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Drum: READS
B ook
R ev iew s
Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy
Review, £7.99
Paperback, 340 pages
Not the only fruit
As Andrea Levy is awarded a coveted O range P rize for
Fiction for her latest novel Small I sland set in the U K,
Matt Taylor takes a look at one of her earlier wor ks and
discovers a rich Jamaican family history stretching
across many continents. But is there something
missing?
Faith Columbine Jackson is having a
crisis. British born to Jamaican
parents, she hasn’t managed to
discover anything of her history
except that her middle name
originates from a family goat back in
the Caribbean. After twentysomething years of growing up in
the UK, she has secured a job
working on the fringes of television
only to be told that she may not be
suitable for promotion (into a
department which has no black
people in it) because she ‘walks too
slowly’. After witnessing a horrifying
National Front attack on a black
woman in a liberal bookshop, Faith
plunges into depression and takes to
her bed.
Her parents, attributing her woes
more to her disturbing choice of
housemates – dope-smoking, free
loving and, worst of all, white ne’erdo-wells – arrange for her to rest and
rediscover her roots by visiting her
Aunty Coral in Jamaica.
As the days pass by Faith hears tales
of the past and is taken to visit some
of the places where the family used
to live.
Andrea Levy is certainly an
accomplished writer and her witty
descriptions of people and places
can be a pleasure to read, for
example: “…a moth so big it could
have eaten a cardigan whole and
spat out the buttons.”and “…a man
in a suit who looked like he’d know
how to use a Corby trouser press.”
Sadly, whilst Levy’s novel might
encourage us to probe our own past
to discover who we really are in the
present, this is also just the thing
which is lacking from the book’s
storyline. Faith undoubtedly learns a
great deal from her stay with Coral
but we never get the chance to see
how this affects her sense of self and
identity because the novel ends as
soon as she returns to England and
we are only given external clues to
the internal process occurring in
Faith’s soul. Take one example: Faith
quickly discovers that skin-shade
racism is rife within black Jamaican
society when she learns of fairskinned ‘black’ children who deny
their families to secure their futures,
and of dark-skinned relatives denied
access to schools and marriages
because they’re ‘too black’. We
naturally wonder how this might
alter Faith’s feelings about the daily
white-versus-black racism she
experiences in England, but
frustratingly we never get to find
out.
Perhaps this is a book which simply
needs to be read and reflected on,
and used as a catalyst to further our
own investigations of who we are
and where we come from.
Meanwhile, the experience of
reading it is very like tasting the fruit
of its title: initially surprising and
refreshing, but also in need of
something more to make it truly
palatable and satisfying.