The Long Song

The Long SongBy Andrea LevyHeadline Review £18.99, 312 pagesFT Bookshop price: £15.19

In January 1804, to the alarm of British Jamaica, slaves in the neighbouring island of Haiti overthrew their French masters and declared the world's first black republic. King George III, fearing the "contagion of revolt", sent 27,000 troops to Haiti from Jamaica but tropical disease devastated his Redcoats before they capitulated. A European army, incredibly, had surrendered to an army of African slaves.

Andrea Levy's novel, The Long Song, opens in Jamaica in the 1830s during the aftershocks of the Haitian revolution. Two decades after Britain abolished its own slave trade, field-hands in Jamaica are still worked almost to death. Meanwhile, the sugar island hasdegenerated into a patchwork of ramshackle farmsteads, where rumours of a slave uprising are rife.

The novel is narrated by July, a former freed slave and now an elderly "frailing mama". Born in Jamaica, she brocades her story with salty island speech ("How dare you impudence me") and chides her grown-up son Thomas for disdaining her forthright tongue. A printer by trade, Thomas has agreed to publish his mother's memoir on condition that it tells the truth.

July reveals the dark secrets of Amity plantation where she was conceived. The plantation overseer is a boorish Scotsman who has come to the cane-cutting colony to acquire a fortune and social status. As a perk of his position, typically, he abuses his captive African women. July is the fruit of one of his predatory encounters.

In spite of her humble birth, July stresses that she is mixed-race, not black. Like the Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole ("I have good Scotch blood coursing in my veins"), she has absorbed a good deal of planter prejudice. Between true black and pure white, July tells us, were mustaphinos, quarteroons, octoroons and Sambos (children of mulatto and African mix). In her previous Jamaican novel, Small Island, Levy made much of this calibrated hierarchy of skin tones, and here she amplifies it.

With her fair skin and "tall" (straight) hair, July is a decorative addition to Amity plantation. She is taken from her mother by a local English widow, Caroline Mortimer, and installed in a Georgian pile owned by her slave-driving brother, John Howarth. Madeira-sodden, Caroline instructs July in etiquette, but beats her for impertinence. The girl must become her "lady's maid".

Meanwhile, the Jamaican Baptist War of 1831-1832 catches fire. Sam Sharpe, a preacher and former slave, has urged the half-starving African majority to launch a protest against planter privilege. Huge damage is done to plantations across Jamaica but the disturbances are quickly suppressed, and the lives of 340 "rebels" (among them Sharpe's) are claimed by the gallows. In pages of vivid, fast-paced prose, Levy describes how Baptist missionaries were hanged, beaten and tarred by vengeful planters.

Along the way, Levy intrudes real-life characters connected to Jamaica, among them Anthony Trollope and the diarist Lady Nugent. James Kinsman, an English Baptist, is modelled on the abolitionist and missionary William Knibb, a patriarchal figure who attempted to Christianise Jamaica's "swarthy sons of Africa".

As well as providing a history of post-abolition Jamaica, The Long Songis beautifully written, intricately plotted, humorous and earthy. In patois-inflected prose, Levy conjures the greed and licentiousness of the island's sugar impresarios and heiresses as they indulge vast meals and sexual gropings - before casting Jamaica aside like a sucked orange. Those who enjoyed Small Island will love The Long Song, not just for the insights on the "wretched island", but as a marvel of luminous storytelling.

Ian Thomson is the author of 'The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica' (Faber)

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