Small Island by Andrea Levy

A friend of mine had the wonderful idea of starting a book club, and the first book selected was Small Island. The novel has two main characters - Gilbert, a Jamaican who volunteers for the RAF in WWII and tries to make it in England afterward, and Hortense, a Jamaican woman who becomes his wife for the chance to come with him. To a lesser extent, the book also traces two other lives - that of Queenie, an English woman who rents a room to Gilbert, and her husband Bernard. The characters are all given the chance to narrate in first person, and the the novel overall explores racism and the different motivations of affection.

It's on the whole an informative and well-intentioned book, and nicely bound. I'm hard pressed for other good things to say. Because everything is told in first person, the author has what my mother has not-so-charmingly titled "verbal diarrhea." No motive, thought, or impression of landscape is left unexplained. Jamaican and British accents make appearances, only to be replaced with flowingly-worded social commentary that the characters recite in their heads as they fight wars or cook dinner. And mysteriously, no organizing principles in the main characters are apparent by the end of the book, behind the mountains of their self-definition.

Perhaps the only part of the novel granted some ambiguity - and as a result, sparkle - is a connection between Gilbert, Hortense and Queenie in the form of Michael Roberts. He is Hortense's step-brother and love-object before he volunteers for the RAF and leaves Jamaica (following an indiscretion with a married white missionary woman), a one-time lover of Queenie when in London and the father of her child, and the reason that both Queenie and Hortense befriend Gilbert - since the two men look greatly alike. He is also the reason Hortense comes to England and the only spark of happiness in Queenie's English life, and as such a liaison between the worlds of black and white, colonial and Mother Country - the themes explored by the novel.

The racism in Jamaica, in the world of the book, is parochial, and malignant in a subdued way - Hortense, trained by British women in a Kingston teachers' college, sincerely judges people by shades of skin color and knows her place in the racial hierarchy, yet perceives of herself as comparable to whites in achievement. At the beginning of her teaching career, she thinks, "I hungered to make those children regard me with as high an opinion as I had for the principal and tutors at my college. Those white women whose superiority encircled them like an aureole, could quieten any raucus gathering by just placing a finger to a lip" - and does not realize the true origin of their authority is not available to her.

The racism in England, on the other hand, is of the "savages from the jungle" kind; it makes people shun, be afraid of, and want to violate, all at once, anyone non-white. Even Queenie, the only character open to interaction with Jamaicans because of her general compassion, and the timely appeance of Michael Roberts at her door when she was most lonely, repeats things twice for Hortense, assuming her dim-witted, and overcharges her black tenants as a sort of insurance.

American GIs, who make an ugly appearance, also bring the American brand of racism to the examination table. Here, blacks are not only assumed to be naturally unfit for society, they also require total and demonstrable physical separation from whites. When Gilbert, in RAF boy-in-blue uniform, sits next to Queenie in a movie theater with American GIs present, they start a riot demanding that he sit in the back with the African-American GIs, and end up shooting Queenie's father-in-law. The Americans make the British "they're not of our sort" approach seem benign by comparison.

So this juxtaposition of national attitudes was a very interesting part of the novel, and I would think the foundation for the book as well. The trouble is that the characters seem built to illustrate the point (which, I should note, is of course more complex than I've presented it), rather than act on their own to tear at the cloth of the point a bit, and show us their reactions and adaptations. Perhaps the fun thing to at our book club would be to come up with extra layers for the characters and explore how to make them more interesting and illuminating as residents of a world entrenched in racism in a myriad different ways.

I should also look over White Teeth, which treats similar subjects in what I remember to be a hugely more sharp, sarcastic and touching manner, to see if I can pinoint the reasons for the difference between the two books.