Delving into heritage makes a harrowing read

Author Andrea Levy. Photo / Supplied

If slavery is not a humorous matter, I have to wonder why Andrea Levy keeps bursting into laughter. But the London-based writer is refreshingly irreverent company when I meet her to discuss her new novel The Long Song, frequently undercutting some serious point with an acidic aside.

The long-awaited follow-up to her bestselling novel Small Island, Levy's latest is set in Jamaica during the final years of the slave trade. When I ask what happened to the island's indigenous inhabitants, the Taino people, she explains that they were decimated by disease after being put to work on the plantations. The British owners then attempted to recruit workers from northern England before turning to Africa.

"They tried dragging people from Lancashire," she says before descending into another fit of giggles. "If that had worked, we might have had a history where the white working classes of this country were displaced to the Caribbean to work on the sugar plantations. But they found it really difficult and nobody wanted to go and work there because it was tough, tough conditions so the African slave trade began."

Making her debut with Every Light in the House Burnin' in 1994, Levy penned two more novels before striking a chord with Small Island in 2004, which revolved around the intertwined lives of four Jamaican immigrants. After moving to England in the late 1940s, the immigrants rudely discover that the Mother Country isn't the green and pleasant land it appeared to be. The book won several awards including the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and the Orange Best of the Best and was last year turned into a popular BBC mini-series.

"I was very surprised," she admits. "I thought if I could just get a few people to read it, they might like it. It's not the amount of people who have enjoyed it that has amazed me as much as the breadth, black, white and from all across the world. It's absolutely staggering, I wish I knew why it happened."

Levy was impressed with the television adaptation, which starred Naomie Harris, David Oyelowo and Ruth Wilson. "It's a great piece of telly," she declares. "The book is huge and they couldn't put everything in so you have to come to terms with what they left out and what they changed in order to make it a drama. Having said that, they kept the tone and the spirit of it."

But Levy was intrigued by a newly added epilogue set in the present day, which hints at the eventual fates of the main cast. "I nearly passed out when I read that in the script," she laughs. "But it was a nice touch. I think they were wanting to show that this wasn't just a piece of history, it was about the life that we lead now."

She has so far resisted the temptation to write a sequel. "There was a great danger after Small Island of just doing Small Island 2," she says. "A lot of people said, 'What happened next?' I did toy with the idea a bit but then I thought 'no, we go there and then we go away'."

Nevertheless there is a connection between Small Island and The Long Song. "There are some characters that crop up in both books," she teases. "A careful reader will spot them and then you will see how they link together."

Beginning in 1898 before flashing back to the early part of the 19th century, The Long Song centres around young slave girl July who inadvertently becomes the companion of English plantation owner Caroline Mortimer. "With all my books, I'm exploring my own heritage," says Levy, whose parents sailed from Kingston to Southampton on the ship Empire Windrush in 1948. "After I'd finished Small Island, I began to wonder how did they come to be in Jamaica in the first place? Of course, when you do that you come full smack into the whole experience of slavery. That was why they were there. It's a story that I almost didn't want to tell because I thought it was too difficult; the stuff I would have to read would be really unpleasant research. But I thought, 'I need to look at this. This is absolutely part of who I am'."

The novel takes in actual historical events such as the 1831 Baptist War when the slaves rose up against their masters, but Levy is careful not to place any of her characters in the eye of the storm. "If you have someone in the centre of it, that seems a bit unlikely," she says. "Thinking of myself, I've lived through quite a bit of history but I've never been near any kind of important moment. I've just heard about it and sometimes I didn't even know it was going on at the time. I wanted to show that you could be absolutely in the middle of this thing, you could be on this island when this rebellion happens and not know anything about it."

Levy was determined to approach her story from the perspective of the enslaved. "There aren't that many West Indian testimonies from ex-slaves so you can't read about what their life was like," she says. "There's an enormous amount of testimonies from white people, plantations owners and the like. I read them and I began to think, 'I can see through this. I can see the life that was lived around them by the vast majority."'

According to Levy, it was a unique and fascinating moment in human history. "They were taking millions and millions of people from one place, displacing and putting them somewhere else," she says. "Then you have this huge enslaved population and a small white population who owned them. They just worked them; they were there to work. Instead of subsistence farming or small holdings, it was this intense, massively industrial farming for this commodity, sugar."

With many unflinching scenes of torture and murder, The Long Song can make for harrowing reading. "I would loved to have written 'Carry On Up the Plantation'," she says with a smirk. "But there must have been these strange relationships where the white people were totally dependent on the black people around them and yet they were their property. It beggars belief how that was negotiated and it was negotiated with great cruelty. You can't give a sense of that without a great deal of violence. It was an extremely violent society and the system perpetuated that violence. You could only hold people in that sort of system with violence and they could only rebel against it with violence."

Nevertheless, Levy draws you in with a compelling tale that is also heartwarming. "I like a story," she says. "I always try to find a story, I try not to be a meanderer. I want to entertain people; I want them to enjoy this book. Even though it might have bits in it that are difficult, I still want you to finish it and feel you've read something that has entertained you. That's very important to me as a writer. It's a difficult story and a difficult subject that has been tackled in a lot of books that have been very hard to read. I wanted to give it a life of its own that you would sometimes even think was funny."

July's son Thomas supplies much of the humour, narrating his mother's life story in the form of a book published by Levy's own publisher "the venerable Hodder and Stoughton". He is even responsible for the cover blurb. "I love to be playful," she laughs. "I love storytelling, the idea that being a novelist is to be a storyteller. I'm starting to understand how important the stories we tell each other are."

But Thomas proves to be somewhat unreliable. "He obviously makes things up and says things that aren't true," she continues. "I needed a storyteller that would do that because I wanted a fluidity. I didn't want the story to be set in stone because this is a kind of trying to give a voice to voiceless people. I didn't want to be dogmatic about what it was like. I wanted to give it a sort of humanity. I didn't want her to be a paragon of virtue or to be slightly mythical. She's just a down and dirty human being telling you how life was, who can't remember all of it and makes some of it up."

A frequent visitor to New Zealand, Levy is looking forward to returning to Auckland next week, not least of all because her mother and sister both live on the North Shore. "My sister's a real Kiwi now, she wouldn't go anywhere else," she says. "She gets so excited when people have heard of me, she can't believe it. It's such a beautiful place. Last time I came I stayed in a flat in Devonport and I'd look across the bay and think, 'if only England was just over there'. It would be a lovely place to live if it wasn't so far away."

Andrea Levy

Born in London 1956 to Jamaican parents who emigrated to Britain in 1948.

Her first three novels, Every Light in the House Burnin', Never Far From Nowhere and Fruit of the Lemon, all explored issues facing black British-born children.

Small Island focussed on th life in post-war Britain from the perspectives of both the immigrants and the English people adjusting to their changing society. It won the Orange Prize and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize.

* The Long Song (Headline Review $38.99).