Book Synopsis
Genre: Fiction
It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh’s neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but Queenie doesn’t know when her husband will return, or if he will come back at all. What else can she do? Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Returning to England as a civilian he finds himself treated very differently. It’s desperation that makes him remember a wartime friendship with Queenie and knock at her door. Gilbert’s wife Hortense, too, had longed to leave Jamaica and start a better life in England. But when she joins him she is shocked to find London shabby, decrepit, and far from the golden city of her dreams. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was…
Review
This book was actually a birthday gift last year… hehe yeah only just got around to reading it. It took me quite longer than I thought it would to get through. My copy is about 500 pages and though I think its wonderfully written… I really didn’t click with this book.
Small Island is about the lives of mainly four people who live in the same house. It’s set after the end of the Second World War and deals with the racial prejudices faced by a Jamaican couple trying to live their lives in England. They get a room to live in with a woman called Mrs Queenie Bligh, the best character in the book in my opinion. Queenie is an independent white woman who is left to fend for herself when her husband gets conscripted. She gets a lot of stick from the neighbours for letting to foreigners but she ignores their opinions.
Now whilst this was an interesting book, I just didn’t enjoy it- not because it was a bad story or poorly written but simply because racism disgusts me. The fact a group of people think they’re superior to another race makes my skin crawl. Who the hell put you on a pedestal? I could unfortunately relate to how Hortense and Gilbert were treated as outcasts, just because they looked different. Growing up in a predominantly white area as one of the very few Muslims around isn’t the most fun of things. I think it’s sad that this still goes on today, in a supposedly civilised society. In my opinion, society won’t ever truly move forward-despite all these new technologies- until it can accept everybody in it as equals. Yeah, loooong way to go.
The ending was pretty tragic in my eyes. This was a thought-provoking novel about how people’s actions can affect others; how prejudice can destroy lives and what really is wrong and right. Interesting but sad insight into life back before racism was a crime in this country! Read if you want something real and thought provoking- definitely not a chick lit, light read type of book.