Andrea Levy’s previous novels have covered the lives of immigrants from the West Indies to the UK and their British-born children  both in contemporary times and in the early to mid 20th Century. Her decision to write a novel set at the time of slavery in Jamaica was therefore a brave one as it would involve meticulous reading of the lives of the plantation owners and ‘their’ slaves and would require allowances to be made for the fact that the vast majority of this literature in the UK would have been written by the white oppressors, thereby not offering a balanced view of the dreadful conditions forced on the black workers.

There’s also a secondary problem with any novel centred around times of horrific injustice based on ethnicity which is that the story, however well written, will inevitably be so harrowing as to put some readers off.

Levy gets around this by making The Long Song a first-person account by a daughter of a slave, taken in to lead a relatively more easy life as a white female plantation owner’s  personal maid. The girl,  July, is therefore privy to a relatively privileged existence – by this I mean unpaid servitude in the home rather than toiling long hours in the sugar fields – for some of her life.

July is the daughter of a slave called Kitty who has been inpregnated when raped by the white overseer of a plantation named Amity. When July is a child of around eight, the master of the plantation, John Howarth, drives by in his carriage with his pudgy sister Caroline Mortimer. Caroline has been in Jamaica a short time only and is lonely and stressed. Her maid from England has died of an illness picked up on the ship on the way over, and when she sees July she decides she wants her as her plaything and lady’s maid. With no consideration for Kitty, July is torn from her screaming mother and adopted into the household where Caroline gives her the monicker Marguerite because of course it’s better for the girl to have a nice conventional European name than a strange foreign-sounding one. July and the fellow house-slaves mischievously misbehave, filching lace and buttons from Caroline’s dresses or food and drink from the stores, spreading a bed sheet instead of a linen tablecloth on the dining table for a formal dinner party, hiding from their demanding mistress, and generally trying to make life as bearable as they can – an option not open to the plantation slaves sweating with heavy labour all day long.

Within a few years unrest and resentment  foments among the slaves. There has been word in 1831 when July is sixteen that the new Queen of England does not approve of slavery and that the King will free them. Militants rise up on the plantations and there are rebellions leading to bloodshed.  John Howarth subsequently dies, as does his overseer, and Caroline becomes mistress of the plantation. She hires a series of overseers who don’t last long because their high-handed manner alienates the already discontented slaves. Finally one arrives called Robert Goodwin who starts the day after slavery is finally abolished in 1838. The son of a clergyman, he believes in humane treatment of the black workers – at least to begin with. But negotiations don’t go his way and he loses his patience.

Meanwhile, July has grown up. She has a romance with a black activist who dies, and gives her son from that short-lived encounter up for adoption. Then she falls in love and has a daughter. But the rumblings of rebellion from the now free but still abused black workers bring tumultuous events that change her life.

Levy has managed a real feat with July’s voice which is idiosyncratic and entertaining, bringing many moments of humour and levity to what could have been a bleakly disturbing subject. She talks in a Carribean patois which lilts with rhythm and vitality. Caroline is a ‘fatty batty’, and many words are repeated for emphasis: ‘big-big’, ‘long-long’, ‘hot-hot’, ‘itch-itching’, ‘licky-licky’, ‘nasty-nasty’, ‘ugly-ugly’, ‘bug-a-bug’, and so on. This could easily have sounded contrived and overdone in some hands but Levy makes July’s voice sing – the story really is a long song – and so the story sounds natural and real. As in all Levy’s previous novels, the lightness of touch is delightful. Here is an early segment:

‘Caroline was blessed of a long, pointed nose that, while giving her silhouette a fine distinction from across a dim-lit room, was nevertheless unable to feel what was happening at its tip. Consequently there was often something stuck upon the end of it, of which she was totally unaware; the yellow stain of pollen from the hibiscus she was admiring; a white daub of cream from some milk she was drinking; even a drop of snot from a nasal chill could, like a rain drop caught upon the tip of a leaf, remain dangling and swaying for quite some time. And it was this insensible nose that, her brother began to fear, would be dipping into everything upon this plantation named Amity before too long.’

Yet the sparkle of July’s voice doesn’t veil the barbaric treatment of the plantation slaves. When July is plucked from Kitty on Caroline’s whim there is no consideration of Kitty’s maternal feelings; in fact she is sized up as if she’s a horse, dehumanised and objectified. Levy lets us know how exploited the workers were, both as slaves and as supposed free workers, when punitive rents were demanded for the fields they tended to force them to work on the plantation fields instead of growing crops to sell at market and gaining some independence. None of the white characters emerges with any humanity intact; even the white Baptist minister who adopts July’s son Thomas disowns him when Thomas relinquishes his faith, and Robert Goodwin’s compassion for the blacks is short-lived. This is depressing but probably accurate; in those days the only kindness extended from whites to non-whites was sanctimonious do-gooding conditional on adopting the whiteys’ faith. And even when Levy is outlining hideous working conditions, July’s accessible voice prevents the story from becoming  heavily depressing, while the personalisation of experience to individual characters makes it all the more powerful . Here is Kitty, July’s mother, carrying dung from cattle to cane fields on her head:

‘…the solid odour did choke her at the throat, after mighty coughing and a few strong inhalations, all the air about Kitty, be it sweet or bitter, came to smell like shit, so the offence was lost. But for her poor tongue there was no such accommodation. When, unwittingly, a piece would fall into her open mouth…it would burn so fierce upon her tongue that she feared a hole was being bored right through it. For it was sharp as rancid lemon and did make her retch. Everything she nyam, be it food at the cane piece, or her porridge after her day’s work was done,  came to taste not like a repast butlike…well, the putrid splatterings that fall from the backside of a mule.’

 But Levy’s book is more complex than that – she also shows the black-on-black unkindness perpetrated by those slaves and servants in positions of relative power to their more menial peers, and of course the black hangman who kills his kin.   Also a constant presence is the established and rarely questioned pecking order generated by skin shade whereby it was accepted that those with white blood and paler skin were superior to those with a darker hue, despite them all being under the yoke of the whites.

The main drawback of the first-person narration is that July can’t give the reader an overview of events to which she did not bear witness or of which she didn’t receive first-hand accounts. Sam Sharpe, the rebel leader in 1832, is mentioned, but an in-depth account of the rebellions, the path to freedom, the continuing exploitation of the workers following freedom and their gradual resolvement is beyond the scope of  the story. This is a very personal account and as such it lacks the wide camera angle of history, but Levy’s bibliography lists  literature where this may be found.

My reservations about the novel are minor. The most important one is that there is a period of some forty years or so which remains blank after July is cast out from the plantation owner’s house and before she is found again by her son Thomas. This was a time of real privation and it’s unclear why Levy misses out these years. Perhaps she thought it would bring July’s sassy, cheerful and attitude-soaked voice down. But it’s a loss.

In Levy’s previous novels she has used the image of black characters sucking their teeth several times, so having it crop up twelve times here grated a little: racial stereotyping of this sort from a white author would be unacceptable, so it makes me uneasy from a black one too. There are also one or two possible anachronisms – Alexander Graham Bell didn’t patent the telephone until the late 1870s, so it seems doubtful that it would have been in widespread use by the time July wrote her story. July’s assertion early in the story that sugar turns the teeth black might also not have been widespread knowledge in the 1820s – 30s.

There’s also a small continuity hiccup where Molly, a one-eyed house servant July didn’t get on with asked her for the lace off the mistress’s dress and the lace is gone a few minutes later, even though July had been within eyeshot of it during that time.

These are almost  insignificant flaws in a book bursting with warmth and vitality, brought to life by a very credible voice. The Long Song is a novel that combines historical veracity with humanity, and as such is a great achievement.