Andrea Levy - Small Island

review by showhost on show May 20th
This has recently been serialised for TV and I imagine it was very good. I feel its an honest account of the Jamaican immigrants during and after the 2nd war. How those who were fighting for the Mother Country against the Nazi’s when they arrived on our shores expected to be treated civilly to be welcomed but they were in for a shock. The Brits attitude was better than the Yanks but still diabolical. How they came to England expecting a green and pleasant land but they got racism, squalid rooms and ‘no jobs for blacks’. Plus lets not forget middle-class Londoners snobbery towards the Cockneys.
The main characters who tell their story are Airman Joseph Gilbert, who dreamt of becoming a lawyer in his Mother Country, his wife Hortense (a snob in her own way), who wanted to teach in England as she had in Jamaica but was told ‘black people don’t teach white children’. Queenie bligh, who after her boring husband left for the war rented out her rooms to immigrants and loose women much to the horror of her neighbours (brought the tone of the neighbourhood down don’t you know!). And finally Queenies husband Bernard a weak man who had to go to war to keep face and returned after being missing assumed dead.

The author puts humour in her story, which is mixed with daily life (was it the 70’s when we had the tv series ‘Love thy Neighbour’ – the coloured family moving next door to the bigoted white man’s family) which means that after 20 years the discrimination was still going as strong as ever!

Her format is like Jodi Picoult, she keeps changing from one character to another while they retell their version of events. But towards the end of the book I was getting weary of this and wanted to get to the end. There were parts where I was really gripped then others where I would skip read.