Sally Whitehead's Reviews > The Long Song

With a keen interest in the writing of Caribbean women, and the female perspective of slavery, I'd been meaning to read Andrea Levy for a long time. Given my personal interests her fifth novel "The Long Song" seemed like a good place to start. Yet despite being an engaging, well crafted read in the end I was somehow left wanting. Our somewhat unreliable narrator Miss July, herself a 19th century Jamaican slave now free to tell her story with the editorial assistance of her once estranged son Thomas, asks in the closing of her narrative, "Must I show you the trouble that those free negroes had to endure?" and my overwhelming response was "Yes". Don't get me wrong, in the earlier parts of the narrative there are scenes of convincing cruelty and brutality, and whilst I didn't want Levy to linger on these (it is the story of Miss July's journey to freedom after all) I found the story as a whole a little too light hearted and it didn't move me in the way I'd hoped. On the flipside though I adore the fictional Miss July for her beautifully buoyant voice and unapologetic patois, and for telling and writing her "long song" as her own, and not succumbing to readers (like me) who may have wanted her to tell it slightly differently. Levy allows her to write her own "herstory" and therefore herself into history