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A Novel
by Andrea Levy
Book Reviewed by:Andrea Levy is one of the best storytellers around. Her follow up to Small Island (set in the 1940s and 1950s in both Jamaica and Britain) is set in the smaller of the two islands, Jamaica, and tells the history of slavery's end on the sugar plantations and the years of confusion that followed as slaves and planters made the transition to emancipation. Our unreliable narrator is the feisty Miss July. From the first scene, in which her conception is hastily accomplished through the rape of Kitty, a field slave, by her cruel Scotch overseer, the reader knows that she or he can expect an unblinking look at this period in Jamaican history related through the eyes of a former slave.
Through the continuous feverish imagery of heat, stench, bugs and sugarcane along with a light touch of Jamaican Negro dialect, Ms Levy conjures up the plight of a plantation slave's life. Yet, it is the resilience, humor, trickery and humanity of these people that impresses. By her own admission, Ms Levy wrote The Long Song with the aim of instilling pride in anyone with slave ancestors, but she has done more than this - by an alchemy of voice she has given us an almost voyeuristic glimpse into the intimate dynamic of oppressor and victim.
Miss July employs two voices: in first person she relates the trials of writing her story in a meta-fictional address to the reader, as she describes the problems of dripping ink and a bossy son who edits her writing; but the story of her life is presented in the third person providing a diffidence that allows for the woman's sorrows, secrets, indiscretions and petty crimes to escape judgment or shame. We get an inside look at the Christmas rebellion and the Baptist War and we feel the slippery negotiations that take place between former master or mistress and slave once emancipation becomes reality.
Best of all though is the story itself. As Miss July bears and loses children of her own, as she navigates the fine lines of mulatto, quadroon and full negro blood, I became immersed in her life. This is the first book I have read in a while that balances misery and loss with a fairly happy ending. The Long Song is recommended as the best sort of historical fiction and a fine pick for reading groups. I can imagine lively discussions over rum punch and fried plantains.
This review was originally published in May 2010, and has been updated for the
April 2011 paperback release.
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What is Metafiction?
It depends on whom you ask, as the term is somewhat slippery, meaning that various authors and literary critics define it differently. William H. Gass coined the term in 1970 in an essay entitled "Philosophy and the Form of Fiction". Commenting on American fiction of the 1960s, Gass pointed out that a new term was needed for the emerging genre of experimental texts that openly broke with the tradition of literary realism still dominant in post-WW II American literature. Metafiction is thus an elastic concept covering a wide range of fictions.
John Barth (Lost in the Funhouse), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale), Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions), A. S. Byatt (Possession) and Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children) are a few authors who have either claimed to write in a metafictional style or were viewed that way by critics and literary theorists.
In The Long Song, a woman is writing a book about Miss July, the slave. That woman turns out to be Miss July herself and she periodically comments on her experience of writing the story with her son looking over her shoulder as editor. This device on Andrea Levy's part qualifies as an example of metafiction, which can include the writer intruding to comment on writing, directly addressing the reader. One or two critics found this distracting but I saw it as an entertaining way of showing how far Miss July had come in her life from slave to free woman.
What is An Unreliable Narrator?
An unreliable narrator is defined as an imaginary storyteller or character who describes what he witnesses accurately, but misinterprets those events because of faulty perception, personal bias, or limited understanding. The discrepancy between the unreliable narrator's view of events and the view that readers suspect to be more accurate creates a sense of irony.
A common unreliable narrator is a child, such as Huck Finn, David Copperfield, or Holden Caulfield, who are not in complete possession of the facts but tell the reader more than they understand precisely because they don't understand.
As it becomes apparent that the "writer" of Miss July's story is the character herself, the reader of The Long Song becomes aware that he or she is learning the history of slavery in Jamaica from a radically different viewpoint than can be found in history books, because our narrator interprets the actions of white masters and mistresses, of overseers, even of free Negroes, from a point of view which is naturally limited by her perspective and limited knowledge of wider events.
This review was originally published in May 2010, and has been updated for the
April 2011 paperback release.
Click here to go to this issue.
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