Daarvoor is ’Het lange lied’ een te menselijk verhaal, over vrouwen en kinderen die weten te overleven in tegenspoed, die leven en liefhebben, die geboren worden en sterven onder de heldere zon, omringd door de weelde van de tropen. Thomas, zoon van de verteller en trots op (maar niet verblind door) zijn Engelse opvoeding, drukt het zo uit: „De enige troost voor het geleden onrecht is de volledige waarheid”. Dat wil zeggen: een onsentimenteel portret van een gebroken samenleving, waarin de fouten van degenen die eerst tot slavernij en daarna tot armoede veroordeeld waren net zo eerlijk en met net zoveel sympathie worden beschreven als die van hun onderdrukkers. De slavenbezitters zijn vooral gênant als persoonlijkheid, niet als vertegenwoordigers van een bepaald volk of natie.

As is inevitable in any book about slavery, this novel is confronting. And at times it is almost unbearable to witness the attitudes of the plantation owners.

In The Long Song, Andrea Levy explores her Jamaican heritage more completely than ever before. This sensational novel – her first since the Orange Prize-winning Small Island...Slavery is a grim subject indeed, but the wonder of Levy’s writing is that she can confront such things and somehow derive deeply life-affirming entertainment from them. July emerges as a defiant, charismatic, almost invincible woman who gives a unique voice to the voiceless, and for that she commands affection and admiration. Levy’s aim, she says, was to write a book that instilled pride in anyone with slave ancestors and The Long Song, though “its load may prove to be unsettling”, is surely that book.

Andrea Levy's insightful and inspired fifth novel, "The Long Song," reminds us that she is one of the best historical novelists of her generation....Levy's previous novel, "Small Island," is rightly regarded as a masterpiece, and with "The Long Song" she has returned to the level of storytelling that earned her the Orange Prize in 2004. Her heroine narrates the beginning of the end of slavery in Jamaica, coming to a climax with the 1831 Baptist War, when enslaved men and women fought their enslavers for 10 days. It's clear that Levy has done her research, but this work never intrudes upon the narrative, which travels at a jaunty pace. Levy's sly humor swims just under the surface of the most treacherous waters

Slavery is a subject that has inspired some magnificent fiction (think of Toni Morrison's Beloved or Valerie Martin's Property), but I had some misgivings: might it not, in this case, make for over-serious writing, especially for a novelist as comically inclined as Levy? But she dares to write about her subject in an entertaining way without ever trivialising it and The Long Song reads with the sort of ebullient effortlessness that can only be won by hard work.....The heart of the novel is July's description of the ménage à trois between Caroline, herself and Caroline's newly acquired English abolitionist husband, Robert. You despise, pity and almost – but never quite – sympathise with Caroline. On first arriving in Jamaica, she appears a twit – yet with a lively curiosity