Who are the most vulnerable characters?Ĩ. Discuss the differences between men's power and women's power in The Long Song. How does she use humor in tackling the grim and disturbing subject of slavery?ħ. Discuss the author's use of language and of voice in the novel. Discuss how the relationship between master and servant develops. Caroline Mortimer takes July away from her mother without any thought. July is clearly an unreliable narrator, but what does that mean? How did your feelings for her develop or change in the course of the novel?ĥ. How successful is the novel in achieving both these aims?Ĥ. In The Long Song she saw a way to fill the silence with a fictional voice, and to give us a sense of life as it was lived on a daily basis during the period. When she was doing research for the novel, Andrea Levy found plenty of accounts of slavery in Jamaica by white plantation owners, but the voices of the plantations' slaves seemed silent or lost. What did you learn from The Long Song that surprised you and that you didn't know before? How do you think novels bring the past to life in a way that history books don't?ģ. Both books explore the relationship among the Caribbean, Jamaica, and Britain.

In Small Island, Andrea Levy told the story of Jamaicans in London just after World War II in the The Long Song, she goes further back, to the nineteenth century. By telling such a story and writing this novel, Andrea Levy wanted to make her questioner feel proud of her heritage. When a young woman asked the author how one could possibly take any pride in one's ancestry when all one's ancestors were slaves, she planted the seed that would eventually become The Long Song.

The Long Song by Andrea Levy