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Andrea Levy

The Long Song: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010 Hardcover – January 1, 2010

by Andrea Levy (Author)

4.4 2,385 ratings

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Language

English
Publisher

Headline
Publication date

January 1, 2010
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.14 x 9.49 inches
ISBN-10

0755359402
ISBN-13

978-0755359400
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Please pardon me, but your storyteller is a woman possessed of a forthright tongue and little ink.
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But, upon that day, the act that made John Howarth question his God for allowing such barbarity within a world he knew, and gasp at the cruelty of his fellows, while a righteous anger fermented within his belly until he felt sickened, ashamed and disgusted, was the sight before him now: nine white men dressed as women.
Highlighted by 49 Kindle readers

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Headline; First Edition (January 1, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0755359402
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0755359400
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.14 x 9.49 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #7,756,782 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 2,385 ratings

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Andrea Levy

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Andrea Levy was born in England to Jamaican parents. She is the author of four other novels, including Every Light in the House Burning (1995), Never Far from Nowhere (1996), Fruit of the Lemon (1999), and Small Island (2005). Small Island won both the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction: Best of the Best. Selling over a million copies worldwide, Small Island was also adapted for the small screen in a critically acclaimed series that aired on BBC and will debut on PBS’s Masterpiece Classic on April 18 and 25, 2010. Levy lives in London.

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Debra S

Could not put this book down!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 31, 2023

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Wonderfully written tale that takes you on an adventure into another place and time. I did not want this book to end.

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Suzanne Dobbins

A moving and uplifting tale

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 9, 2013

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Set in a narrative fiction, The Long Song is the story of a Jamaican slave, Miss July, told at the request of her adult son – a proprietor of a publishing house. Miss July is a reluctant teller, but she certainly has a voice to savor with a charm all her own. We learn through her story that she was the product of a slave girl, Kitty, and the plantation overseer, Tam Dewar. As a child, she was snatched up into the plantation house and trained as a ladies maid and companion to the owner’s sister, Caroline Mortimer.

Having read and loved Levy’s Small Island, I was anxious to read this work of fiction. For me, The Long Song did not disappoint. Some of my Goodreads friends did not care for this book – Levy’s characters were accused of being insipid and the tone too light for such a serious subject matter. I appreciated hearing those comments ahead of time, and I read with a thought as to why the author might portray her characters the way she did. Miss July really came alive for me. In fact, she reminded me of a woman I have known and loved. She is charming and mischievous; and yes, she had a hard life, but she didn’t want to dwell on the tragedies. I felt that Levy understood that a real person, reluctantly telling a story so full of sadness, might want to downplay the bad events. To dwell on them would be to give into the despair, rather than showing that she had been able to come through it as a survivor.

Levy presents a novel that is well-researched – including the language used by Jamaican slaves (as is evidenced in her lengthy resource list at the conclusion of the book). She also shows a bit of the origins of the Jamaican class system, which currently favors lighter-skinned blacks.

In addition to all that, The Long Song is a moving and uplifting tale of a people who are able to retain dignity in the midst of enslavement. I can see why it was a finalist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

17 people found this helpful

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A. Prentice

A Child Lost, A Child Found

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 22, 2012

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Reading this very accomplished novel reinforced for me once again the extra horrors of the British system of slavery on Jamaica and the grim realities of working on a sugar cane plantation. While there is a great deal about the novel to admire --- the descriptions, the language, the characterizations are all very well done, and you can clearly see the plantation setting of the book -- for some reason it did not create the emotional involvement with the heroine that would have made it a greater book. July struggles to survive and loses most of the people she cares for; the ultimate loss, of her beloved baby daughter, should have felt more awful than it does. The happy ending has an element of sad mystery since her life between the birth of her son and his finding of her 30 years later is not related in the book and we are left to deduce just how hard it was. Thomas, July's son, is a truly good person and successful as well, and I would like to more of his story. I would actually recommend Marlon James' novel, The Book of Night Women, for a more serious fictional portrait of slavery in Jamaica.

12 people found this helpful

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Cas Alex

The Long Song

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 28, 2013

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This is a lovely novel by Andrea Levy. The only issue is that it is written in both first-person and third-person narrative, which can be a bit confusing if the reader is already having a difficult time following a story line. That said, the story is very interesting. July is not only an interesting character, but a good narrator. Her story, which she recounts from the moment of her conception, is probably historically accurate for slave women in the Anglophone Caribbean. When her daughter is kidnapped and taken to England, July's emotional collapse is so dramatic and real; it is difficult to imagine a woman feeling any less hurt, lost, and betrayed. Levy leaves her audience wondering, at the conclusion, what happened to July's kidnapped daughter. Perhaps there is the possibility of a sequel in which her daughter's story of growing up in England as an White, English child is revealed. All in all, this novel is a must-read for fans of Andrea Levy and scholars of Anglophone Caribbean Literature of the diaspora.

4 people found this helpful

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Susan C. Hinzpeter

Review of the Long Song

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 10, 2021

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Well-written historical fiction.
The characters are well fleshed out. The history of the English owned Jamaican sugar plantations and the black slaves forced to work on them is very informative as well as entertaining. The telling of this story is unique.
I would recommend this book to those interested in Jamaican history as well as another presentation of slavery.

3 people found this helpful

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elzib

great telling

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 30, 2022

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The writing is delicious as are the characters. While you feel the extraordinary hardships endured by our heroine, you revel in her honest appraisals of the people and world around her. A must read.

One person found this helpful

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Penelope Gamble

An Education in Jamaican Slavery

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 16, 2010

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I categorize books in "easy read" and "hard read" My usual reads are by Delinsky, Macomber, Michaels, etc.-mostly romance. This book caught my eye in the Better Homes and Garden pages. It was listed under "Books we can't put down." That was provocative enough for me to order from Amazon. Well, it was for me a "hard read" meaning it took more than three or four nights to finish. I stuck with it, anxious to find out how Miss July completes her journey. Yes, it was a book I couldn't put down as well. I'm glad I decided to try this author as I was not familiar with her. I would recommend it and I feel I learned a lot of important information regarding slavery in Jamaica and humankind.

One person found this helpful

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Kevin

A stunning second read!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 8, 2019

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This is the second time reading The Long Song! I just can't get enough helpings of this beautifully written meal. To be immersed into a sad piece of history albeit fiction is not only eye-opening but written in a way not to bear down on anyone or make it too heavy a read.
I preferred less the temporal jumping back and forth and switching of voices and would've enjoyed more of July's narrative as it happened. But that is a minor partiality and still doesn't stop me from picking it up again!

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Diane Lindroos

Excellent reading

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 3, 2021

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I truly enjoyed this book. July is a heroine. Such strength and resilience. Reminds me of my mom and all she suffered providing for her eight daughters and son.

One person found this helpful

Summit

NO

Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on December 1, 2020

Verified Purchase

I hated this book it was full of words that today we all suffer for if we mention any of them in public and yet we accepted to read why? Not my kind of reading

Sharon parish

This book make you understand the history of Jamaica. ...

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 9, 2016

Verified Purchase

This book make you understand the history of Jamaica .but i as a reader want a more continuous storey,the writer keep going into the past and future.

One person found this helpful

JuliaC

Brutal but beautiful and uplifting tale

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 23, 2010

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Andrea Levy's excellent Booker short listed novel `The Long Song' tells a familiar story, but from an oft neglected perspective. Her concern is with the system of slavery in the Caribbean, and her narrator is July, born a female slave and now looking back on her experiences with honesty, humour, and a sometimes imperfect memory. Levy uses a clever device of other characters, such as July's grown up son Thomas, questioning the story and the storyteller throughout to ensure that the whole tale is told.

July was born to a slave who had been raped by one of the white massas, and is heartbreakingly taken from her mother when she is just nine years old at the whim of the plantation owner's sister. Caroline Mortimer sees July when out riding in her carriage, and finds her just too adorable to resist. She is gathered up and taken away like a doll to amuse Caroline, and obviously also to be her house servant and answer to her beck and call for the rest of her life. Caroline calls her `Marguerite' as it is a proper name in her opinion, so she is even robbed of the name her mother gave to her, and her mother is cruelly left to mourn the loss of her little girl without complaint.

Levy's story is a real page turner, fast paced and engaging. The reality of the lives of the slaves is shocking as they are routinely whipped, hit, abused and more by the white plantation owners and their overseers. There is a terrible sadness about the events that unfold, and the almost unbearable cruelty of the system of slavery and the people who perpetuated it is staggering.

The heartbreak of July's early separation from her mother is repeated in her own experience, as her beautiful baby girl is also taken from her by trickery. But it is not all heartbreak by any means. This is a tale of strength and fighting back as well as of terrible poverty, total insensitivity and inhumanity among the planter community to their negro slaves. Levy tells how the slaves bite back, when the system is abolished by the King of England himself. They quickly learn how to use their bargaining power to their best advantage, and sometimes, but not always, succeed in getting one over their former owners.

This is a great book, not having read all the other Booker short listed entries I can't say if it should have won this time, but I can say that I certainly enjoyed it immensely, and a lot more than last years successful entrant `Wolf Hall'.

6 people found this helpful

Yashi Sinha

Tragic Yet Amusing

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on May 7, 2022

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A Jamaican slave named July, in the first half of the nineteenth century, narrates her own story but pretends this is someone else's story. Having been a slave July is not squeamish in her narration and can describe the horrors of life and slavishness of her own mentality with a great deal of humour.

July is a house-slave. What's more, she is a mulatto as she was the result of her mother's rape by an English overseer. These two factors sets her apart from and higher than the field-slaves. She also has a natural sense of humour. She tells you, for example- "Reader, you must know as well as I that, if a pig is slaughtered upon this tropical island it must be eaten up soon before the meat does turn renk and wriggle with so many tiny living things that it might journey from the kitchen to your plate without aid."

When light -hearted banter is used to narrate suffering and humiliation, the narrative acquires a poignant beauty of its own.

The book uses the slave revolt of Jamaica (1831-32) known as the Christmas Rebellion or the Baptist War as its background. The revolt failed, of course. And the owners of the sugar plantations unleashed horrifying retaliation. A sample-

"John Howarth did shake his head in mild reproach at the punishment of a negro boy they came across. The small boy had been running with messages to rebel slaves—a crime—there was no doubt in Howarth’s mind upon that. But the boy was then sealed into a barrel which was roughly pierced with over twenty-five long nails hammered into the shell. The boy, still trapped within that spiky cask, was then rolled down a hill. Howarth believed this reprimand to be a little . . . wanton."

But this was the time when the Whigs were gaining ground in England and liberalism and reforms were in the air. Slavery was abolished by an Act of the British Parliament in 1838 and the slaves of the sugar plantations were freemen at long last.
Who would have thought that freedom would mean a jump from the frying pan into the fire? The plantation owners told their erstwhile slaves that they should continue to work as usual and would now be paid wages for their work. But these people, uneducated and unaware of the world outside the plantations, were unable to distinguish between slave- labour and wage-labour. They saw the offer as a trap to keep them as slaves and they started setting terms which were unreasonable and unacceptable.

The planters then began bringing in 'coolies' or indentured labour from India (the girmitiyas) who had already established a reputation for being industrious and capable workers in places like Mauritius. The result was that the erstwhile slaves found themselves homeless and starving - but free.

There is a fair bit of history in the book and I liked the way the author has woven fiction and humour into it to make it a most interesting read.

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The Long Song: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010 Hardcover – January 1, 2010

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