It's a world in which Caroline, Amity's new mistress, avoids the reality of her dungeon of torture as easily as she manages to offset the smell of her slaves by use of a lilac-tinctured handkerchief. The net result is a novel that won't let the reader go.īut beneath its surface lurks the deeper reality of an abhorrently violent social system, the likes of which the world had never seen, one in which Molly, the cook, through the years of the book, goes about her chores with only one seeing eye, the other having had its light kicked out by the well-shod foot of a former mistress. Upstairs/Downstairs social comment and magical realism thrown in here and there. Set at a time of unique turbulence in a colonial landscape on the verge of collapse, it is told in an effective mixture of hilariously Monty Pythonesque humour, combined with
On the surface, Levy's tale is of a torrid romance between the indomitable mulatto slave, Miss July, and her master, a spiritual contortionist, Robert Goodwin. It is in many ways a comedy of manners on life in the great house, taking equal shots at despicable masters in all their evil, arrogance and pretentiousness, and their luckless slaves, who survive them through a combination of sly ingenuity, effective obsequiousness and hypocrisy, sabotage and resilient perversity. The Long Song is a wickedly funny parody of life at Amity sugar cane plantation in Jamaica, in the years leading up to and just after emancipation of July 31, 1838.
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