Elleke Boehmer

The National Theatre production based on Andrea Levy’s unforgettable novel Small Island (April–August 2019) brings all the heart and angst of this tangled story vividly to the stage.

The novel and now the epic play adapted by Helen Edmundson tells the story of four characters, two Jamaicans and two Britons, Hortense, Gilbert, Queenie and Bernard, whose lives are impacted by the global events of the mid-twentieth century, war and immigration. The key pivot around which the action turns is the arrival at Tilbury of the SS Empire Windrush, movingly evoked at the end of the first half using projection onto a rippling screen. Throughout, the scenography – a hurricane in Jamaica, a war film in Lincolnshire – was incredibly atmospheric and well done.

The three-hour production sticks faithfully to the story-line, which made it too episodic and linear for some audience members, though for many others the neat patterns and parallels helped to give the actions resonance and density. Particularly striking was how we were made to see again and again that tiny misperceptions and shifts of decision can determine the shape of the rest of our lives – like Queenie going to the cinema with Gilbert and her father-in-law Arthur, which leads to Arthur’s death; or Hortense bumping into her friend Celia and Celia’s beau Gilbert in Kingston, after which she ends up marrying Gilbert. These effects were enhanced by telling the story forwards from two geographical perspectives, the two islands of the title, and these were captured in the division of the revolving stage into halves, Jamaica on the one side, English interiors on the other.

For the more critical viewer there was a slightly congratulatory aspect to the story-telling, with the racist remarks of characters like Bernard represented as if they were in the past, rather than still current and cutting on the streets of Britain today. The adoption of Queenie’s baby Michael that ends the play (and the novel) also produced mixed reactions. The handover of the child to a still-hesitant Hortense and Gilbert was presented using a grand tableau scene that was moving but also glossed over the many difficulties involved in this act. The symbolism of reconciliation and coming together at this point overrode emotional plausibility.

Even so, the audience seemed to troop out of the theatre animated and pleased. This was a story and a production full of heart, and the four central character portrayals were very strong indeed. Leah Harvey as the uptight and straight-talking Hortense was outstanding.    

Cite this: Boehmer, Elleke. “The National Theatre brings the tangled story of Small Island vividly to the stage” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 12 February 2026.

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Tessa Roynon

The analysis is of the following paragraph from Andrea Levy’s Small Island (Tinder Press, 2015 edition), p. 55.

No living person should ever see the underside of a tree. The roots – that gnarled, tangled mess of prongs that plummet unruly into the earth in search of sustenance. As I fled from the schoolhouse after the hurricane had passed, the world was upside-down. The fields to my left, to my right, undulated with this black and wretched chaos. Trees ripped from land that had held them fast for years. Branches that should have been seeking light snuffled now in the dirt – their fruit splattered about like gunshot. Tin roofs were on the ground while the squeaking wheels of carts rotated high in the air, disordered and topsy-turvy. I stumbled through this estranged landscape alarmed as a blind man who can now see.

In terms of the novel’s plot, this paragraph describes the teenaged Hortense’s encounter with the chaos and destruction wreaked by the recent hurricane. Emerging from the schoolhouse after the storm, Hortense is traumatised not just by the uprooted trees, roofless houses and overturned houses, but also by having inadvertently witnessed the illicit sexual encounter between Michael and Mrs Ryder that the hurricane and the need to shelter from it had enabled. The turmoil of the landscape mirrors Hortense’s inner turmoil: somewhat obviously, her own world has been turned ‘upside-down’ as she had previously thought that Michael and herself shared a romantic understanding. Her sense of betrayal is matched only by her shock at the disregard for conventional morality and for racial difference that characterise the affair between the older, married, and white American Mrs Ryder and the younger black Jamaican, her cousin Michael.

At the same time, of course, the cataclysmic effects of the hurricane here symbolise Andrea Levy’s concern with the cataclysmic changes involved both in individual lives and in Caribbean and British history during the decades (the 1930s and 1940s) that Small Island as a whole depicts. Indeed, the sense of a world ‘disordered’, ‘topsy-turvy’, and ‘estranged’ epitomises the processes of colonialism and postcolonialism that motor Levy’s entire literary project. As the Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932–2014) documents in his posthumous memoir, Familiar Stranger (2017), the middle decades of the twentieth-century were a time of extraordinary upheaval and rapid transition in Jamaica, in the so-called ‘Mother country’ of Britain, and for those on both sides of the encounter between the two.

Jamaica achieved its independence in 1962. Hall describes the combination of ‘the quickening anti-colonial struggle’ with the 1938 labour rebellion in Kingston (also featured in Small Island) as ‘a political hurricane sweeping across the whole region’, one which ‘made the wheels of history turn faster’ (Familiar Stranger 38-39). Inseparable from these political changes, of course, are huge personal upheavals: the crises of belonging and identity that West Indian immigration to Britain from the late 1940s onward set into motion for those of every skin colour and every economic class. When Levy depicts Hortense stumbling through the ravaged landscape ‘alarmed as a blind man who can now see’, it is only the beginning of the protagonist’s intense and discomforting process of re-learning, of coming to terms with her soon-to-be-uprooted self  as a ‘gnarled, tangled mess’, and with the fast-evolving worlds around her (Small Island 55).

There is one further important detail on this page that we should not miss. Just before she describes the deracinated tree, Hortense describes her wish to escape from the barricaded schoolroom in which the tryst is taking place: ‘to burst from the room, to blow through the windows, to blast through the walls, and escape into the embrace of the dependable hurricane’ (55). The violence of the verbs here anticipates the splattered fruit that resembles ‘gunshot’, and express the forceful personal rebellion of this emotionally and sexually intense young woman. The fact that the hurricane is ‘dependable’ as well as devastating ensures the paradox that the cataclysmic change is not all bad: it is at once inevitable, unstoppable and necessary.

This paradox brings to mind the cinematic device in the wonderful documentary of Stuart Hall’s life, The Stuart Hall Project (dir. John Akomfrah 2013). In this film, footage of a Caribbean hurricane, accompanied by powerful music, punctuates every momentous personal and political event that occurs in its subject’s life time. Levy’s focus on the ruptured and unpromising nature of the tree’s roots, furthermore, recalls the famous formulation by the black British intellectual Paul Gilroy about viable postcolonial black identity: it is ‘routes’ (or journeys and paths travelled), rather than ‘roots’ (a futile clinging to often-mythologised origins)  that must sustain the black diaspora (The Black Atlantic, 19). In Small Island Hortense learns, albeit the hard way, that to be rootless is an opportunity as well as a loss.

Towards the end of her novel, Levy returns to the concept of ‘hurricane’ and its symbolic potential, and this time she does so with painful but restorative humour. When Hortense has tried to exit from her disastrous teaching interview by walking into the broom cupboard, she finds solace in recounting her experience to Gilbert. Recording a pivotal shift in the dynamics of their relationship, he observes that, after weeping, ‘she blew her nose … with the force of a hurricane’ (459). This conscious incongruity on the part of both Gilbert and Levy – describing an apparently minor event in grand, epic terms – is important because it emphasises Levy’s interest in the significance of apparently-small, incremental changes. The novelist suggests that small-scale evolutions – such as the lessening of hostilities between Gilbert and Hortense – are potentially as significant as major, cataclysmic revolutions. Thus the hurricane, as a recurring motif, expresses a conviction shared by Andrea Levy and Stuart Hall alike: that human experience and human identity are never fixed, but are always in flux and in formation.

~

Works cited

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London and New York: Verso, 1993.

Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. London: Allen Lane, 2017.

Andrea Levy, Small Island (2004). London: Tinder Press, 2015.

The Stuart Hall Project. Dir. John Akomfrah, 2013.

Cite this: Roynon, Tessa. “Close reading of Small Island.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 12 February 2026.

The post Close reading of Andrea Levy’s <em>Small Island</em> by Tessa Roynon appeared first on writers make worlds.

Biography

Writing

Andrea Levy (Photo: andrealevy.co.uk)

‘For me, writing has always been a journey of discovery about my past and my family’, said Levy in a 2015 interview. ‘All my books look at what it is to be black and British, trying to make the invisible visible, and to put back into history the people who got left out – people like my dad’ (2015 Tinder Press edition of Small Island, p. 539). Scholars tend to demarcate her first three novels from her most recent two: these last two, with their overt historical contexts of 1940s Jamaica and Britain (Small Island), and nineteenth-century Jamaica (The Long Song) are undoubtedly more complex and ambitious than their predecessors in their scope and technique. Yet despite their smaller canvases, Levy’s depictions of the mid-to-late-twentieth-century lives of the Jacob family in Every light in the house burnin’, Olive and Vivien in Never Far From Nowhere, and of Faith Jackson in Fruit of the Lemon, all bear witness to the interconnectedness of Jamaica and Britain since the beginning of the colonial enterprise. In so doing they share the conviction of the postcolonial critic and commentator Stuart Hall, that the ‘personal’ is always the ‘political’.

Levy’s novels convey in-depth portrayals of her characters’ psychology and development with her trademark combination of compassion, humour, and anger at social and historical injustice. Through her interweaving of a range of points of view, perspectives, and time periods her writing often achieves a scale and mood that are paradoxically at once epic and intimate. In Small Island, for example, her commitment to the viewpoints of white British Queenie and Bernard, as well as to Jamaican-born Hortense and Bernard, means that the complex specificities of historical and geographical locale, of gender, of racial politics based on skin colour, and of social and economic class, are all simultaneously in play. The Long Song, in turn, is striking for the freshness and intensity of its depiction of slavery and its aftermath in the British Caribbean. The compelling interior life of its resilient female protagonist, July, tends to stay with all those who have encountered it.

—Tessa Roynon, 2017

Cite this: Roynon, Tessa. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 12 February 2026.

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