“Enthralling but at the same time disturbing” 123

“Enthralling but at the same

time disturbing”: Challenging the
Readers of Small Island
Anouk Lang
University of Birmingham, UK

Abstract
This article explores the responses of readers who encountered Andrea
Levy’s novel Small Island through the 2007 project Small Island Read.
Through an analysis of the pleasure and discomfort experienced
by these readers, it suggests that Small Island was able to keep them
in the thrall of its narrative arc, while simultaneously challenging them
to consider the stereotypes distorting their perceptions of others and
while conveying uncomfortable information to them, such as the dis-
parity between the representation of the “mother country” to colonial
subjects and lived reality in wartime England. The responses also furnish
evidence of the ways literary features can both facilitate and obstruct
a text’s transformative potential, and how Levy’s text helped readers
to overcome destabilizing effects such as chronological shifts and use
of dialect. It argues that the reception of Small Island raises important
questions about the divide between academic and other kinds of reading
within postcolonial studies.

Keywords
Small Island, Andrea Levy, mass reading events, reception study, reader
response, postcolonial studies

In 2007 the “biggest mass-reading initiative that has ever taken place in
Britain”1 was organized in the cities of Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow and

Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications http://jcl.sagepub.com

(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)
Vol 44(2): 123–140. DOI: 10.1177/0021989409105122
124 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

Hull as part of the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the passing

of the Slave Trade Abolition Bill. Fifty thousand copies of Andrea Levy’s
novel Small Island were distributed across the UK, along with eighty
thousand readers’ guides which provided information about Levy and
on the topics of slavery and migration. Over a hundred events – talks,
discussions, exhibitions, competitions and workshops – took place in
association with Small Island Read, and at least a hundred stories about
the project appeared in the local, regional and national press.2
In its depiction of the trajectories of immigrants arriving in Britain
from the Caribbean, Levy’s text aims a pointed critique at the racist
elements of British society in the decades around the Second World
War. While the novel does not deal directly with slavery, the organizers
of Small Island Read reported selecting it in order to resonate with
events commemorating the anniversary of the Abolition Bill.3 The novel
tells the stories of several migrants who come to England from the
Caribbean in the 1930s and 1940s, among them Gilbert, who serves with
the British forces, and his wife Hortense, who follows him to England.
Upon arriving, she discovers that the green and pleasant land of her
imagination is a far cry from the realities of post-war deprivation and
prejudice that greet her at every turn. The narrative also follows two
British characters: Queenie, a working-class woman who runs one of
the few boarding houses in London liberal enough to accept immigrants,
and Queenie’s xenophobic husband Bernard, who is deeply suspicious
of the black lodgers Queenie takes in without his knowledge. The
novel is narrated from the perspective of these four characters, whose
stories and backgrounds are woven tightly together, culminating in
the moment when Queenie gives birth to a mixed-race baby – the result
of an affair with another Jamaican immigrant – and gives him to Hortense
and Gilbert to bring up as their own.
Much of the existing scholarship on Small Island is underpinned by
the assumption that the effects of the text on the author are the same as
those on all readers. Barbara Korte, for instance, describes Small Island
as demonstrating a “new awareness of the historical presence of blacks
and Asians in the British Forces”, and reinscribing black soldiers into
history as central, rather than marginal, to the war effort.4 Implicit in
Korte’s argument is that readers other than herself will without hesi-
tation accept this reinscription and demonstrate this new awareness.
Cynthia James, meanwhile, elaborates on the intertextuality between
Small Island and other texts including The History of Mary Prince, a
West Indian Slave, As Related By Herself and George Lamming’s The
Emigrants. Her assertion that the resonances between Hortense and
Black Queenie in the latter novel “is not lost upon the reader”5 collapses
the difference between middle-brow readers in Britain and academically
“Enthralling but at the same time disturbing” 125

trained readers situated across the Atlantic such as James herself. In

a third essay, Maria Helena Lima discusses the unfolding of the narrative
through different points of view, but makes no connection between the
way this structural feature might assist – or impede – readers as they
participate in the “ambitious project of remembering” that she sees as
central to the novel’s purpose.6 Conventions of referring to one’s own
idiosyncratic interpretation as that of “the reader” – a convenient fiction –
are normative within literary criticism, and their effects in obscuring
the way interpretative differences flow from differences in the subject
position, geographical location and educational training of readers are
rarely remarked on.
Such an obfuscation is perhaps more surprising within postcolonial
studies than in other areas of literary studies, as it is one of the areas of
literary analysis which is more attentive than others to the effects of such
differences. Indeed, the question of reception is one to which Caribbean
authors have been particularly attentive, especially in relation to their
British readers. Edward Kamau Braithwaite has drawn attention to
the expectations of British critics that ethnic and national differences
would manifest themselves in West Indian writing in the form of certain
“authentic” native characters familiar from a long tradition of colonial
representation, such as the carefree happy-go-lucky, the childlike innocent
or the savage, and the disparagement that resulted when these stereotypes
were not forthcoming.7 Describing how profoundly an earlier generation
of Caribbean immigrant writers had had English supremacy in matters
of aesthetic judgement impressed upon them, George Lamming points
to the corresponding inability of British critics to “register the West
Indian writer as a subject for intelligent and thoughtful consideration”
and traces this critical blindness back to Hegel’s dismissal of Africa as
a land beyond the reach of history.8 Similarly, Paul Gilroy has argued
that black cultural production stands apart from other kinds of art in
demonstrating how ethical ends such as the pursuit of racial justice are
more than abstract. Rather than confining themselves to a putatively
autonomous sphere of art, such texts provide through their grounded
ethics and aesthetics an ongoing commentary on the systemic relations
of domination that supply their conditions of existence.9 If we are to take
seriously Gilroy’s assertion – and its implication for other texts which
confront questions of racism – it would seem important to attend not
only to texts which interrogate these relations of domination, but also
to the ways readers interpret them and receive their critiques.
Small Island, I argue, is a text that raises insistent questions about the
silent divide between professional and other kinds of reading. In Bruce
Woodcock’s brief article on the novel, the gulf between these modes
of interpretation is, fleetingly, made clear. Showing various ways that
126 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

the novel signals its preoccupation with the limitations of subjective

perspective, Woodcock cites a reader on whom this apparently obvious
point was lost, as he or she phoned into BBC Radio 4’s “Bookclub”
programme to complain that the novel’s depiction of Caribbean people
was dehumanizing.10 In all of these critical pieces on the novel the
spectres of actual readers actually reading the text are invoked, but
are, eventually, dismissed in favour of the critic’s own reading.
In this paper, I seek to disentangle real readers from ideal readers
through an analysis of the reactions of individuals who encountered
Levy’s text through their participation in Small Island Read. I draw on
two bodies of data, the first a collection of several hundred responses to
an online survey undertaken by the event organizers hosted on the Small
Island Read website.11 Asked “Please tell us what you thought about the
book”, some 398 people offered responses ranging from a few words
to several sentences. The second body of data is a set of transcripts of
group discussions of Small Island in which four reading groups (in St Ives,
Cornwall; Chepstow, Wales; and Liverpool, twice) recorded themselves
discussing the text without the researchers present.12 This conceptual
approach involves reading these responses as texts in themselves in
order to identify recurrent patterns, and thus interposing a further layer
of interpretation between individuals’ reading experiences and my own
inevitably biased suppositions about their significance taken as a whole.
In seeking to discern recurrences and common threads within these
readings-of-readings, I make no claims about their general applicability
to any other group of readers. Rather, I present this analysis both for
what it can tell us about a group of readers with specific historical and
geographical co-ordinates – Cornwall, Wales and Liverpool in the year
2007 – and for the ramifications of such an analysis for the implicit
distinctions within literary theory between professional and other kinds
of readings.
It is my contention that the interpretations of non-professional readers
can throw light on the significance of textual features that professional
readers may not themselves see, but which may bear directly on critical
concerns directly relevant to postcolonial literary studies. An example
of this can be seen in Levy’s decision to have several of her Caribbean
characters serve in the British forces. Gilroy has written of the importance
of war in defining the scope of the nation and its members, something seen
in representations of Britain at war in which the nation is represented as
homogeneous and undivided by race or culture.13 Discursive patterns in
which black Britons are excluded from the imagined community of the
nation thus contain the traces of deeper ideological struggles, and for
Gilroy, “[d]econstructing and contextualising them is important for the
“Enthralling but at the same time disturbing” 127

development of anti-racism”.14 The novel’s emphasis on the involvement

of Caribbean soldiers in the war, and its portrayal of the war as one of
the conduits for immigration are particularly subversive gestures, striking
as they do at the heart of a powerful strand of nationalist myth. Reader
responses to Small Island, then, allow critics to observe the deconstruction
and contextualization of racist myths and histories in practice, as enacted
by actual readers rather than literary critics.
To set out to analyse individuals’ reading processes, however, is a
daunting matter. The analyst must attempt to account for a multiplicity
of components, including the cognitive and affective processes governing
a reader’s experience of a text; the way in which reading is articulated
to others in a dialogic process in which meaning is negotiated rather
than fixed; the habitus within which both reader and text are located
and the constellation of potential interpretations these give rise to; and
the paratextual framings of texts by elements such as reviews, media
representations or events such as Small Island Read.15 In supplying related
information, such as details about the slave trade and immigration, such
paratexts help to establish what Jauss terms a “horizon of expectations”
within which readers are predisposed towards particular interpretations.16
A further complication arises from the difficulty of aligning the cognitive
and affective processes of reading with individuals’ articulations of
that experience in any systematic way. For one, these responses are
themselves texts which must pass through hermeneutic processes. In
addition, readers’ reports of their reading are not delivered in a neutral
context. The activity of reading is heavily freighted with social and moral
significance, and hence readers are likely to be subject to what Bourdieu
terms the “legitimacy effect”, and exclude details which they judge to be
unacceptable to the context.17
Deepening the legitimacy effect in this context was the project of
Small Island Read itself, which clearly situated the book within the
frame of the commemorative events surrounding the anniversary of
the abolition of slavery. A legitimate discursive field for the reading
experience was established, in which Small Island was characterized not
only as a text to be used for the morally laudable purpose of drawing
people together into discussion, but also one in which issues of race,
diversity and inequity were foregrounded by the novel’s paratexts
(including its cover picture of a black woman and a white woman
passing each other) before the reading of the actual text itself had even
begun. This point was illustrated by survey responses which alluded
to slavery despite its being absent from Levy’s text. Examples of this
include, “I have a better understanding of slavery it brought it home
to me what they had to endure”, “It gave the reader food for thought
on the main issues of slavery and migration and also racism” and “Enhanced
128 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

knowledge about slavery etc.” The power of this contextual framing was
such that some readers were indignant that the text did not provide
them with more details about slavery: “It did nothing to inform me or
develop my awareness of slavery and migration”. Others, meanwhile,
did their best to relate their own response to what they perceived to
be the point of the project: “I didn’t think about any connection with
the bi-centenary of the abolition of slavery legislation as any relevant
issue when I read the book but it is hard to believe that the prejudices
and ignorance within the book’s setting were 160 years after the passing
of the Slave Trade Abolition Bill”. Contextualizing the novel within this
community reading project predisposed a number of readers to adopt
certain interpretive strategies, of the kind identified by Stanley Fish in his
explication of the idea of interpretive communities. For Fish, the inter-
pretive strategies underlying such communities “exist prior to the act
of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather
than, as is usually assumed, the other way around”.18 To separate out the
influence of this or any other element of a reader’s horizon of expectation
from their reading practices is extremely difficult. A more productive
approach is to be as specific as possible about the context in which the
reading occurs and to seek to understand the interplay between the con-
text and the individual act of reading, which is what the remainder of
this essay seeks to do.

*****
In their short responses, many readers mentioned the novel’s use of
perspective as a structural feature, with some considering the device’s
significance in relation to the immigrant experience. One reader com-
mented that the text provides readers “with an understanding of the
experience of immigration to Britain from the immigrants and the British
point of view”, while another “found myself considering how hard it
must have been for the first immigrants arriving in Britain”. A recurrent
theme here was surprise and embarrassment at imperial propaganda as
seen in the falsely glowing portrayal of England disseminated to those
from British colonies. One reader articulated a feeling of shame about
“how the ‘Mother Country’ was sold to people of the Empire”. Another
stated that the text “opened my eyes to the original Jamaican attitude
towards ‘the motherland’ England”, with the quotation marks suggesting
that this reader considered that the term “motherland” was not a fitting
descriptor of Britain’s relationship to her colonies. There seems to have
been a recurrent alienation effect achieved for these readers with respect
to the representation of England, seen for example in comments such
as, “A good insight how people from other countries see us as a nation”.
This was also remarked upon by the reading group members, whose
responses suggested they had their perceptions of England and its status
“Enthralling but at the same time disturbing” 129

among the nations of the world relativized and destabilized. The St Ives
readers articulated this as follows:
S4 I liked especially the way how in Jamaica they were lead to believe
that what we * * London you know everybody was really cultured
there and wealthy and * well educated then when they came over it
was really such a shock and
S* they were probably better off in
S4 and in many ways some of the some of the people that were coming
over were actually well off sort of enlightened English people
The narrative of Small Island demonstrates the bewilderment of the
Caribbean characters when they arrive in England and discover that,
far from being the centre of civilization, the Mother Country in fact
falls far short of the standards in their own home country. An episode
in which Queenie takes Hortense – newly arrived from the Caribbean –
on a shopping expedition gives a sense of this dynamic:
“There you are,” he said to me, pushing the loaf forward enough for
me to see a thin black line of dirt arching under each fingernail. It was
Mrs Bligh who came and took the bread from him. Her dirty hand
having pinch up my loaf as well, she placed it into my shopping bag.
Then she tell me loud for all to hear, “This is bread.”
She think me a fool that does not know what is bread? But my mind
could not believe what my eye had seen. That English people would buy
their bread in this way. This man was patting on his red head and wiping
his hand down his filthy white coat. Cha, why he no lick the bread first
before giving it to me to eat?
I whispered into the ear of Mrs Bligh, “He has not wrapped the bread.”
But she paid me no mind, so busy was she joining this shopkeeper in
rolling their eyes to the heavens as I paid my money over.19
This brief passage exemplifies the novel’s focus on the culturally contingent
limitations of perspective and shows how one simple act – buying bread –
can be entirely changed by one’s cultural background. Though narrated
by Hortense, the scene can be simultaneously understood through the
eyes of all three characters.
A second feature which readers found compelling was the inversion
of the usual hierarchy between metropolis and colony, something which
emerged repeatedly from both the discussions and the survey responses.
The May Liverpool group, for example, approached it through a discussion
of the misrepresentation of Britain to her colonial subjects:
S2 I suppose that people in the colonies were told England they must
have had a very romantic view
130 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

S1 well that’s it starts off very much like that her [Hortense] and Celia
say oh you know you can come and knock on my door the two pillars
and you know she has this fantastic view of this house and I think
when she arrives at the house she thinks he has the whole house
doesn’t she? … she can’t get her head round it it’s just one room in
which they do everything
This reference to a moment in the text where Hortense is disgusted with
what she perceives as the squalor and overcrowding of Queenie’s house
led the group on to a broader consideration of inaccurate representations
of other nations including Africa, and the stereotypes within which their
own perceptions of other countries were confined:
S1 she’s very judgemental though isn’t she? everybody else you know
does everything wrong
S2 I think I might be like her if I went to live there somewhere in Africa
and I’ve got my idea of Africa busy eating mangoes in the sunshine
(laughter) * * * * *
S* * * this huge ants crawling up the walls the size of cats (laughter)
S2 that’s right do they eat this? this is disgusting
This moment could be interpreted as a fleeting acknowledgement of the
group members’ dawning embarrassment at having caricatured Africans
as indolent and their continent and their way of life as monstrous. By
revealing the often severe limitations of its characters’ – both British
and Caribbean – understandings of each other’s nations and indeed
each other, the text can be seen as having prompted these readers to
interrogate their own perceptions, however briefly.
The discussion of the March Liverpool book group also led from the
text to a consideration of other aspects of racism. From attitudes in the
American deep south and the lynching of African-Americans, talk turned
to the treatment of Jews by Germans, and from there to a consideration
of atrocities perpetrated by the British towards those they conquered:
S* if there were no laws nothing to restrain us would we have acted the
same way?
S* it’s a good question
S* it’s interesting to see what happened on like on Jersey or Guernsey
where we were occupied by the Germans and all the things that we
British would never do collaborating informing on people they did
so what would we have done?
S* i’m not sure we British would never have done actually i would say
you have to go back to India and the Raj and see some of the atrocities
that we actually carried out there in vast numbers and allowed people
“Enthralling but at the same time disturbing” 131

to starve etc etc so i’m not so sure that just because we’re British we
wouldn’t do it i think it’s possibly in mankind’s nature it’s there it’s
just that fortunately most people can actually conquer it but i think
it is there

S1 but even going back to the slave trade as well

In the lead-up to this excerpt, the group spends more time talking about
American racism, but there is also evidence of connections made to British
imperial abuses of power, and group members implicate themselves (“we
British”) as being potentially capable of further atrocities. The St Ives
group made similar links between past and present forms of exploitation,
moving from a discussion of the Middle Passage to modern slavery – for
example children in India working in the textile trade and being bonded
to their employers – and from thence to a consideration of how the forces
of global capital are exploiting Indian workers in call centres.
An extended discussion in the St Ives book group is worth quoting
at length, as it demonstrates group members using the events of the
book as a jumping-off point for discussing the intersection of race and
class. This discussion is particularly interesting as it develops out of the
pattern mentioned above, that of the unexpected disparity between the
representation and the reality of England experienced by the Caribbean
characters.
S4 it’s a real it’s a real criticism of the Empire as well just looking at
how how our Empire on the surface is is sold as being a civilized
and educating process but I think it demonstrated when he came to
England he saw that it was exactly the opposite and in fact people
were hated there black people and it * * * a strange twist

S* mmm this concept of the “mother country” I thought that was

fascinating the way that was put that mother’s a a symbol of maybe
potentially of loving and so they took that and that’s why he wanted
to come wasn’t it to fight for the mother country I found that

S* but I also think it’s you know it’s like how class overtakes race you
know class is like endemic and you know it doesn’t actually matter
I think that what your skin colour is it’s more the sort of the class
structure that you’re particularly in that in the fifties forties and fifties
you know it’s like how endemic that sort of class structure was or
how Britain actually took that forward into the countries that they
colonialized at the time you know it was endemic in the Empire and
they inflicted that upon the countries also that you know that you
know they they took over yeah so that that sort of class structure
becomes then inherent in the lives of those people that maybe in
those colonies you can do the same if you take in Asia

S4 in India
132 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

S* in India yes
S4 class is the only way they were classed isn’t it
S* yes absolutely so almost like the issue of race becomes almost settled
because it’s the class structure that was *
S4 and literally * still the class in this country you know especially when
that class * that class structure maintained itself even in the conditions
of war you know when the Eastenders were like getting bombed out
and they were coming back to well there was Earls Court then which
was probably quite a classy area at that time and then they wouldn’t
you know even though they had empty rooms in their houses they
wouldn’t put up these sort of what they saw as Eastenders because
they weren’t their type and Bernard was saying all the time all the
time wasn’t he are they one of us
S* but did you think that was interesting that the layers of racism I mean
in extreme society you know I would say to * you should really read
this book if you want to get a grip on what racism is about yeah?
you need to there’s a history to racism and it’s not clear cut it’s not
black and white it’s you know it’s to do with values and class * * *
and I think that really comes through
What this discussion demonstrates is the effectiveness of Levy’s apparently
straightforward text in providing a robust ground on which readers can,
following de Certeau, “poach”: roam over texts at will taking from them
what they please, “like nomads poaching their way across fields they did
not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves”.20 For
de Certeau, such tactical reading is marked by the reader’s appropriation
of a text in order to find her own pleasures within it, invent her own
history through it and slip her own world into it, improvising meanings
by “leap[ing] over written spaces in an ephemeral dance”.21 This freedom
of interpretative movement is not always adequately accounted for
in theorizations of reading such as those of Bourdieu, Fish and Gauri
Viswanathan, for whom the forces of class, sociality and ideology take
precedence in governing textual interpretation.22 In the excerpt above, the
readers move backwards and forwards between the text and their individual
understandings of Britain’s relationship with and effects on other nations.
Poaching on the unfamiliar territory of geographical, national and ethnic
alterity, they draw on elements from Levy’s constructed world in order
to make sense of their own. For S4, for example, the prejudice Gilbert
experiences as a black airman fighting for the British brings out the irony
of the racist underpinnings to the British Empire’s civilizing mission. In
the second turn, the speaker – who appears to be unfamiliar with the
phrase “the mother country” – finds a symbolic meaning for the term
which makes sense of his or her understanding of the narrative and
the character of Gilbert. In the third turn the speaker explicitly signals
“Enthralling but at the same time disturbing” 133

his/her intention to shift the emphasis from ethnicity to class, and uses the
text as “proof” that Britain exported class divides to its colonies. These
three speakers use points in the text to interrogate their understand-
ing of their British heritage, and the legacies of empire at home and
abroad, which leads into a discussion of class divisions within British
society. It is worth noting that in this process there are things that the
readers get wrong, for example that class divides did not exist prior to
contact with the British. Poaching, then, opens up spaces for inaccuracies
as well as insights to be generated.
Seen through these responses, Small Island does not tip over into
the kind of polemical critique of the British Empire which might risk
alienating its readers. Rather, its achievement is that it lays out the
complex interrelations of race and class in two locations – the Caribbean
and Britain – in such a way as to demonstrate the prejudices and flaws of
the black characters while not for a moment exempting its white British
and American characters from complicity with wider currents of racism
circulating in the 1940s. In the bakery episode, Hortense’s disdain and
impatience and Queenie’s well-meaning but patronizing behaviour make
perfect sense in light of what the text has painstakingly laid out about
both women’s subjectivity and history. Yet it is simultaneously clear
how each might be frustrated by – and incomprehensible to – the other.
The complexity of characters on both sides of the race divide prevents
readers from settling into an easy identification with either. What the
responses to Small Island suggest is that readers were simultaneously
drawn to the central characters and yet kept from full identification with
them by their less enticing characteristics, thus preserving the integrity
of their difference.
Readerly identification with characters proved important in another
way: it allowed readers to overcome certain textual difficulties by offering
them well-crafted characters in whom to anchor their grasp of the narrative
in the face of such destabilizing effects as chronological shifts. Members
of the St Ives group gave insight into these textual obstacles, and how
these were alleviated by identification with characters:
S* you read it you read it all the way through didn’t you?

S* I did and after the first chapter I’d kind of written it off and but then
I kinda returned to it on a sort of train journey so I * it * amount
of time and I then got into it but I found it very caricature and too
more two-dimensional in the first chapter just the first chapter really
and there’s nothing for you to get your teeth into but then I don’t
know if persevering the characters she started writing better I think
about the characters didn’t she?

S* yes she did yeah

134 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

Character identification proved not only a powerful device with which

readers could mitigate confusion with other aspects of the text, however,
but also a device through which historically established difficulties might
be overcome. Critical responses to Caribbean writing from the British
literary establishment in the past often emphasized its strangeness
and focussed on the alienating effects of the writing for metropolitan
readers. 23 If critics have struggled with these texts that presented
Caribbean alterity, then the very accessibility of Levy’s text, seen in its
enthusiastic acceptance by a large number of readers in Britain, coupled
with its insistent commingling of British and West Indian destinies, make
it something more than a middle-brow novel: it is a historical anomaly
which harnesses the powerful effects of character identifi cation in
order to overcome the difficulties of cultural and linguistic difference
for British readers without diminishing that difference or mitigating its
material consequences.
This tension between the stabilizing and destabilizing effects of the
text took another form, that of pleasure and discomfort. A discursive
pattern emerged in which readers mentioned enjoyment and uneasiness
in close proximity.24 One reader, who described the novel as “enthralling
but at the same time disturbing as I was made more and more aware of
the treatment of the black immigrants”, offered insight into how the text
was able to simultaneously keep its readers in the thrall of its narrative
arc while conveying uncomfortable information to them: the disquieting
elements emerge only gradually after the reader is already enmeshed in
the plot. There were enough responses in which enjoyment and discomfort
were put side by side for this to emerge as a plausible theory for how the
text managed to challenge its readers while simultaneously appealing to
them: “Enjoyable yet disturbing and uncomfortable in parts”, and, from
another respondent, “It was both disturbing and amusing, but at times
shocking”. These reactions suggested that there was a fine balance to
be struck between the pleasures of a text and its destabilizing elements,
which, as the responses above indicate, included having one’s vision of
Britain as a nation superior to its colonies completely overturned and
being made to see the experience of immigration through the eyes of
an immigrant. The repeated allusions in the reader comments to the
tension between attracting and repelling reader sympathies suggest it
is something which is important to account for, if the text’s effect on its
readers is to be understood, and which might potentially offer a new
lens by which to understand the novel. Yet this is a feature that neither
the scholarship on Small Island nor existing critical paradigms within
postcolonial studies attends to.
As well as indicating what in the text troubled them, readers also
demonstrated that reading the text was a pleasurable experience, with
“Enthralling but at the same time disturbing” 135

very many responses invoking the term “enjoy” (“Enjoyable, entertaining,

and enlightening”, “Enjoyed a whole range of emotions reading Small
Island”). Humour was foremost among the features which readers found
pleasurable, and appeared particularly important in mitigating the more
challenging parts of the narrative: “It is bitter-sweet, very humorous at
times too though”, and “Lightened with humour, the author skilfully
never understated the cold facts”. Readers in the St Ives group linked
the humour to successful characterization:
S* I found parts very funny you know

S1 yes oh yes

S* and just very funny I think when Hortense and Gilbert *

S4 but those two are very funny aren’t they

S* are very funny yeah

As we have seen above, the skilful creation and development of character

was another significant component of readerly pleasure, as seen in
comments such as “all characters rounded and treated sympathetically”
and “I felt like I knew the characters personally – they came to life”.
The survey responses and group discussions also provided insights
into some of the difficulties readers experienced, and, intriguingly, the
way in which the text itself was able to offer readers help in their task
of interpretation. One difficulty mentioned by a number of readers was
the use of phonetic spelling to distinguish the words of the Caribbean
characters from those of the British. One reader, who reported that she
or he had been looking forward to reading the novel, found it “difficult
to read and not easy to understand”, because despite “having had a
Jamaican friend during the 1960’s whose speech I understood perfectly,
I would have preferred the speech in the book not to be as it is. I’m
afraid I gave up very quickly”.25 While shifts in narrative perspective
appeared to offer many readers a decodable pleasure, they also served
as an impediment for others, for example one respondent for whom the
text “jumped about from one person to another too much, which I found
confusing”. Other readers, meanwhile, experienced difficulties with the
multiple chronologies: “I did not enjoy the moving from the past to
future for characters”. A more sustained account of the disorientation
brought about by the shifts in chronology and perspective was offered
by the Chepstow book group:
S1 it was a chapter about one person and a chapter about another per-
son then a chapter about somebody else and it you weren’t the last
chapter you were reading about you’d think
136 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

S* no I didn’t have a clue when it was I and I sort of thought no this is

different person to what it was in the last chapter

S* but the voices were well differentiated so you knew who they were
but I think it was this constant going back and I wanted to go forward
what happened next rather than what happened before

S2 but what happened before though was quite important wasn’t it cause
it they were they sort of were expecting to have a good life when
they came over and they didn’t so it was actually important to have
that bit whether it should’ve been mixed up

S* yeah you know I just felt it was it a bit imbalanced …

S1 you were saying about the different voices that they used and you
got * * which is very much the fashion in fiction in the last few years
I’m I’m not convinced she did it well like Francis I find myself losing
track of which character as well and heading back towards the chapter
having to pick it out

Linking the narrative’s switches between characters to the movement

between different chronologies, these readers demonstrate both their
awareness of why this structural device was employed (“what happened
before though was quite important … [because] they were … expecting to
have a good life when they came over and they didn’t”) and their ability
to contextualize its use within the wider context of other contemporary
novels (“the different voices that they used … which is very much the
fashion in fiction in the last few years”). Difficulties with textual features,
then, did not prevent these readers from understanding their function.
Difficulties did not impede enjoyment of the text, as was apparent in
survey responses such as this one:
Enjoyed the different viewpoints, though had to back track a few times
to help the connections in my mind. Very interesting to see such different
readings of the same situation and how their perceptions of themselves
were so different to others views.

Here again the text seems to have successfully coached the reader in the
codes necessary for its own interpretation.

*****
What can be drawn from this collection of individual reading vignettes,
bound as they themselves are within the limits of textuality, and divorced
as they are from meaningful information about these readers’ location in
social space? Taken broadly, these articulations offer evidence that this
text is able to challenge the beliefs with which readers approached it, but
“Enthralling but at the same time disturbing” 137

there is also evidence that it allows individuals to displace or pass over

unwelcome information. What is perhaps more interesting – and somewhat
easier to verify – is that these responses furnish evidence of the ways
literary features can both facilitate and obstruct a text’s transformative
potential. From the responses analysed above, the tension between a
text’s pleasures and its hidden stings seems a particularly crucial one to
understand in seeking to find out how a provocative text such as Small
Island forces an encounter with new and unsettling information that
must be engaged with rather than ignored.
As the number of community reading initiatives and “One Book”
projects around the world continues to rise, and increasing amounts of
public and charitable funding are devoted to them, it seems worth ask-
ing whether readers are challenged and transformed in positive ways by
the experience. This case-study suggests that these outcomes can some-
times be achieved, but that they cannot be guaranteed, as readers poach
on texts in a variety of ungovernable ways. One conclusion I draw from
these responses is that a transformative outcome is made more likely
by the use of a text which is able to provoke its readers while pleas-
ing them, and which manages to balance the tension between offering
enough textual challenges for proficient readers to decode and setting
up too many structural and stylistic barriers such that readers who are
unfamiliar with the codes of close analysis fall at the first fence.
The instrumentalizing of Small Island within a community reading
project with a specific ideological aim – to commemorate the abolition of
slavery – also raises the question of what, exactly, transformative reading
looks like. Discussing the goals of critical sociology, the sociologist Paul
Connerton describes one possibility: a process which “renders transparent
what had previously been hidden, and in doing so … initiates a process
of self-reflection, in individuals or in groups, designed to achieve a
liberation from the domination of past constraints”.26 This formulation
characterizes many of the patterns identified in the responses above.
Previously obscured information – such as the racism directed towards
black immigrants, or the deceptive representation of Britain to her
colonies – is rendered transparent, and readers can be seen reflecting
on themselves, their position in society and the potential problems with
their conceptualizations of others, in both individual and group con-
texts. The responses offer plenty of evidence that readers can also use
Levy’s text to displace unsettling information, for example their own
prejudice. But they also demonstrate that readers took this information
on board and – at least in what they articulated on the online survey
or to their fellow reading group members – were able to change their
perceptions of themselves and others.
138 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

What literary scholars will perhaps find most interesting is the role
played by literary and narrative features within these processes. Characters
with whom readers can empathize are crucial, as is a compelling plot:
these combine in Levy’s text to enable the novel to slip its critiques –
such as the gaping discrepancy between the way the Mother Country
represented herself to her colonial subjects and actual lived reality in
England – in under the reader’s radar. Alienating narrative styles or un-
familiar structural devices can obscure the text’s meaning and thereby
reinforce social and educational differences between readers. If the
narrative and the characters do not grip readers, we have seen that it is
more difficult for them to engage with the message of the narrative. So
a text that to professional readers may be of less interest in appearing
to carry its meanings close to the surface needs to be reconsidered, as it
is likely to be more easily assimilable by non-trained readers. However,
the responses here suggest that it is important to balance this against
the enjoyment to be derived from deciphering the decodable elements
of the text.
Viewing the text through the eyes of its readers – with their vary-
ing degrees of expertise with the kinds of literary techniques that
defamiliarize what is being described – gestures towards a wider issue
within postcolonial studies, of “what counts” as a text worth reading,
teaching and writing about. Being largely realist and without much
formal inventiveness, Small Island is likely to be of less interest to literary
critics than denser and more overtly stylized texts. Moreover, it risks
being dismissed as middle-brow or mainstream, especially given that
it has been validated by several arbiters of middle-brow taste, among
them award-giving bodies, the BBC (who broadcast it over the radio in
shortened and serialized form) and the Small Island Read project itself.
The responses considered here, however, offer critics the opportunity
to reconsider a text that might not otherwise register very highly on
the critical radar, in observing how a wide range of readers – ones not
necessarily trained in the academic study of literature – make a range
of meanings from it through which they interrogate the legacy of the
British Empire and their own British heritage and identity. It is worth
asking which other texts capable of engaging a wide range of readers
may also have been so dismissed.

NOTES
Research for this paper was undertaken as part of the research project Beyond the Book:
Contemporary Cultures of Reading in the UK, US and Canada, funded by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council in the UK. I am grateful to Danielle Fuller and DeNel
Rehberg Sedo for their comments on an earlier version of the paper.
“Enthralling but at the same time disturbing” 139

1 Small Island Read, Small Island Read 2007: Home. Retrieved 19 June 2008 at
http://www.smallislandread.com.
2 These and other details can be found in the evaluation report, Small Island Read,
Small Island Read 2007: Evaluation Report. Retrieved 1 July 2008 at http://www.
smallislandread.com/downloads/small_island_evaluation.doc.
3 Bea Colley, one of the co-ordinators of Small Island Read, stated in an unpublished
interview with Danielle Fuller on 27 June 2006 that Levy’s text was chosen in order
to chime with, rather than refer directly to, the abolition of slavery. Colley commented
that although Small Island does not address slavery directly, it does contain “echoes
of the legacy of slavery and … ideas of identity and diversity, and racism, and coming
to a new place”.
4 Barbara Korte, “Blacks and Asians at War for Britain: Reconceptualisations in
the Filmic and Literary Field?” Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 14,1
(2007), 35–6.
5 Cynthia James, “‘You’ll Soon Get Used to Our Language’: Language, Parody and
West Indian Identity in Andrea Levy’s Small Island”, Anthurium: A Caribbean
Studies Journal, 5,1 (2007). Retrieved 15 October 2008 at http://anthurium.miami.
edu/volume_5/issue_1/james-language.html
6 Maria Helena Lima, “‘Pivoting the Centre’: The Fiction of Andrea Levy”, in Kadija
Sesay, ed., Write Black Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature,
Hertford: Hansib, 2005, p. 75.
7 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Timehri”, Savacou 2 (1970), 37.
8 George Lamming, “The Occasion for Speaking’”, The Pleasures of Exile, New York:
University of Michigan Press, 1991, pp. 27, 29, 31. See also Sarah Lawson Welsh,
“New Wine in New Bottles: The Critical Reception of West Indian Writing in Britain
in the 1950s and Early 1960s”, in Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh, eds, The
Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 261–2.
9 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, New York:
Harvard UP, 1993, p. 38.
10 Bruce Woodcock, “Small Island, Crossing Cultures”, Wasafiri, 23,2 (2008), 51, 54–5.
11 The survey was hosted on the Small Island Read website and ran from 11 January
2007 to 11 June 2007. The results are summarized in Small Island Read, Survey
Results & Analysis for Small Island Read 2007 Survey. Retrieved 10 June 2008
at http://www.smallislandread.com/downloads/ small_island_survey_report.doc.
No demographic data was available for this survey, hence respondents’ age, sex,
ethnicity and social class are unknown.
12 These all took place in 2007: in St Ives on 29 March; in Chepstow on 6 June; and
in Liverpool on 30 March and 8 May. I am extremely grateful to James Procter and
the Devolving Diasporas project at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the
University of Stirling for sharing these transcripts. S1, S2 denote speaker 1, speaker 2
and so on, while an asterisk (*) represents information that is unclear.
13 Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, London: Serpent’s
Tail, 1993, p. 52.
14 Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race
and Nation, London: Routledge, 1987, p. 153.
140 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

15 For an analysis of the cognitive and affective dimensions to reading, see Janice
Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. For dialogic negotiations of shared
textual meanings, see Bethan Benwell, “‘Lucky This Is Anonymous.’ Ethnographies
of Reception in Men’s Magazines: A ‘Textual Culture’ Approach”, Discourse and
Society, 16, 2 (2005), 147–72. For a discussion of habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu, The
Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, New York: Columbia
UP, 1993, especially pp. 29–61 and 161–75. For the role of paratexts in inflecting
readerly interpretations, see Gérard Genette, “Introduction to the Paratext”, New
Literary History, 22, 2 (1991 [1987]), 261–72. The theoretical framework of this essay
is built in part on the pivotal work of this interdisciplinary group of theorists.
16 Hans Robert Jauss, trans. Elizabeth Benzinger, “Literary History as a Challenge to
Literary Theory”, New Literary History, 2,1 (1970), 12–13.
17 Pierre Bourdieu and Roger Chartier, trans. Todd W. Reeser and Steven D. Spalding,
“Reading Literature/Culture: A Translation of ‘Reading as a Cultural Practice’”,
Style 36, 4 (2002), 667. Benwell offers several example of the legitimacy effect in
“‘Lucky This Is Anonymous.’”.
18 Stanley E. Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum”, Critical Inquiry, 2, 3 (1976), 483.
19 Andrea Levy, Small Island, London: Headline Review, 2004, p. 332.
20 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1984, p. 174.
21 ibid., p. xxi.
22 See Fish,”Interpreting the Variorium”, 483; Pierre Bourdieu, trans. Richard Nice,
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1984, p. 1; Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies
and British Rule in India, London: Faber, 1990, p. 2.
23 Sarah Lawson Welsh, “New Wine in New Bottles”, p. 263.
24 The 2007 Headline edition of the book also sets up this opposition: on its cover it gives a
quote from the Sunday Times which includes the phrase “Entrancing and disturbing”.
25 Comments about the difficulties posed by Caribbean varieties of English have long
been a feature of the reception of Caribbean texts in Britain. See Welsh, “New Wine
in New Bottles”, pp. 263–4.
26 Quoted in Roger Fowler, “On Critical Linguistics”, in Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard
and Malcolm Coulthard, eds, Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse
Analysis, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 4.