Small Island by Andrea Levy

There are some journeys where you can lose yourself. 

Gilbert Joseph, a black Jamaican who had volunteered to serve England as an RAF pilot in the war against Nazi Germany, realized this only when it was too late. He had set sail on a ship that brought with it a group of eager, hardworking Jamaicans to England. Jamaica, at that time, was British colony, and the humble Jamaicans considered it their allegiance to defend their 'mother country' England.

“Then one day you hear Mother calling – she is troubled, she need your help. Leave home, leave familiar, leave love. Shiver, tire, hunger – for no sacrifice is too much to see you at Mother’s needy side.”

Though England was up in arms against the atrocities of the Nazis, its own society was, at that time, steeped in an intense prejudice against people of color. It wasn't long before Gilbert and other earnest Jamaicans realized that, but for the purpose of serving lowly jobs in the war, their colored selves were very unwelcome on this white turf.

"She offers you no comfort after your journey. No smile. No welcome. Yet she looks down at you through lordly eyes and says "Who the bloody hell are you?""

Gilbert's high-flying dream of becoming an RAF pilot was quashed, and he was forced to work as a driver. His poetic lament tugs at the heartstrings, echoing the disillusionment of many others like him: "How come England did not know me?"

The inspiration for this bittersweet novel was sparked by one such journey from Jamaica to England made by the author's father. Told from four different points of view, the author weaves together a telling tale of four individuals and the troubled times that they find themselves in. 

At the other end, in Kingston, Jamaica, Hortense Roberts had enough reasons to hold her head high. She was colored a light shade of golden honey and was a teacher to boot, which automatically relegated her a cut above other soot black Jamaican women. She dreamed of going to England, the perfect abode for an accomplished lady like her, and work there as a teacher.

Now Gilbert was the anti-pole of her dream man - uncouth, unsophisticated, hardly the gentleman, with only a guileless heart as his saving grace. In a union of convenience of sorts, Hortense married Gilbert, and arrived in England. Her pipe dreams about the glory of England came crashing down as soon as she set her eyes on his ramshackle one-room home. This disillusionment made her insufferable; she patronized Gilbert and continually harangued him, but Gilbert was not one to take this lying down. Their spirited exchanges, delivered in authentic Jamaican diction, brought comic relief to the intense story.

Their landlady, the effervescent Queenie, was another narrator. She had the distinction of being the only white person in the neighborhood to rent out her rooms to black people.Though broadminded, Queenie had a diminutive knowledge of the world outside England, and thought, like several other Britons, that Jamaica was in Africa. She was married to an unromantic English bloke, Bernard, who harbored an unconcealed dislike of black people. When Queenie let out her rooms to Gilbert and some other black Jamaicans, Bernard had been missing from home for 5 years, having gone to India to support the English troops during World War 2. In this subplot, the author dwelt a tad excessively on highlighting Queenie's charitable spirit; it got to the point where I thought any more of it would be overkill.

At about three-fourths into the plot, Bernard reappeared, completely unsettling the lives of the other three characters. His late introduction made it harder to relate to his narrative because, by that time, I had already categorized him as an insignificant character in the novel. Since the plot switched among multiple first-person narratives, it took some effort to change gears and adapt to a new character's point of view.

Anyhow, I ploughed through Bernard's narrative, hoping to be rewarded with some enlightening prose of India in the 1940s, but the author had nothing new to say beyond the trite set of clichés' and stereotypes that have to be mentioned in any writing about India - cows on streets, mosquitoes, dirty railway platforms, begging urchins, open latrines, stench, body odor, garlic breath, snakes, snaky head shake. In that brief narrative, Ms. Levy had them all covered, as if she were just referring them off a list of Indian peculiarities that she had especially created for the purpose.

In a surprising development that converged all plot lines, Micheal Roberts - the mischief maker from Hortense's childhood who had teased Hortense as a child and grew up to be a skirt chaser - turned up one day at Queenie's door. The author risked too much of a coincidence here, making the plot that was flowing so organically until that moment appear synthetic and contrived. But despite this, the author had complete command over the four narratives -those of Gilbert, Horetense, Queenie, and Bernard. They worked in perfect unison, smartly propelling the story forward, not once derailing the plot. For the most part, the pacing was good, each individual narrative sharing nothing more, nothing less than what was required of the plot, while the story steadily gravitated towards the climax.

It was through Micheal that the author chose to make a beautiful statement that echoed as the motif of the book. Micheal had once sighted amongst the debris of London a multi-hued hummingbird, the national bird of Jamaica, and in that hummingbird, its red, green, yellow hues flitting against the dull gray of debris, he saw a glimpse of his native country. Like a buoy that secured a drowning man against pull of the waters, this sentiment sustained and comforted the multitudes of soldiers, refugees, and immigrants who have had to leave their homeland to live in foreign shores. As evident from the warmth that enveloped Gilbert after sighting other Jamaicans in the cold, frigid streets of London, and the succor that Bernard felt amidst fellow Englishmen in faraway Calcutta, it was this sense of deja vu, these snatches of familiarity that helped one hang on to the fading memories of their motherland even in hostile, unfriendly shores.

The novel culminates in a twist that appears cinematic at first, but upon reflection, grows on you as an intense indicator of just how much racial prejudice scars the psyche of a society.

Andrea Levy (born 1956) is a British author, born in London to Jamaican parents who sailed to England on the Empire Windrush in 1948. Levy began writing only in her mid-thirties, but she attracted attention immediately with her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin'. Her fourth novel, Small Island (2004) published by Picador, won the Whitbread Book of the Year award (2004), the Orange Prize for Fiction (2004), and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (2005). It has since been made into a television drama, which was broadcast by the BBC in December 2009. (Courtesy: Wikipedia)