One of the first things you notice about Andrea Levy is that she laughs readily, heartily and often. The novelist once dubbed Britain's black Roddy Doyle can also turn the tables and provoke anything from a wry chuckle to a hearty guffaw in others, too, whether in person or on the page.
Humour, as her fans know, is as much a trademark of her fiction as her compulsion to redefine and expand the nature of British-ness. It was, after all, the poignant humour and 'voice' of her 2005 Commonwealth Writer's Prize novel about notions of empire and identity, Small Island, as much as its historical sweep, accuracy and narrative flair that won her more than a million readers in England alone. Not to mention carrying off the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction and the 2004 Whitbread Book of the Year Award. The book is published in 23 countries and recently turned into a BBC drama.
But when Levy came to write her latest novel, The Long Song, one partly prompted by a desire to know more about the origins of her Jamaican-born parents, 'That was the one thing that worried me,' she says. 'How do you write humour in a story of slavery? Then I realised, these are people. Of course there's humour in there. There always is, it doesn't matter the situation ... It's absolutely part of the human condition.'
But she cautions with a wry chuckle: 'I tread a line. This is not Carry On Up the Plantation.'
As if anyone in his or her right mind would expect it to be. But something of Levy's irreverent humour and lack of artifice has seeped into her fictional heroine, July, who tells her story in what surely must be one of the most memorable voices to emerge from fiction in recent years. But for all its leavening humour and riveting pace, The Long Song is a heartbreaking read as much as it is an inspiring one.
Shaped as a story within a story, it opens in Jamaica of 1898. A foreword by its 'publisher-editor', Thomas Kinsman, a printer whose business has flourished in the wake of abolition, explains it is his mother who has written the book and that it 'was born of a craving'.