Skip to main content

Review 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

The Long Song
I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture.

In The Long Song, the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid.

Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empire, following the life and trials of July, a young slave (and then freewoman).

One of the key points of the book seems to revolve around the telling of stories. As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, the oral tradition of storytelling was staple in black culture. Levy really neatly contrasts this between the slaves, who embellish their stories to make them more enjoyable and unbelievable to hear told and retold, and their white masters, who twist the truth into forms they find more palatable and believable in line with their worldview. The overall message is one that the truth can never truly be found when it’s constantly under human reinterpretation – and that we should challenge our preconceptions of what this period was like.

Since the book’s being narrated by July herself, it’s also interesting to see white people through her eyes. Much as white people write two-dimensional black character through a lack of cultural understanding, so July struggle to understand white behaviour in-depth. And how could she not, when the minor annoyances of the white masters are set against the deep miseries endured by slaves?

So there’s a lot of depth to the writing – but nonetheless, it feels light, easy and pleasant to read. That in itself is quite an achievement, and there are plenty more here besides. I really enjoyed it.

--

This is my thirty-fourth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 7: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The first thing you see when you open Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is six pages of quotes from reviews saying how good it is. If you’re like me (and with any luck you’re not), you’ll think: talk about putting yourself under pressure . Happily, Gyasi more than rises to the implicit challenge set by her voluminous praise. The scope of her book - following two branches of an African family tree as they become separated by time and distance – is beautifully realised, with each chapter representing another generational step down. Homegoing is, in its clearest sense, about the reverberating impact of slavery on black people, both in the lands they were ripped from and the lands they were taken to. But the core theme that ties the book together is connection between those two strands of people. The title could be considered a reference to ‘returning’ to Africa, but I think it’s more powerful when considered as more abstract – the re-binding of the strands of people who have been separa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 40: Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ by Giulia Enders

Earlier in the year, I read Mary Roach’s Gulp - a fascinating and hilarious journey down the alimentary canal. When picking up Giulia Enders’ Gut , I worried that I might be over-gutted. What more could I possibly have to learn, having already read one other book? Fortunately, Ender’s bestseller couldn’t be a better companion piece to Roach’s. Where Gulp is a light-hearted set of the facts that she found most interesting, Gut goes and fills in more of the hard detail. Both are immensely readable, but the former is set to entertain, and the latter to inform. They complement perfectly. Enders (and let’s not forgo the cheap mention of nominative determinism here) makes you fall in love with the gut by being in love with it herself. Her passion and joy blast out of every sentence, and like so many things discussed within the book, that’s infectious. Sometimes the writing style feels slightly young, but I think that’s to make it engaging to a wide audience, and is easily over...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 28: Bitch Planet, Vol. 1: Extraordinary Machine by Kelly-Sue DeConnick

I’ve never been a fan of the word bitch when applied to women, so I confess to some reticence about picking up Bitch Planet . After all, if I don’t like it being used about one woman, using it to describe a whole planet should rocket me into heights of discomfort previously only known to people visiting emergency rooms having glued bits of themselves to other bits of themselves. I needn’t have worried. Its use in Kelly-Sue DeConnick’s graphic novel series is exactly to underline the reason I don’t like it in the first place. The eponymous Bitch Planet is a sexist epithet used by men to describe an off-world prison reserved for women who don’t fit into the neat box that society wants them in. Its use is deliberate and knowing, rather than lazy. Yeah, okay Nash, keep yer sociolinguistic jibber-jabber to yerself. What’s the actual story, you pretentious codpiece? Thank you, dear reader, I value your feedback. Essentially the premise is somewhere between The Handmaid’s Tale and Th...
Post a Comment
Read more