The Long Song by Andrea Levy
Published 2010 · 313 pages · 96,122 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Postcolonial Literature
How hard is The Long Song to read?
The Long Song scores 53 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
- Levy writes in a mock-Victorian formal register, with words like "peruse" and "vexing", and sets it against Jamaican patois such as pickney, bakkra and "me caan suffer yer jabber". The vocabulary is dense but clear and easier than Rushdie's Midnight's Children; the patois needs context, not a dictionary.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Sentences run long in July's formal narration, with stacked clauses and lists, but the dialogue is short and the rhythm is lively. It sits between Fitzgerald's balanced prose and Rushdie's digressive flow.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- The book is concrete: a birth in the cane, a dress ruined on purpose, a hanging. Ideas of freedom and authorship arise through scenes. It is closer to To Kill a Mockingbird in its concreteness than to Dostoevsky.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Levy packs each chapter with names, plantations, parishes and historical detail such as the Baptist War and the compensation payments, yet the plot moves briskly. It is lighter than Bolano's 2666 and denser than Beach Read.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- July tells the story and is also an unreliable editor of it, since the reader must work out from Thomas's interruptions what she leaves out, such as her abandoned son and her cry of "This tale is of my making". Her biting comedy keeps the meaning on the surface. The reader infers more than in Gatsby, less than in Lolita.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Objects recur: the blue and white plate, the strawberry jam, the leather shoes, the bed sheet on the table. They carry meaning without overwhelming the story. It is nearer to Gatsby than to Moby-Dick.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- July's mockery of Caroline's vanity, of white women's memoirs and of Goodwin's kindness, and the gap between the planters' talk and their acts, makes irony constant. It is sharper and more openly comic than Morrison's earnestness and lighter than Nabokov's.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- Plot threads close, with the mother's death, emancipation and a final reunion in the last chapters, though the ending asks readers to rethink the whole frame. The open meaning is less than in Lolita.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- The frame of July dictating and Thomas interrupting, the conflicting eyewitness accounts of Kitty's fight and the retraction of the false "midnight burial" scene add layers. The chronology is linear in its chapters, so it is simpler than Midnight's Children.
How The Long Song is regarded
The Long Song holds a literary regard score of 64 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Prizes
- Booker Prize 2010, shortlist
- Women's Prize for Fiction 2010, longlist
Where the story of The Long Song takes place
- Jamaica, 1831-1838 (1831 to 1838), the main setting