderdrukkers. De slavenbezitters zijn vooral gênant als persoonlijkheid, niet als vertegenwoordigers van een bepaald volk of natie.

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— 4 more

Packabook Travel Novels

As is inevitable in any book about slavery, this novel is confronting. And at times it is almost unbearable to witness the attitudes of the plantation owners.

The Telegraph

In The Long Song, Andrea Levy explores her Jamaican heritage more completely than ever before. This sensational novel – her first since the Orange Prize-winning Small Island...Slavery is a grim subject indeed, but the wonder of Levy’s writing is that she can confront such things and somehow

derive deeply life-affirming entertainment from them. July emerges as a defiant, charismatic, almost invincible woman who gives a unique voice to the voiceless, and for that she commands affection and admiration. Levy’s aim, she says, was to write a book that instilled pride in anyone with slave ancestors and The Long Song, though “its load may prove to be unsettling”, is surely that book.

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The Washington Post

Andrea Levy's insightful and inspired fifth novel, "The Long Song," reminds us that she is one of the best historical novelists of her generation....Levy's previous novel, "Small Island," is rightly regarded as a masterpiece, and with "The Long Song" she has returned to the level of storytelling

that earned her the Orange Prize in 2004. Her heroine narrates the beginning of the end of slavery in Jamaica, coming to a climax with the 1831 Baptist War, when enslaved men and women fought their enslavers for 10 days. It's clear that Levy has done her research, but this work never intrudes upon the narrative, which travels at a jaunty pace. Levy's sly humor swims just under the surface of the most treacherous waters

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theguardian.co.uk

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.....The heart of the novel is July's description of the ménage à trois between Caroline, herself and Caroline's newly acquired English abolitionist husband, Robert. You despise, pity and almost – but never quite – sympathise with Caroline. On first arriving in Jamaica, she appears a twit – yet with a lively curiosity

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User reviews

LibraryThing member brenzi

It’s the case of too many endings. Thomas Kinsman, black professional man living in Jamaica in 1898, convinces his mother that she should write a book depicting her life as a house slave on a sugar cane plantation in that English island colony in the mid-1800’s. Surprisingly, his mother turns

out a very accomplished, very polished book, complete with two separate endings. The prose is lovely, the narrative flows, the story is captivating and yet something fell flat.

Here’s the problem, and it happens too often to ignore. A writer writes a spectacular book. The Booker committee fails to notice or decides it isn’t worth the trouble, or it isn’t that author’s “turn”. The book goes on to notable success, both critical and popular. A few years later, the author produces another book and the Booker committee finally takes notice and decides now is the time for this author to snag a nomination. I think this is what happened to Andrea Levy. Her 2004 novel, “Small Island,” was a stunning book, filled with poetic prose that just made its narrative sing. The Booker committee failed to take notice. The book went on to huge critical success and popular appeal. They tried to right this wrong by nominating her 2009 novel, “The Long Song,” for the prestigious award but, unfortunately, this novel is no “Small Island.” Don’t get me wrong; it’s a good book. It’s not a great book. It’s not nearly as good as the author’s previous effort. This could also just be my problem. Levy set such a high bar after the publication of “Small Island” that maybe, for me, no book could live up to its predecessor.

At any rate, Miss July is a slave child, wrenched from her mother’s arms at the age of nine, to become the house slave/companion to Caroline Mortimer, sister to the sugar cane plantation owner. There’s a world of difference between a house slave and a field slave and Levy points up all the differences. We follow July’s life as she becomes a young woman and faces the violent confrontation between the landowners and the slaves, as they seek their freedom. The accompanying violence and abuse paints an ugly picture of all that was at stake:

“The overseer tossed the limp remains of this negro aside, like he was a piece of spent cane just stripped through the mill. The girl, bloodstained as a butchered hog, grabbed Dewar around his ankles to plead for her salvation. He seized her by a fistful of hair to hold her steady as he rearmed his pistol. ‘No massa, no, massa, mercy, massa, mercy,’ she struggled savagely. The overseer could hardly hold her. ‘Shut up, you dead…nigger, shut up.’ It was as the overseer raised his hand to strike her with his pistol that Kitty flew.”

Raw, human emotion fills the pages. Levy writes beautifully and the story is compelling, by any measure. Recommended especially for those readers who have not yet read “Small Island.”

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24 more

LibraryThing member kidzdoc

The latest novel by Andrea Levy is narrated by an older Jamaican woman in the late 19th or early 20th century, and is the story of July, a headstrong mulatto girl born in slavery to Kitty, a homely and dark but strong woman on a struggling sugar cane plantation on the island. Her English master,

John Howarth, allows his sister, Caroline Mortimer, to live on the plantation after the premature death of her husband. Caroline takes a liking to the beautiful July, and she is taken from Kitty and allowed to live in the plantation house as Caroline's personal servant. She does not approve of her birth name, and renames her Marguerite instead.

After the death of Howarth's wife, Caroline assumes a greater role in the day to day operations of the plantation. The field slaves are treated brutally and inhumanely, and small acts of rebellion begin to become organized movements, as the slaves become aware of the abolitionist movement in England yet are not granted emancipation. A large insurrection occurs, and Howarth dies, leaving Caroline to run the plantation. The overseer is also killed in the insurrection, and Caroline hires and fires several men, none of whom can do the job to her satisfaction.

A new man, Robert Goodwin, the son of an English clergyman, is hired. Unlike the other overseers, he is handsome, refined and gentle natured, and Caroline soon falls for him. However, Goodwin is entranced by the beautiful July/Marguerite, and he falls in love with her.

The Long Song is a captivating story of love, the brutality of slavery and its devastating effects on both slaves and colonists. Levy also discusses the role that race and color played in post-emancipation Jamaica, as mulattos, quadroons and octoroons were able to rise above their darker brothers and sisters, to their social and financial benefit. July was richly portrayed by the author; however, the other main characters, especially Howarth and Mortimer, and Goodwin to a lesser extent, were not. I still found this to be a worthwhile and enjoyable read, and would recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about Jamaica.

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LibraryThing member JanetinLondon

The Long Song tells the story of July, from her childhood on a slave plantation in Jamaica through the period of early independence (slavery was abolished in Jamaica in the 1830’s, but for many ex-slaves, life got even harder), to her old age living in freedom and comfort with her son and his

family many years later. She has bad times and some better times, makes friends and enemies, encounters terrible brutality and acts of kindness, behaves well and less well, and generally lives the best life she can manage, given the circumstances so entirely not of her own making. She is an attractive woman, which helps her achieve a position of some comfort and even status in the household, at least for a time.

Or does it? July herself tells us more than once that she is an unreliable narrator, trying several times to cut the story short with “and she lived happily ever after”, only to be told by her son that she must tell it as it “really happened”. At the very end of the book, when we are told of the unsuccessful search for a lost person (this is not a spoiler!), I found myself wondering if that person truly existed, and even whether the whole long “happier” episode in her life was just a fiction. Then I realized – of course it’s a fiction – it’s all a fiction – made up by Andrea Levy, duh! Silly me – it was so good that I had started to believe it really was July’s memoir of her true life.

Anyway, it was a good story, and I enjoyed it (well, not the violent brutality and casual racism, but you know what I mean.)

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LibraryThing member elkiedee

The Long Song is the story of July, a woman born into slavery in 19th century Jamaica.

As an old woman at the end of the century, July is writing the story of her early life, and the narrative switches between the present day of the novel (1898), in the first person, and the past.
Slavery officially

ended in Jamaica in 1838, but of course the former slave owners still controlled the plantations and the economy, and the former slaves still needed to work in exploitative conditions for the white people who all too obviously regarded them as an inferior race.

The Long Song is beautifully written and I found it a very readable novel, perhaps deceptively so. Thinking about it again for review purposes makes me want to reread it again more carefully. I was carried along by the story, or stories, July tells – frequently she offers several different versions of what happened, usually a more romantic account followed by one which seems more rooted in the realities of the day.

July is separated from her mother, Kitty, as a child by a white woman who thinks she is cute but is repelled by Kitty. She is not the most obedient or loyal slave (or servant) – at first, she hopes that if she gets things wrong she will be returned to her mother, but she grows up into a woman who tries to stand up for herself. But in this time and place black women have very little power over their lives and her very entertaining attempts at self-assertion often have quite unpleasant results for July.

Some readers may find it hard to like any of the characters, even July – I liked her a lot sometimes and felt some sympathy for her anger at other times.

This is not a feelgood novel about black and white characters getting together to challenge racism. A lot of potential happy endings are briefly dangled in front of the reader before being snatched away. That made me feel angrier as a reader when bad things happened.

The shifts in narrative, tone and style of the book, and the alternative stories offered, make reading this novel a bit more challenging but I would argue that it rewards careful reading.

Recommended.

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LibraryThing member richardderus

What am I missing here? This is a perfectly good novel, and the character of Miss July is well-drawn, the story of Jamaica is interesting, but...great? How? Where?

It's all rather one-note cuteness from my POV. The narrative drive is that these are the memories of Miss July. So that takes any

suspense out of the book. I know she's alive to tell the tale, so who cares who else dies?

I wonder if I should read Small Island now. I would hate to take another tepid bath in the Jamaican waters. I don't recommend this one with any vigor. Sure, if you can get it free, don't hesitate to accept it and read it. BUY it?! Oh hell no. Too many exciting books out there. I didn't connect with it, and I've read it twice now, so I think it's fair to say I've given the book a chance to make its mark on me.

It failed to do so.

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LibraryThing member GarySeverance

Andrea Levy has written a lyrical novel of slavery and freedom in Jamaica during the first half of the 19th Century. The narrator tells a rambling tale held in check by a family editor that covers three generations of sugar plantation slaves owned by British resident “massas.” These are not

benevolent owners as in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. The masters and overseers are brutal and ignorant of the ways of their slaves and are apparently the dregs of the wealthy and working class families in England.

There is humor in the novel involving tricks the slaves play on the owners involving poor service provided in every area outside of the cane fields. The slaves must kow-tow to the white owners and overseers, but they get their revenge by spilling food, using dirty bedsheets for table cloths, destroying owners’ clothing by over-washing and mishandling it, and squatting on property on the fringes of the plantations.

Freedom is hard-won and the “free” life can be more difficult than continuing to work for the owners offering “fair” wages. But for many freed slaves in Jamaica, freedom in poverty is preferred over doing the same difficult work in the fields they did as slaves. Many of the expatriate dregs of England give up trying to entice the freed slaves back to the plantations with the reinforcements of capitalism. One by one, the scions return to their mother land and corporations replace the single family ownership of sugar cane plantations.

I enjoyed this interesting story of Jamaican life in the 19th Century with its violence, humor, rape, revenge, conceptions, birthing, family destruction, slavery, triumphs of free will, and ultimate freedom from slavery. Levy describes the evolution of a social structure on the island with a combination of realism and impressionism. The reader is left to determine if the driving force of the struggle for freedom from tyranny is best served by personal economic reinforcement or collective redistribution of wealth.

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LibraryThing member lauralkeet

Miss July was born a slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation. When she was a child, the English mistress took a liking to her and brought her from the fields into the house, forcibly separating July from her mother and insisting on calling her "Marguerite." July came of age serving the mistress, and

made it through some very tumultuous times, including the Baptist Rebellion and later, the abolition of slavery. Now an old woman, July is living with her son and his family and sets to writing her story. That sentence alone tells you her life was an unusual one, and there are many details and plot twists the reader can look forward to in this novel.

I loved this book, and I loved July and her strong personality. Her survival was mostly due to pure cunning, mixed with a bit of luck. The people in her life -- both slaves and whites -- were well drawn, and Andrea Levy didn't shy away from the violent realities of slave treatment, the consequences of rebellion, and the tension once slaves were free but still expected to work on plantations.

This novel was shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize and is a worthy contender for that honor.

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LibraryThing member writestuff

July is born in the early part of the nineteenth century on a Jamaican sugar plantation. Her mother is a black slave, her father the white overseer who is her mother’s rapist. One hot day when July is still just a young child, she is noticed by Caroline Mortimer, the sister of the plantation’s

owner who has arrived from England. On a whim, Caroline decides to take July to be her companion, stealing her from July’s mother without a second thought and renaming her Marguerite. The Long Song is July’s story, narrated retrospectively by an adult July many years later. It is not an easy story, spanning decades and taking the reader through the tumultuous years of the Baptist War and the controversial end to slavery in Jamaica. But, it is July’s voice which drives the narrative. Funny, cynical, highly observant and intelligent, July weighs in on racism, violence, and the struggle for freedom at a time when blacks were viewed as property to rich, white landowners.

Only with a white man, can there be guarantee that the colour of your pickney will be raised. For a mulatto who breeds with a white man will bring forth a quadroon; and the quadroon that enjoys white relations will give to this world a mustee; the mustee will beget a mustiphino; and the mustiphino…oh, the mustiphino’s child with a white man for a papa will find each day greets them no longer with a frown, but welcomes them with a smile, as they at last stride within this world as a cherished white person. – from The Long Song, page 203 -

The Long Song is a brilliant novel narrated by an unforgettable character. July is, perhaps, one of the most memorable female voices I have read in a long, long time. Bittersweet, funny, often devastating…this is a novel which drew me in immediately and held me in its grip to the final page. Andrea Levy writes with an honesty and insight into the human condition that takes one’s breath away.

The Long Song was shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize, longlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction, a finalist for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and named as a 2010 New York Times Most Notable book. It is, in my opinion, worthy of all these accolades. Beautiful prose, enduring characters, and the evocation of place that vibrates off the page, all combine to create a remarkable novel of historical significance.

Readers who love literary fiction and historical fiction will want to put The Long Song on their must read list.

Highly recommended.

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LibraryThing member lit_chick

The Long Song is set in 1820s Jamaica, a turbulent period in the island’s history as the slaves labouring on sugar plantations fought to be free. Miss July, housemaid to the ample Caroline Mortimer, owner of Amity Sugar Plantation, narrates. The Long Song is a framing narrative: at the same time

July is narrating the story of the Amity slaves, she is writing a book at the urging of her son. She tells her readers, “your storyteller is a woman possessed of a forthright tongue and little ink.” Indeed, readers will soon understand that July has no time for “the puff and twaddle of some white lady’s mind.” (ch 1) Hilariously, she warns one last time before launching into her tale:

“Let me confess this [forthrightness] without delay so you might consider whether my tale is one in which you can find an interest. If not, then be on your way, for there are plenty books to satisfy if words flowing free as the droppings that fall from the backside of a mule is your desire.” (ch 1)

July is delightful, sometimes hilarious, company throughout The Long Song. I enjoyed her sparse, straightforward style of storytelling. She is compassionate and honest, but never sensational; and her voice is steady and confident. She knows the story of the Amity slaves is her story, and she tells it well.

I particularly liked that Andrea Levy is able to write about a sensitive subject without sensationalizing and sentimentalizing. July leaves readers no doubt as to the violence of the period; but violence is not the point of her story. In the same way, Levy is authentic and believable as she writes about the lives of Jamaica’s slaves post-abolition. Their freedom, long sought and hard won, came with a hefty price. Indeed, in its early years, the "victory" of freedom wore the face of destitution, even starvation.

Recommended to readers who enjoy historical fiction, readers interested in slavery and abolition.

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LibraryThing member mebacat

What a smashing read!

Once begun it's hard to put down. Tragic circumstances set down without a cry for pity which only makes them that much more pitiful. The story is told in such a delightful way giving a glimpse of how a story can be changed and remain just as interesting.

Levy knows her

characters so well I could hear their voices and see them and as is so often the case in reading novels like this with a similar theme, I'm left wondering how can humans possibly be so cruel to each other, because although the situations may not be identical, man's inhumanity to man seems to remain constant.

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LibraryThing member mhleigh

The Long Song takes place on the island of Jamaica in the 1800s, primarily on a plantation called Amity where our main character, July, is a slave. Although July is born of a field slave, as a child she is brought into the big house by Caroline Mortimer, the sister of the plantation's owner.

Caroline is a widow, nearly arrived from England, who renames July "Marguerite" and tries to teach her to be the perfect lady's maid. July and Caroline live through dangerous times in Jamaica, through slave rebellions, the Baptist war, and the turmoil and confusion surrounding emancipation. The book is written by July at the urging of her son, Thomas, who has grown up free and educated, allowing him to become an extremely successful printer on the island. Thomas believes that his mother's story is worth preserving for the future, and July frequently cites his editorial comments as she writes. While this could have had the impact of breaking up the flow of the story, instead it just encourages the reader to want more.

Quote: "My beloved son Thomas did caution, when first I set out to flow this tale upon the world, that although they may not be felt like a fist or a whip, words have a power that can nevertheless cower even the largest man to gibbering tears."

Andrea Levy won me over with her book Small Island years ago. With this new novel, I was just as impressed, if not more so. It has the same attention to characters and historical details as Levy's previous work, but is even more fast paced. The narration is entertaining and the plot has twists and turns. I couldn't put it down once I started reading.

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LibraryThing member BlackSheepDances

A Frances Coady Book

A few years ago I spent an entire year focused on titles relating to slavery and civil rights in the South...from the Civil War to the Civil Rights marches in the 1960's. It was a painful topic, and revealed bottomless ugliness about the way humans treat each other, especially

when in a position of power. When I decided to read The Long Song, about slavery in Jamaica in the early 1800's, I wasn't sure if the geographical difference would change any of the perspective. It does.

Levy's novel covers many of the known horrors of slavery: children stolen from their parents, slaves treated like animals, and incredibly horrific forms of torture for those who dared to look a white man in the eyes. But she adds other little insights revealing the nature of people who were slaveholders as well as the slaves themselves. Owners who savagely beat their servants and yet couldn't imagine why the slaves resented them, and who seemed genuinely certain their actions were appropriate. They expected devout loyalty out of their slaves, yet would punish them for the slightest offenses. The punishment wasn't far off, either, as the owners had their own dungeons and stocks in place for punishment as needed. And more surprising, some slaves actually felt loyalty to their masters: in one memorable scene, two female slaves are arguing over whose mistress is more refined.

The voice of the story is that of July, once a stolen child and now a grandmother in England. Her son, raised by Baptist missionaries who took him in when she abandoned him, is pushing her to write her memoirs to save the story of her remarkable life. She tells the story in a light voice, directly to the reader, and at times seems to minimize some of the uglier parts for the readers sake. Is it for her sake as well? Despite her son's insistence, she resists much of the retelling, because of the pain it causes.

"For I know that my reader does not wish to be told tales as ugly as these. And please believe your storyteller when she declares that she has no wish to pen them. It is only my son that desires it. For he believes his mama should suffer every little thing again."

She does as he asks, and recounts the events surrounding his birth, but adds a bit of humor by describing what an ugly baby he was. They bicker frequently during the writing (he wants more details, she wants less). Her voice has no pity, and at times her delivery comes across as emotionless, especially as she seems to have no close bond with any of the other slaves. Yet it's clear that emotionally and physically, that was part of her survival technique.

The story takes place on a sugar cane plantation before and after the 1838 ban on slavery in Jamaica. It shows how the attitudes of both slaves and owners were slow to change, and how difficult it was to impose a new way of thinking on whites who felt their position as master was their destiny. Even the whites who were against slavery were focusing on their fine 'works' rather than genuine love. The woman who raises July's son to a fine young man writes her story for a magazine, and credits herself with his intelligence and morality (apparently he had little to do with it, in her mind). And she can't resist a final mocking insult to July at the end of the article.

The layers to the story are many, and yet the fast pace of the narrator keeps it moving. She tells her story beautifully, and the interaction with her son, once lost to her, is a story in itself. Her new life in England isn't simple, and the dramatic differences as she ages almost reintroduces the pain of her past. She shows confusion when, after all she's suffered, her granddaughters complain about the color of their hair ribbons.
July is a character that will likely become legendary.

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LibraryThing member queencersei

The Long Song is the story of July, a slave born in Jamaica to a field hand and the plantations white overseer. July grows up as a young child with her mother on the sugar plantation, Amity, until the plantation owners widowed sister, Miss Caroline, sees her walking with her mother one day. Nine

year old July is summarily taken from her mother, renamed Marguerite and trained by Miss Caroline to become a ladies maid.

July grows into a beautiful and spirited young woman who years for freedom and acceptance into good society. Freedom does come to Jamaica’s slaves; however July remains on the plantation that she has always known, assisting Miss Caroline with the management of the property after her older brother’s death.

A new, idealistic English overseer named Robert Goodwin comes to Amity with high minded ideals about the equality of blacks and wife, shaking up the fragile little world of the plantation. However Robert is not what he first seems. Robert’s betrayal of his cherished ideals ultimately leads to devastation for July.

The Long Song is a moving story of a woman’s struggle to overcome the circumstances of her birth and to constantly strive to overcome the obstacles that a society built on color and class lines creates.

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LibraryThing member mckait

I have to say that I liked her first ending a lot. It pleased me to think that is the way it was. I do Like July. I was, in the end, nearly as pleased with the final pages, the end of the story, and the closing of a circle.

This is not a happy story. It is a tale of slavery and abuse and ugliness.

Even in slavery though, there will be love. There will be devotion, and there will be selflessness. And of course, there is hope. Hope for something better to come, perhaps for the children.

July was born to a slave and lived many years as a slave. She was a mother, a lover, and a maid.
She was a woman of strength and endurance, and finally of great wit. Her history was grim, but she made me smile. I could hear the cadence of her words, her saucy ways were the mark of strength as well .

Thomas Kinsman was an important part of her story, perhaps the most important part. And you need to read this compelling story to find out why. You won't regret a moment spent within these pages...

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LibraryThing member eleanor_eader

As the child of a slave, July is plucked from her Mama’s side to become companion to the petty-minded white sister of the Amity plantation’s Massa, a transition that finds her well placed to watch the consequences of the newly granted freedom. Freedom that seems to July - still curiously

chained to the will of Caroline Howarth - a powerful but elusive concept.

Historical fiction should, I think, make of the history to which it is tied another character, one that moves and gives context to the depicted lives; and that is exactly what Andrea Levy does in The Long Song. Miss July’s life is not merely enacted with the scope of the timeline; it is entirely shaped and engulfed by it. From the easy contempt with which she is plucked from her mother, to the way in which she is drawn to the perceived power of being the mistress of Caroline’s husband later on, Miss July’s relationship with ‘Free’ is the important one in this book.

This wasn’t an unflawed tale – even Miss July’s tart observation gives no nuance to the character of Miss Caroline, who was depicted as a creature of banal ignorance and shallowness to the point of caricature. While many such negligent (or even negligible) people held the fates of slaves and ‘free’ servants, it became difficult to respond to that character – either pityingly or with disgust - without feeling manipulated by the author. There were also times when some of the characters’ histories were given in chunks that jarred with the flow of the rest of the story.

Otherwise, I found this compellingly told, moving and insightful. It was my intention to read Small Island, but found this first, and nothing about it puts me off my original goal.

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LibraryThing member curlycurrie

An excellent read which has sent Andrea Levy into my list of favourite authors. I lived every moment with July, with a story which created Jamaica at the end of the slave trade totally. All the characters were totally alive and the dialogue between July and her son all the way through the book was

electrifying.

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LibraryThing member cbl_tn

A former slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation writes the story of a former slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation. While the story is autobiographical, it's also clear that the writer is an unreliable narrator. She confesses to exaggeration at several points in her story. This is an exceptional book

as far as technique goes, but I found it difficult to connect with the characters on an emotional level except for the field slave, Kitty, in her grief at the forced separation from her child. A strong undercurrent of anger runs throughout the book, and perhaps that accounts for my inability to connect with the characters. I felt angry on their behalf, but I didn't experience the empathy that occurs when a book's characters inhabit my heart and mind.

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LibraryThing member DubaiReader

Life as a slave and as a freeman.

The Long Song differed from other slave fictions in that it continued beyond the lives of slaves on the sugar plantations in Jamaica and into their lives after slavery and the hardships that freedom also brought.

The book was narrated by July, half negro, half white,

(mulatto). She was the daughter of the overseer on the plantation, although he would never acknowledge her as such. At the age of 9 she was separated from her mother by Caroline Mortimer, the sister of the plantation owner, just because she took a fancy to the cute little girl. She worked in the big house and eventually became Caroline's personal servant. As slavery is abolished she becomes swept up in the madness of the times and the subsequent struggle to survive.
The narrative is July's account of her life on the plantation, in the big house, and subsequently as a freeman. It is written as she nears the end of her life and is living with her son, Thomas, a printer by trade. He encourages her to write her life story, which he will then publish.

I didn't really enjoy the way in which the book was presented - July tells her own story in an authentic Jamaican voice, but this voice seems to dilute in the telling to a more 'British' voice, which then suddenly reverts when we are again made more aware that this is July's story. I'd have preferred her voice consistantly, to this yo-yo effect.
In addition, July would tell one version of her life and then say 'no, that's not really what happened' and then re-tell it. I found this mildly annoying.

This was my third book by Andrea Levy, but not my favourite. I enjoyed Every Light in the House Burnin' but by far my favourite was Small Island, definitely a hard act to follow.

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LibraryThing member limoncello

I loved the voice of the narrator who told this story of July a slave on a sugar plantation in Jamaica. The story set in a time of change when Britain was abolishing slavery is heartrending. Another wonderful novel by Andrea Levy.

LibraryThing member bhowell

A vivid protrayal of a young woman's life during the fall of slavery in British colonial Jamaica.

LibraryThing member Litfan

“The Long Song” is the fictional story of July, a former slave who is writing her autobiography at the urging of her publisher son, Thomas. July is a former slave born on a Jamaican plantation. One fateful day as she is out with her mother, July is chosen by Caroline Mortimer, the plantation

owner’s sister, to be her personal slave. While this means respite from the harsher work of the fields, it also means a tragic separation from her mother.

A heartrending portrait of slavery on the Jamaican sugar plantations, the novel offers a profound exploration of the impact of slavery and relations between whites and blacks during and post-slavery. The characters are compelling; July learns at a young age how to survive in a precarious world, and her voice as she shares her story is like listening to a neighbor talk to you over coffee. It’s a plain-spoken, honest, and profound voice that illuminates the far-reaching impact of slavery as well as the power and goodness of love and hope.

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LibraryThing member jasonlf

The best book I've read so far this year. Andrea Levy tells the story of the last years of Jamaican slavery and the first years of manumission with a piercing humor, sometimes gentle and humane and sometimes appropriately less so.

The story is framed by a successful Jamaican printer who encourages

his mother, July, to write down the story of her life, largely because she is distracting him by constantly trying to tell it to him. Mostly she tells the story in the third person but periodically the novel returns to the first person, present tense -- the time she is writing it many years later. It begins with July's conception in the rape of her mother by the overseer. And the continuous narrative ends with an event even more cold hearted and brutal.

In between, it tells the story of July, a sly, witty slave who becomes a house slave and, after manumission, continues on as a house servant.

It is hard for me to capture just how compelling, well written, beautifully imagined, funny, and tragic the book is. So you should read it for yourself.

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LibraryThing member pokarekareana

Throughout this book, glimpses emerged of Levy's talent, but I must admit it was a struggle to get to the end. I found the characters engaging and universally irritating - I'm sure some of this was intentional on the part of the author, but towards the end I felt that the story was just dragging

unbearably. I didn't really understand why Levy chose to use a narrator to describe the story, because her story and that of her son didn't add much to the overall effect. While it was interesting to read about Thomas' experiences in London, it clashed with the background of July's story as a slave on a Jamaican plantation - it felt a bit like Levy was trying to shoehorn two stories into one book and it didn't work.

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LibraryThing member Davidgnp

I came to 'The Long Song' having thoroughly enjoyed Andrea Levy's 'Small Island'. My expectations were high, and she did not merely match but exceed them. Her secret is in finding the right voice for the story, and in the female slave July she found someone to conduct us through the years of

slavery and (so-called) freedom for the blacks in Jamaica with just the right amount of irreverence to deny her victim status, and an instinctive native wit to counterbalance the misery, or rather to give it a very individual perspective.

Levy admits in her own notes on writing the novel to the anticipated difficulty of writing about slavery "without it turning into a harrowing tale of violence and misery". July arose from that anxiety as the answer to it. As a narrator she is unreliable, one-eyed and sometimes mendacious, which is paradoxically why we trust her version of events above the orthodox white historian's view. She is not overly interested in the historical details (though the author has clever devices to give us just as much as we need) preferring to let the story unfold for us through her experiences and her relationships. She is often self-deluded, succeeds in fooling us too at times, and we love her for it.

You might be surprised, given the subject matter, when I tell you that this is in many ways a highly comic novel. July's interpretation of her mistress Caroline's foibles, for example, is pure Fielding at times, as is July's relationship with her own son, Thomas, who is presented as the publisher of her story and with whom she has a continuing chafing dialogue about her version of events. The written down speech of the late-educated Jamaican slave is another source of amusement, in the same way that Huck Finn makes us smile as he tells his tale Mississippi-style. Levy writes with the ear just as well as Mark Twain did.

However much we are entertained by July, we never lose sight of her courage, her tenacity, her life-affirming spirit, and through them we see the qualities that all those who survived and eventually thrived in that harsh period must have had in abundance. Levy never fails to get her message through clearly. That she can do so without a hint of didactism or of overwrought sentimentality says much about her ability as a writer of our times and of our sometimes inglorious past.

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LibraryThing member TineOliver

The main difficulty I had with this novel was a complete inability to connect with any of the characters (with the one exception noted below). It seems to me there are three reasons for this:
(a) the introduction on the first page that the narrator says she has prepared at the behest of her son. It

simply seemed contrived and put me off before I even started reading;
(b) what appears to be the deliberate separation of the first person narrator and her personal narrative; and
(c) the narrator gives us little, if any, insight into any of the characters' emotions or motivations, including her own. I'm unsure how the author expects her audience to connect with the characters if we don't know why they do the things they do or at least how they feel about them.
While I'm well aware of literary theories about readers bringing their own perceptions and experience to characters, not having been either a Jamaican slave or a plantation owner, there was just not enough here for me to form three dimensional characters in my mind.in fact, the only character I felt any feeling for in the book was the printer whose's wife died (but only because grief is universal).

Also, as one of the reviews below notes, I struggled to reconcile the use of Jamaican-English with sophisticated British English by apparently the same person.

Negatives aside, there were still somethings to like and the subject matter was obviously well researched and understood by the author.

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