Small world

SMALL ISLAND by Andrea Levy (Review, £14.99)

To Gilbert Joseph, growing up in Jamaica in the 1930s, small island means his country's smaller Caribbean neighbours. Then he goes off to war and returns home to feel like "a giant living on land no bigger than the soles of my feet". He dreams of escaping to the "mother country", but when he finally does so it is the post-war Britain of 1948 that seems small - an island of low skies, restricted opportunities, cramped bedsits shared with six other men, and small-minded racism.

In her three previous novels, published over the past decade, Andrea Levy has chronicled the lives of the English-born sons, and more particularly daughters, of the Windrush generation of early Jamaican immigrants. Her fourth novel, her most ambitious yet, looks back to the experiences of both these first immigrants and the English into whose lives they came.

Small Island tells the stories of Gilbert, his Jamaican wife Hortense, Queenie Bligh, a pigfarmer's daughter from Nottinghamshire, and her husband Bernard, who spends the war in India, where he sees his best friend killed by "coolies" and comes home to find that Queenie has installed Gilbert and Hortense as lodgers in his house in Earl's Court.

The novel is narrated, in turn, by these four individuals, and it spreads itself widely. We see Hortense growing up as a kind of Cinderella in rural Jamaica, the illegitimate daughter of a great man farmed out to uncaring provincial relatives, Gilbert experiencing segregation in America and among GIs in

England, and Queenie as a young girl visiting the British Empire Exhibition, where she meets an African "carved from melting chocolate" who astounds her by speaking English. The war, and its power to transform, is at the heart of the book, and the characters' lives. Before the war, Queenie is a shy sweetshop girl who marries scrawny-necked Bernard by default, but in the war both of them blossom. Queenie becomes a saviour of the bombed-out, and even Bernard's neck looks "fearless with the collar of his RAF blues pressing against it".

It is after the war, though, in the space of a few days in 1948, when the four characters come together in the house in Earl's Court, that the novel most engages. Small Island is never less than finelywritten, delicately and often comically observed, and impressively rich in detail and little nuggets of stories. But there is a sense, in the greater part of the book, which goes under the heading "before", that all this is a construct designed to reach what really concerns us, the post-war world of 1948.

It is when the scene moves here that the novel comes fully to life and we realise what we have been missing. The scenes where the prim, haughty Hortense and the equally proud but more relaxed Gilbert, who have married out of convenience rather than love, joust with each other are both hilarious and tenderly moving. "I felt her foot press lightly against my leg," Gilbert recounts when Hortense finally lets him into the bed. "I moved my leg away. And soon the little cold foot followed."

The last moments of frost, and thaw, between the black and white characters also contain the promise of an interesting, and funny, next few years. When Gilbert makes a stirring speech about living together to racist Bernard, the room falls hush. "'I'm sorry,' Bernard finally says softly. 'But I can't understand a single word that you're saying.'"

If we are lucky, the misunderstandings, and gradual enlightenment, of those next few years will be the subject for a future novel from this talented writer.