The cover of Small Island shows two young lasses, a black and a white wearing frocks that could have been from the 1940s. But we really can’t make up our mind whether the photo was in fact, taken in the post-war era, or it’s just two young models posing for the cover of the novel for this purpose. I couldn’t make up my mind whether the cover is a genuine photograph or not, but it seems to me a photograph produced for the purpose of the novel. The credits of the photo goes to a Richard Haughton, but the background photograph is stored in Hulton Getty Archive.
The mélange of the two emits an unsettling feeling — the background is genuine but the subject matter is contrived. It is not a fault of the author lest we fault most authors trying to make do. Andrea Levy is English, born to Jamaican parents. The West Indian immigration to the throne of the empire would be something close to her heart and through her folks, something that she would experience secondhand. But it’s a misstep to dig into an author’s life to see the resemblances of the fiction — as readers perhaps we should keep those two things separate. However, I can’t help the feeling that the fiction is of artifice — just like the cover of the book. Never has a cover of a book agitated me as much as this one.
This is not to say that Small Island is not a worthwhile read. It is. I think it raises a lot of important questions on the British treatment of those under its Commonwealth, and the perceptions of the so-called Mother Country to whom she’s supposed to nurture. There are fundamental rifts in between that may not be reparable, but the increasing imperative to tolerate this rift.
England — A rude awakening
There are four different perspectives in this book, each voice is unique and Levy has done a decent job to differentiate each one so that we don’t feel lost. The voices are well balanced in terms of race, gender, background and perspective: Hortense, a Jamaican trained teacher who’s a bit haughtier than she probably should be; Gilbert, Hortense’s husband who’s genuine but a little bit of a slob; Queenie, an Englishwoman who became the landlady of her husband’s house for West Indian arrivals; Bernard, the estranged husband of Queenie.
The story opened with Hortense’s migration to England to join her husband of less than one year, Gilbert. Hortense is a bit frigid, let’s admit, and she won’t even let Gilbert show off his shlong before being disgusted by the act, even though she kinda missed the point of people getting married. She had an image of her mind of an England superior to Jamaica — people living better lives, dressing like kings and drinking better tea. But after having arrived, her husband failing to meet her at the port, she was quickly appalled by the conditions in which he was living in.
Her room was tiny as fuck, the toilet was far downstairs so that Gilbert pisses in a bucket, and disposes the content freely into the same sink that he washes his food in. Gilbert isn’t doing so well himself in London. As a black man in London, job avenues are difficult to come by, and when it comes, he is stigmatised by his peers. Queenie, the landlady, knew Gilbert from back then during the war, when she was still taking care of her father-in-law and he was still a visiting soldier. Things get complicated when Bernard, who’s been missing for years even after the war has ended pops back in to the story.
The four dimensions of England’s colonial ghosts
Each character is given their due voice, as all perspectives are written in first person narrative. We hear about each character’s early lives up to their confluence in 1948. We learn that Hortense was fathered by an upper-class bureaucrat, but a lowly mother who were quickly sent away before she was old enough to raise questions. Yet, she is painfully oblivious to the implications of this. Her caretakers parents, her father’s cousins treated her as a help than their own. She was also infatuated with their son, Michael Roberts, who was a bit of rebel himself.
Her upbringing was her downfall. She claims to be of a superior descent than her Jamaican peers, she wants to master the queen’s English to foster this superiority, she felt victorious when she was the one who got to go to England as opposed to her friend who only longed for it. Like many in Jamaica, it seems that England can do no wrong. She can enunciate Shakespeare better than Shakespeare himself, she’d think, but her speech when we get to Queenie’s perspective, is rather flawed. Hortense who has no knowledge of English idioms finds the cultural barrier insurmountable. Her Jamaican qualifications and her letter of recommendation was literally laughed at by the school she applied to.
Gilbert, as a soldier, was patriotic for the cause of the war. He quickly learns racism in England, where American soldiers treated him like shit and he suffers racial prejudices for the first time. He came back to Jamaica after the war, disenchanted for what the Mother Country had to offer. Nobody recognises him as British, although he has a claim to be. He does not look, sound or smell British enough. After having fought the war for the British, he carries a dose of resentment to the continent, yet he cannot help to long for life in England, still the promised land.
Small Island mentality
Which one is the small island? U.K. is about twenty times larger than Jamaica, an amoeba in comparison, but they’re both pretty tiny compared to let’s say Australia. But it is the mindset that counts, as both the English and the Jamaicans behave as though they’re from a village in the middle of fucking nowhere. Either side have their own reasons to scorn their counterpart, if only they are little things that add up incrementally — Hortense was shocked by how poverty-clad Queenie dressed to go out, she expected the English to be more fashionable; conversely Bernard’s xenophobia only exacerbated when he returned from the war.
But the “small” in the title implies the claustrophobia of space — the post-war England had to rebuild, immigration was inevitable and coming in torrents. White neighbourhoods were quickly becoming neighbourhoods of colour and the old occupants were leaving, not used to their new way of life. Space, it seems, was ever becoming a premium then as it is now. Somehow, the new citizens of England must cohabitate with her original residents lest they suffocate each other. Relative to size, England is fast becoming smaller than Jamaica.
Small Island, big book
Clocking in at over 500 pages, Small Island is not a small read, yet it is not a difficult read. If you want to go deep into it, you can — especially with gendered and racial readings. It is also a historical novel, a juxtaposition of lives affected by war. But the meat of the story is the tension between the English and the immigrants, between the old and the new, the colonial powers against the colonial subjects. It is a book written close to twenty years ago, set before the end of the ’40s, the verge of a global golden era of prosperity, if you want to call it that. It is also the study of human relationships — Queenie, the neglected and unsatisfied housewife finds passion in the exoticism of the West Indian men; Hortense was revolted by her juvenile husband but eventually finds tenderness in him.
But I still feel that there are flaws in the book that made me feel only lukewarm to it, as opposed to really liking it. The main characters annoy the shit out of me — I reckon they’re fucking imbeciles. And going back to the cover of the book, it does feel like a book written by an author who does not belong to the world she created, like the two models at the cover. No matter how meticulous the details, it fails to immerse me to the giant hangover that is the post-war London.
