An English kind of luck

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An English kind of happiness (original title Small Island ) is a novel published in 2005 , written by Andrea Levy ; the author won three major literary prizes in Great Britain with this work: the Orange Prize for Fiction , the Whitbread Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize . In 2015, 82 international literary critics and scholars voted the novel one of the most important British novels .

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After the Second World War in 1948, the Jamaican Hortense has just reached the destination of her dreams: in London , where she wants to become a teacher and lead a self-determined life. She sacrificed a lot for this dream: she married her best friend's boyfriend, whom she despises and financed his trip to London as a dowry. But shortly after their arrival they suffered the first setback. Her unloved husband, Gilbert Joseph, doesn't even pick her up from the platform.

Gilbert had lofty dreams of his own. He wanted to be celebrated as a hero of the Royal Air Force who valiantly defended the British mainland against his enemies. Instead, as a black man, he sees himself confronted with discrimination everywhere during the war and then in “white” London. In addition, he cannot receive his wife Hortense in a plush villa in bombed-out London, as she had expected from all the exaggerated stories of the rich “Mother Country”, but in a small, shabby apartment. He owes the accommodation to his "landlady", the Londoner Queenie Bligh, who rents rooms to black immigrants despite severe complaints from the neighborhood.

Queenie is characterized by the naivety and humanity with which she defends her black lodgers against the prejudices of the neighbors and against racist American GIs . After her marriage to Bernard, she herself moved to London, not least to escape a life as a maid of her father, who works as a master butcher. The marriage to Bernard is unsatisfactory for Queenie. Her husband's decision to go to war is therefore not particularly hard on her. Bernard's unit is transferred to India after the war to put down the rebellion there. Since Queenie doesn't hear from him even after the conflict has ended, she thinks he is dead. Under this assumption, she sometimes shares her bed with a black soldier.

When Bernard returns from India, nothing is as it should be at home in London. His wife refuses to do marital duties and black immigrants come and go in his house.

In this way, a tension-laden network develops between these four characters, which holds many revelations and tragic-comic moments in store. The novel is about dreams that fail because of reality. However, the protagonists cannot be stopped on their way to happiness by the many setbacks.

Narrative style and interpretation

An English Kind of Happiness is a remarkable example of post-colonial literature in which the author Andrea Levy processed her own autobiographical experiences as the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant couple.

The work is characterized, among other things, by the fact that it is mainly told from a non-European perspective, namely from that of the Jamaican Hortense and her husband Gilbert. As the novel increasingly grew into a social panorama, Andrea Levy renounced a mono-ethnic perspective and told the story in the third person. In addition to the feelings and ways of thinking of their Jamaican-born protagonists, the voices of an English couple impressively round off the picture of the post-war period in bombed-out England. The author invents her own language for each of her four narrators. For the rather simply structured Gilbert a strongly patois- colored, for the proud Hortense a diction that sometimes seems almost medieval. The pragmatic and warm-hearted white butcher's daughter Queenie Bligh chats slim and light as a feather, the war returnees and Arch-Briton Bernard Bligh cultivates a militarily tight-knit idiom.

The title, Small Island , implies the lifestyle of the Jamaican protagonists, for whom their island has become too cramped and who travel to London with high expectations of the praised “Mother Country”. But both have to realize that the English, despite their "big island" and diverse possibilities, lack greatness of mind. Although Gilbert's services as a soldier in the Royal Air Force were popular, when he returned to London as an immigrant in 1948, he found it difficult to find accommodation and a job. It is a similar story for Hortense, who soon afterwards discovers that her training as a teacher in Jamaica is worthless in London and is forced to earn a living as a simple seamstress.

The protagonists of the novel find it particularly difficult to understand each other and the respective situation. So Hortense looks down with contempt on Gilbert, who in her opinion is too clumsy and dependent to get his life under control and to offer his wife a decent home. Gilbert is annoyed by Hortense's arrogant manner, but is rightly convinced that his wife in London will be brought back to earth soon enough. Hortense feels patronized by Queenie and Queenie herself cannot do anything with Hortense's remoteness and unworldliness. Bernard, in turn, would rather evict his lodgers from his house today than tomorrow. All four are too involved in their own ideas and desires to be able to put themselves in the other person's world.

Finally, while reading, the four perspectives combine to form a humorous panorama in which the feelings and behavior of each individual figure are explained in a completely new way. In Hortense’s eyes Gilbert is z. B. a worthless proletarian; in his own tales, however, he surprises with intelligent insights and confessions. However, some descriptions do not seem entirely conclusive: Gilbert's parable of England as the shabby mother who does not know her black children raises the question among the readers whether the narrator is actually Hortense's husband.

Such inconsistencies do not detract from the greatness of the entire novel, according to which each person forms his own "small island" as long as there is no understanding of other cultures, of the opposite sex and of other people. In any case, Andrea Levy knows how to arouse empathy for each of her characters in her readers; even for Bernard, the racist and bad guy in history, whom it does not explain in all its brokenness, but also does not denounce. This results in the wish that each of the characters - even after the bittersweet ending - still finds their own personal happiness.

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Guardian: The best British novel of all times - have international critics found it? , accessed on January 2, 2016