The Long Song: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

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The Long Song was filmed in the Dominican Republic, a setting that offered grueling hot days, but also surprising beauty. “It looked like a film set,” Hayley Atwell said. “When we were at that plantation house and there would be a sunset, there was a moment when we just stopped filming for a second, and everyone went onto the veranda…just look at these purples and oranges. The plantation was on this kind of hilly land and it looked like a carpet of neon green. It didn’t look real at all. It was a very lush place.” She manages to share the story with great humour and frequent distaste. No one is immune to her stripping characters bare and showing their true selves. So there's no indulging flights of fancy, happy endings or gratuitous violence, although there is perhaps one character who manages to rise above the rest, but he was abandoned at birth so he deserves it. Slavery is a grim subject indeed, but the wonder of Levy’s writing is that she can confront such things and somehow derive deeply life-affirming entertainment from them. July emerges as a defiant, charismatic, almost invincible woman who gives a unique voice to the voiceless, and for that she commands affection and admiration. Levy’s aim, she says, was to write a book that instilled pride in anyone with slave ancestors and The Long Song, though “its load may prove to be unsettling”, is surely that book.’

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Ms. Levy's talent shined with regard to her descriptive language. I could picture everything she described and felt as though I was recalling my last visit on the property of Amity, the plantation, where July is born in Jamaica in the earlier 1800's. At first, we are unclear, who is narrating the story or even their name (which the author did very intentionally, although her purpose for doing so, wasn't achieved in full). Perspective in narration shifted frequently, which frankly I felt was not essential to the story being told. Primarily, so the reader could realize that July's experiences had caused trauma on the level of possibly disassociation, where the injured party disconnects with their emotional response because it is either unsafe (physically and/or emotionally) for the victim to process the trauma as it is happening. Levy may have achieved that with some readers, who have experienced dissociation or know someone who has. Her delivery may be to subtle for those unfamiliar or confusing to others. I think this would have been more powerful, had she been directing that information to someone other than whom she has chosen in the story, although her choice was logical. Tamara Lawrance ( King Charles III, On Chesil Beach, Kindred) delivers a fierce and unforgettable performance as July. Lawrance was able to discuss the character with author Andrea Levy. “Andrea said that what she didn’t want was an encumbered, hard done-by victim, woe-is-me character,” Lawrance noted. “She said July is flawed, July is manipulative, July is a survivor and July is rebellious…July is always this indominable spirit.” The Long Song has an unusual format for a historical novel. Part memoir, part oral history, it is led by July, the narrator, who is detailing an account of her life on a Jamaican plantation, which is then filtered through her son, who is writing her account and experiences on her behalf. It is often non-linear and, at points, Levy deviates with interludes and interruptions, where the two discuss the presentation of the story. What did you think of this format - how did it serve your reading experience and your understanding of July’s experience? Why do you think Levy chose to write in this manner? mp_sf_list_3_description:The Long Song was filmed in the Dominican Republic, a setting that offered grueling hot days, but also surprising beauty. “It looked like a film set,” Hayley Atwell said. “When we were at that plantation house and there would be a sunset, there was a moment when we just stopped filming for a second, and everyone went onto the veranda…just look at these purples and oranges. The plantation was on this kind of hilly land and it looked like a carpet of neon green. It didn’t look real at all. It was a very lush place.”

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Long song was awarded the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction. It was also shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker prize. The story unfolds at the Amity sugar plantation, where the strong-willed July is working as a lady’s maid for Caroline Mortimer. When Robert Goodwin, a new overseer at Amity arrives, both July and Caroline are intrigued by his revolutionary spirit and intent to improve the working conditions on the plantation. But the winds of change across the hot plantation fields end up not being without consequences.

The Long Song by Andrea Levy | Waterstones

Jan 21 news There is a three-part PBS Masterpiece adaptation premiering tonight and going on through 14 Feb. a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/clips/the-long-song-official-trailer/">Watch a preview now! Y por fin puedo decir que me he leído uno de mis eternos pendientes de la vida. Conocí este libro al ver en la televisión su versión en miniserie o película larga hará cosa de unos dos o tres años, y si he tardado tanto en leerlo (aunque lo he tenido en la mano muchas veces para comenzarlo) era precisamente porque quería alejarme un poco de la película, esperando que así el libro pudiera sorprenderme más si se me desdibujaba su argumento aunque fuera un poco . Tengo que deciros que la versión cinematográfica es muy fiel al original (De hecho, creo que es la película que he visto nunca que es más fiel al libro del que bebe) y que merece mucho la pena verla.Small Island introduced Andrea Levy to America and was acclaimed as “a triumph” ( San Francisco Chronicle). It won both the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and has sold over a million copies worldwide. With The Long Song, Levy once again reinvents the historical novel. The Long Song is written as a memoir by an elderly Jamaican woman living in early 19th-century Jamaica during the final years of slavery and the transition to freedom that took place thereafter. It tells the tale of a young slave girl, July, who lives at Amity – a sugarcane plantation. She lived through the 1831 Baptist War, and then the beginning of freedom. Her mother, Kitty; the slaves working the plantation land; and the owner of the plantation, the white woman Caroline Mortimer, are other characters in the novel. [1] Themes [ edit ] The opening episode of last night’s three-part adaptation, to be screened over consecutive nights, manages the same feat, thanks to a finely whetted script from Sarah Williams (who also adapted Levy’s Small Island for television in 2009) and some outstanding work from a first-class cast. Central to this is rising star Tamara Lawrance, who captures all of July’s ebullience and intelligence, fiercely restrained in the capricious, violent mistress’s presence but forever straining at its bounds. Over the years she learns to handle Caroline (a pitch-perfect performance from Hayley Atwell, who takes her right up to the line of real monstrousness without crossing into caricature), make a good life within its awful and motherless constraints – and then, gleefully at first, embraces the upending of that life when the Christmas Rebellion begins. Many of the characters in The Long Song subvert expectations. July is blunt, outspoken, and short-tempered. Others that work on the plantation often feign stupidity to the plantation owners - they place bed sheets onto dining tables while those who are accomplished musicians ruin dinner parties and embarrass their hosts. These characters are not simply reduced to their suffering. Discuss the point Levy is trying to make by developing such well-rounded and complex characters. I wanted there to be joy in this book; fun, as well. I had to tread a fine line. It was never going to be ‘Carry On Up the Plantation’, but also I didn’t want it to be just so harrowing that nobody could read it. I wanted a book that everyone could read and everyone could enjoy.

The Long Song by Andrea Levy | Fiction | The Guardian

With the story told through the prism of July’s memory, we are led to question how much of the story is accurate. At times she recalls events, despite not personally bearing witness to them. July is presenting a collective memory of events that happened to a group of people - she fills in gaps, embellishing tales while drawing on the experiences of others. Did you feel, or question, while reading, if there was any unreliable narration from July? Ultimately, does it matter? So I was able to assure my precious mama that I would be her most conscientious editor. I would raise life out of her most crabbed script to make her tale flow like some of the finest writing in the English language. And there was no shame to be felt from this assistance, for at some of the best publishing houses in Britain—let me cite Thomas Nelson and Son or Hodder and Stoughton, as my example—the gentle aiding and abetting of authors in this manner is quite commonplace.

Slavery is a subject that has inspired some magnificent fiction (think of Toni Morrison's Beloved or Valerie Martin's Property), but I had some misgivings: might it not, in this case, make for over-serious writing, especially for a novelist as comically inclined as Levy? But she dares to write about her subject in an entertaining way without ever trivialising it and The Long Song reads with the sort of ebullient effortlessness that can only be won by hard work. The white colonialists are, as you might expect, a loathsome lot. I haven’t read enough of the literature of colonial West Indies to know whether they are stereotypical, but they could well be – hypocritical, greedy and with no awareness of the humanity of the people of different race who were their slaves. As slavery comes to an end in Jamaica after an inconceivable 300 years, we learn about the life and times of July. House-slave on a sugar plantation with a fat and useless mistress, July overcomes a painful separation from her formidable field-slave mother, Kitty to somehow survive the brutality and injustice. As the tide of slavery turns, we see the white plantation owners struggle to keep their prosperity. We see 'good' Christian men bring their own insidious brand of racism in sheep's clothing. Andrea Levy's insightful and inspired fifth novel, "The Long Song," reminds us that she is one of the best historical novelists of her generation… Levy's previous novel, "Small Island," is rightly regarded as a masterpiece, and with "The Long Song" she has returned to the level of storytelling that earned her the Orange Prize in 2004.