Andrea Levy’s Small Island won the commonwealth writer’s prize for 2005 apart from other prestigious prizes like Orange Prize for fiction and Whitbread Novel Award. In Small Island Levy presents England through the eyes of four protagonists two of whom are Jamaicans and two British. A study of contrast between the dreams and realities as experienced by these protagonists with reference to England is highly rewarding, especially because each one of them makes a conscious move towards reconciliation.
Small Island focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants who sail to England with a lot of hopes and dreams only to find that the England they arrive at is not the land of their dreams. The historical setting is Britain of 1948 when the ship Empire Windrush arrives from the West Indies with about 500 Caribbeans on board.
Hortense’s Disillusionment
From the moment Hortense arrives in England, it is as if she is taken on a conducted tour of disillusionment after disillusionment. Her accent that had taken her to the top of her class in Miss Stuart’s English Pronunciation Competition, her perfect recitation of Keats’ “Ode to the Nightingale” that earned her a merit star in Jamaica, gets her nowhere in England. The small shabby room that accommodates a sink with a rusty tap, a broken chair that rested one uneven leg on the Holy Bible, a window with a torn curtain was to be her new home in London.
The feeling of racial superiority drives the English to presume ignorance, backwardness and lack of sophistication on the part of the coloured. England does teach many things to Hortense. One is that the English are not as hygienic or clean as she expected them to be. The letters of recommendation that she carried so carefully and proudly mean nothing to the woman at the desk of the Education Authority, who tells her: “You can’t teach in this country. You are not qualified to teach here in England.”
Gilbert’s Frustrations
To Gilbert, the post war England of 1948 is not the England of his dreams. He is offered the lowest paid jobs in this land of ‘opportunity’ despite the fact that he had rushed to the succour of the ‘Mother Country’ during her hour of crisis. He recalls how not only he but every one of the R.A.F volunteers had looked upon England as their mother country. But the mother is not at all what the Jamaicans imagined her to be.
Gilbert faces a series of frustrations. In his own words, one look at his face and the job vanishes. The only job he manages to get after so many disappointments is that of a postman driver for the Post Office.
Queenie and Bernard
Queenie too had her dreams. Daughter of a butcher, she is sick of the blood, muck and stink. She decides to marry Bernard Bligh only to avoid going back to the muck and stink of the butcher’s farm. The war battered England is unrecognizable and exhausted when Bernard returns from India.
Bernard Bligh is certainly a round character in the Forsterian sense. When he objects to Queenie’s decision to give away the baby to the Jamaican couple we are certainly surprised. He is sure they can bring up Michael and give him a home. Levy says of Bernard: “He was a man who had been brought up to see the world in one way — to believe himself, as a white Englishman, to be superior to almost everyone else. … I was never tempted to make him an all round bad man because I personally never believed he was — misguided, foolish, bigoted, stubborn maybe, but not at all bad.”
The Title and Reconciliation
The title Small Island is closely related to the theme of dream and reality. The phrase Small Island is applicable both to Britain and Jamaica. The British Empire, where they presumed the sun would never set, shrinks back into a small island due to the decolonising efforts in the post-war period. Immigration gradually leads to interculturalism, talking of which Levy calls it “both a clash and an accommodation.” All the protagonists experience the clash and shock when there is a gap between dream and reality. But when they make a conscious and dynamic move towards reconciliation, they create and receive accommodation that enriches personalities and societies.
Works Cited
- Winder, Robert. Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain. Great Britain: Little, Brown, 2004.
- Levy, Andrea. Small Island. Great Britain: Review, 2004.
- Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel. rpt. London: Penguin Books, 1990.
- Levy, Andrea. Interview with Sanjukta Dasgupta, included in Connecting, published by The British Council, Aug. 2005.