Although all four characters take turns telling their stories, the narrative momentum of Small Island is slight; the present action occurs over a few days in 1948, but a great deal of the novel takes place in a time zone Levy simply labels ‘Before’ … Levy's greatest achievement in Small Island is to convey how English racism was all the more heartbreaking for its colonial victims because it involved the crushing of their ideals. Gilbert is astonished to discover that although he can reel off the names of England's canals and list the major industries of each English town, most English people can't even find Jamaica on a map … Small Island is too thoughtful a novel to promise its characters a happy ending, but it is generous enough to offer them hope.
Levy tells a good story, and she tells it well -- using narrative voices across time and space as she revisits the conventions of the historical novel and imagines the hopes and pains of the immigrant's saga anew. Levy's novel is no mere flight of fantasy, for it is rooted in the past and mired in the complicated stuff of empire. At the same time the memorable characters are radically unhinged from any sense of national fixity as their lives become intermeshed in strangely unexpected yet predictable ways … Island's temporal dynamics and the artfully choreographed connections among the various first-person voices propel the reader forward through differing perspectives and revelations.
Can Levy's fourth novel be this good? It can. It is. Narrated by the quirky voices of four idiosyncratic characters — Queenie and her husband, Bernard, white and English; Hortense and her husband, Gilbert, black and Jamaican — the novel spans three continents and multiple conflicts both political and personal … Levy's vast, gripping canvas troubles and moves and horrifies and informs. To the surprise and delight of her readers, her story also makes us laugh. What she gives us is nothing less than messy, terrifying, wonderful life itself. Rarely have almost 450 pages spun by so fast.
...a sizable epic spanning three hemispheres and several decades — a revealing and accomplished novel … Queenie is a wonderful, warm creation — a good-hearted gal whose upbeat naiveté during wartime and after turns to tender-tough pragmatism. Levy captures her essence on the book's first page...Gilbert is just as winning, if a sadder case: a man of big dreams who quickly learns to scale them down as he takes in the racial and economic realities of postwar Britain … Levy deftly and generously captures the moment when the arrival of immigrants from far-flung parts of the Empire was shockingly fresh to all involved.
Using multiple narrative voices and regular flashbacks, the plot unfolds fanlike, from the middle. Where some authors risk frustrating the reader with several narratives, Levy uses the technique like a prose conductor. She cues her characters with precision and skillfully extracts their individual timbres and rhythms: Hortense's accounts are tense and idiosyncratic; her husband's mellifluous and enchanting; Queenie speaks brashly from a big heart; Bernard's voice is mortally wounded … The most memorable passages of Small Island are those in which a moment of tranquility leaps to the brink of catastrophe and lands on the safe side of devastation without a discernible deep breath from the narrator … There is no doom in Small Island — only surprises, suffering and deliverance.
A notable feature of the book is that the entire narrative and the stories within it clearly emerge from the memories of the period's survivors. If ever there was a novel which offered a historically faithful account of how its characters thought and behaved, this is it. But the sheer excellence of Levy's research goes beyond the granddad tales of 50-year-old migrant experience, or the nuts and bolts of historical fact. Her imagination illuminates old stories in a way that almost persuades you she was there at the time … Small Island is a great read, delivering the sort of pleasure which has been the traditional stock-in-trade of a long line of English novelists. It's honest, skilful, thoughtful and important. This is Andrea Levy's big book.
The alluring story of two couples, one Jamaican and one English, whose paths cross in WWII-era England ... An enthralling tour de force that animates a chapter in the history of empire.
