Review £14.99 pp439

Small Island is set in the dingy London of 1948, a time when landlords were allowed to deter undesirable tenants by putting up a sign that read, “No Irish, no coloureds, no dogs”, and frequently did so. This came as a jolt to Jamaican immigrants to Britain who, in their own eyes, weren’t immigrants at all but rightful claimants to the land that they had been brought up to believe was their welcoming Mother Country. Hortense Roberts, honey-skinned and impeccably white-gloved, has attended a private school that made her familiar with Wordsworth, Shakespeare and the baking of fairy cakes, so she is baffled when Queenie, her white London landlady, says, “I’m not worried about what busybodies say. I don’t mind being seen in the street with you.” For it is Queenie, shabbily dressed and badly educated, who, the snobbish Hortense thinks, might be seen as shaming company, “dressed in a scruffy housecoat with no brooch or jewel, no glove or even a pleasant hat to lift the look a little”.

Hortense is married to Gilbert, a man she doesn’t love but who was her means of getting to England, a place she had always imagined as “my destiny”; a dreamland where “fish and chips bubble on the stove” and daffodils bloom “with all the colours of the rainbow”. The reality is one filthy rented room in Queenie’s decaying house in Earls Court and the realisation that, in spite of her Jamaican teaching diploma, she isn’t going to be allowed anywhere near an English classroom. She is told that this is because her qualification isn’t valid, but she knows that it is because she is black. Other humiliations follow for, although Hortense speaks a beautiful, lofty English, using words such as “perchance”, Londoners can’t understand her accent. During the war, Gilbert, as a member of the West Indian RAF volunteers, had been stationed in England. In peacetime, back in the Mother Country, he begins to realise how much his uniform shielded him from the worst excesses of racism. As a black civilian, he finds that all that is on offer are the worst, lowest-paid jobs, the meanest lodgings and the disdain of his stroppy wife.

Queenie, like Hortense, married out of a need to escape, in her case from her family’s farm and slaughterhouse in the Midlands. In her teens, she was rescued from the blood and guts and homemade pork pies by a soft-hearted aunt, who cared for her indulgently in London. But when her aunt died, she was faced with having to return to the cold comfort of her birthplace. Instead, she married Bernard, a bank clerk of dismally unattractive personal habits. She was not exactly heartbroken when Bernard joined up and didn’t reappear immediately the war was over.

If it weren’t for Levy’s light, mocking humour, mainly at the expense of Gilbert and Bernard, who are relentlessly upstaged by their wilful womenfolk, this novel would be almost unbearable to read: a tragic litany of prejudice and the ingrained stupidity that is its cause. Every scene is rich in implication, entrancing and disturbing at the same time; the literary equivalent of a switchback ride.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £11.99 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist