To what extent does the telling of a tale belong to its teller, and how much responsibility does he or she have to their audience? The opening pages of Andrea Levy's fifth novel suggest that when we encourage someone to tell their story, we should be prepared to surrender to their voice, however capricious it may be; the subsequent narrative counters with the idea that this might be easier said than done. "The tale herein is all my mama's endeavour," writes Thomas Kinsman, a Jamaican publisher, introducing the book that he has encouraged his mother to write partly as a way of diverting her constant attempts to speak her story to him. "Although shy of the task at first, after several months she soon became quite puffed up, emboldened to the point where my advice often fell on to ears that remained deaf to it." Storytelling, he is hinting, is both habit-forming and empowering; and the nuances, byways and corruptions of power are The Long Song's most significant theme.
Kinsman's mother has lived most of her life with very little power at all; even her birth, on a sugar plantation in Jamaica in the early years of the 19th century, was the result of her father, a Scottish overseer, taking what he wanted from her mother, a slave. As a child, she catches the eye of the plantation owner's sister, and is quickly appropriated to become her lady's maid; not to worry, John Howarth assures his sister Caroline, she would soon have been sold on in any case, and "they are dreadful mothers, these negroes". Stripped even of her name, July, and rechristened as the far more genteel Marguerite, she is summarily separated from the field slaves and forced to enact a grotesque parody of English aristocratic country-house life.
Except that it doesn't work; change is coming, and even Caroline's persistent fantasising and prodigious capacity for self-deception are no match for the gathering movement for freedom among the human beings she believes she owns. In one of the novel's most striking set-pieces, she attempts to marshal her servant-slaves to mount a Christmas feast of unparalleled bounty and elegance, but falls into argument over the price of candles. "It is not that things be expensive," as the slave Godfrey wryly tells her, "it is just that you cannot afford them." By way of revenge on his mistress, he dresses the table not with fine linen but with an old bed sheet; this is of little consequence to the guests, because their dinner is interrupted by news of rebellion and violence, the men swept away to do their duty for the militia, the women left cowering and terrified in their grand houses.
Levy animates the Baptist war of 1831 with admirable deftness, sketching the beginning of the end of slavery with swift, shocking strokes: rumours of freedom granted by the King of England spreading like gossip among the slave population, a Baptist missionary tarred and feathered by plantation owners for inculcating rebellion. Meanwhile, July slides across the polished floors of the house at the Amity plantation on her apron and effects a courtship with the freed slave, Nimrod, by pretending to be his mistress; toppling into an unfamiliar and entirely forbidden bed, they are wakened only by the massa, returned from quashing the uprising to shoot himself in the head, horrified by what he has seen.
But if vast historical events form the backdrop to The Long Song – the end of slavery comes in 1838, with a mock funeral in which its corpse is interred – they do not always immediately trouble July. The story that she wishes to tell is her own, the story of daily life with the slaves of the household, dispatches from her battles with the haughty quadroon Clara (July, as she is quick to remind us, is herself a mulatto, and rivalries over the comparative lightness of skin tone and provenance recur frequently and disquietingly), and the tale of her love affair with Caroline's husband, whose attempts to govern the post-slavery plantation in a progressive manner quickly disintegrate into a welter of oppression and violence.
On more than one occasion July declares her story told, only for her son to burst in and command her to tell more, and tell it differently. "But, reader," protests July, "if your storyteller were to tell of life with July through those times, you would hear no sweet melody but forbidding discord. You would turn your head away. You would cry, lies! You would pass over those pages and beg me lead you to better days." Those better days, it is clear, have finally arrived for July – now living in affluence and relative harmony with her son and his family – and she has little wish to indulge in nostalgie de la boue. For Thomas Kinsman, however, a child whose life was also marked indelibly by the circumstances of his birth, the imperative to make an accurate record cannot be resisted. Yet whose is the better story, and to whom do we most want to listen?
Levy's use of a delightfully fallible narrator is clever and productive, although at times it can also seem strained and show a tendency towards the schematic. In this sense, she is herself the victim of July's story, which gallops along, full of humour and incident, linguistically fleet of foot and by turns illuminating and heartbreaking. As a document of the end of slavery, The Long Song proclaims its own incompleteness and partiality; but as a story of suffering, indomitability and perseverance, it is thoroughly captivating.
