Difficult passages, artfully drawn
Small Island
By Andrea Levy
Picador, 441 pp., paperback, $14
We live in a world of hype. Our expectations for the latest ballyhooed movie, the hottest restaurant jump so far off the charts that disappointment seems inevitable. Too often, the buzz surrounding a new book turns flat by Chapter 3. Andrea Levy's ''Small Island" crosses the pond with the Whitbread, the Orange Prize, and heaps of praise in its wake. We steel ourselves for reader backlash. Can Levy's fourth novel be this good? It can. It is.
Narrated by the quirky voices of four idiosyncratic characters -- Queenie and her husband, Bernard, white and English; Hortense and her husband, Gilbert, black and Jamaican -- the novel spans three continents and multiple conflicts both political and personal. What does it feel like to leave home, to swap one island for another, to live under the shadow of the Empire? Levy asks. Her wry, intimate examination of the fallout from one couple's transplanted roots captures not only the particular but also the universal experience of immigration.
The plot unfurls in a postwar England veering toward multiculturalism. As a child, Queenie visits the British Empire Exhibition. At the African pavilion, a jungle with mud huts, she's startled to see a black man. Even more, she's dumbfounded that he speaks clear English. Yet when she shakes his hand, she notes ''it was warm and slightly sweaty like anyone else's."
''Like anyone else's" is not a concept familiar to xenophobic Londoners. But Queenie's a cut above the average racist. As a tribute to Levy's complex, layered, and flawed creatures, however, she's no caricature of goodness. In 1948, Queenie is strapped. Bernard, stationed in India, has not yet returned. Much to the neighbors' horror, she rents a room to a Jamaican who had fought for the RAF in England, Gilbert Joseph, and his new bride. Queenie's got spunk; she's a hardy English rose sprouting from ruined, blitzed concrete. Volunteering to show Hortense the local shops, she explains, ''I don't mind being seen in the street with you. You'll find I'm not like most. It doesn't worry me to be seen out with darkies."
Queenie's opposite, prim Hortense, white-gloved, trained as a teacher, carefully groomed and spoken, has always dreamed of going to England. When she arrives to join her husband, she imagines a paradise of big houses and brass knockers. Instead, Gilbert's single, shabby, mouse-ridden room sends her into culture shock: ''Just this? This is where you are living. Just this?" More disappointments follow. England is like the brooch Gilbert spies gleaming on the pavement, a shimmering green jewel. But the minute he bends over to pick it up, it flies away -- a ''cluster of flies caught by the light" and gathered on dog feces.
So much for Britain's social structure, a crumbling, decaying empire sitting on a pile of dung; so much for the inspiring words of ''Rule, Britannia," ''Britons never, never, never shall be slaves." Those who fought for England, her loyal subjects, are second-class citizens accused of immigrating to the mother country for the free spectacles and dentistry. ''If the defeat of hatred is the purpose of war, then . . . I and all other coloured servicemen were fighting this war on another front," Gilbert points out. While he's trained for war and its hardships, he's not prepared for the privations and bigotry of so-called peace.
Though official combat is over, private battles flare. Bernard comes back from India to find an unrecognizable Queenie, a woman with the gall to move the sideboard and his father's chair, a wife who got a job, took in questionable boarders, had an ecstatic, scandalous love affair. When Queenie introduces her husband to Gilbert, Bernard recoils: ''The cheeky blighter put his hand out for me to shake. I just shut the bloody door on him."
For Gilbert, all doors bang shut. Eager to study law but forced to drive a Post Office truck, Gilbert longs for Jamaica, where he looks like everyone else. Hortense, too, has doors slamming in her face. Dressed in her wedding finery, bearing letters of recommendation, she sets out to apply for a teaching job. ''You can't teach here," she's told. When she opens the door to leave, she walks into a broom closet.
Nevertheless, hope glimmers. Postwar England contains ''too much seen to go back. Too much changed to know which way is forward." Though Jamaica and England seem unbridgeable, though each character's isolation mocks John Donne's words that ''no man is an island," change is certain. Lives will collide; worlds will expand. At the end of the novel, in a brilliant stroke of Solomon-like genius, Queenie makes a decision that brings all four narrators together with the clash of tectonic plates.
Levy's vast, gripping canvas troubles and moves and horrifies and informs. To the surprise and delight of her readers, her story also makes us laugh. What she gives us is nothing less than messy, terrifying, wonderful life itself. Rarely have almost 450 pages spun by so fast.
Mameve Medwed's fourth novel, ''How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life," will be published next year. 
