Andrea Levy: The Long Song (February 2025)

In an excellent interview with Andrea Levy at the end of the book (we wished that we had read this first before embarking on the novel) she said that, at a conference on the legacy of slavery, a woman asked, in heartfelt way, how could she be proud of her Jamaican roots when all her family had been slaves?

This book is the answer to her question.

The narrator is July who is writing her memoir at the request of her son Thomas whom she gave to an English couple to raise. In England he received an education and has returned to Jamaica, now a successful publisher.

He found his mother alone and destitute and took her in.

July was conceived when her mother was raped by a white overseer. These sexual assaults were a common occurrence as were vicious punishments for little or no reason.

July is spared backbreaking field work when she is removed from her mother as a little girl by the plantation owner’s widowed sister on a whim.

July grows into a resourceful and mischievous young woman who delights in running rings around her mistress.

All the house servants and field slaves find ways of achieving little victories over their owners in acts of disrespect, pilfering, insolence and skiving off work. Who could blame them?

This provides the book with welcome humour amongst the appalling cruelty.

The story takes place at the time of the Baptist War in 1832 which was quelled with killing and destruction followed by many floggings and executions.

Following the suicide of the plantation owner, covered up as murder by a slave, the sister inherits the property and the new overseer marries her and takes July as his mistress. She has a daughter who is stolen from her by the couple when they return to England.

The slaves are emancipated but they are in debt and the rent on their homes and small parcels of workable land are raised to impossible amounts. They had started to become self-sufficient much to the fury and frustration of the plantation owners.

There was, we felt, a gap in the book between this time and the return of Thomas. We wanted to know what happened to the emancipated slaves and how they lived. Also, to us, there was a discrepancy between the character of the young July and her as an older woman.

Had it not been for that, this novel would have been awarded a higher mark as it gave a voice to those who are normally unheard and showed their courage and ingenuity in surviving and maintaining dignity, humour and humanity.

3.5/5