DVD/Book reviews...

Years and oceans are covered. But at it’s heart this is a beautiful personable drama.

Adapted from Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island tells the story of two young women in post-war England. Hortense (Naomie Harris) is an ambitious, slightly snooty, young Jamaican woman who dreams of the mother country only to suffer culture shock on her arrival there. Ruth Wilson plays the equally determined Queenie. Having relocated to London from a Yorkshire pig farm to make somethingof her life, the elocution lessons she takes hardly seem required for her job in a sweet shop.

The action skips back and forth from the sunshine smothered, mainly rural late 30’s Jamaica to the war torn ravages of London a decade later with brief interludes in a Butlins holiday camp converted into an RAF base in freezing cold Filey.

Men are called to war, women have affairs and get pregnant, people die, people cross oceans. These huge events are not writ too large but employed as a backdrop, a highly dramatic one, to the story itself.

Both Harris and Watson put in captivating performances but props should also go to Ashley Walters as the handsome, free-spirited Michael and the splendidly monikered Benedict Cumberbatch in a thankless racist role as Queenie’s loving, yet unloved and unlovely, husband Bernard. Best of all is David Oyelowo as well intentioned, long-suffering Gilbert Joseph (Hortense’s husband) – a man who strives only for a better world for his family and those he cares about.

The cinematography is excellent. The mud tones of smoggy London contrasting effectively with the verdant greens of Jamaica. The direction, too, is taut. Allowing shots to linger long enough so you feel immersed in the era but, once done, moving on snappily to let the story develop and the characters build.

The initially cloying voiceover, whist remaining slightly over earnest, eventually subsides and you find yourself genuinely touched. This is a fantastic adaptation shining a light on the mores of both British and West Indian societies of the time as well as both the difficulties and rewards of integration.

Ultimately however it works best as a personal drama. So just sit back and let the dramas of Queenie and Hortense’s lives wash over you. Did someone just peel an onion?

Dave Evans