I have absolutely no idea how to rate this. I loved the portrayal of PTSD of Walker, a WWII war veteran, as well as the social commentary on race, corruption and decay in America. But I don't know what to make of the narrative structure because it didn't pull me in and I felt like a detached witness.

Undeniably noir. Less convincingly poetry, at least to this poor reader of poetry. Actually it reminded me of James Ellroy who has covered a fair bit of this kind of 40s in L.A. ground and has made a reasonable stab at noir poetry himself in books like White Jazz. Robertson is more concerned here with the city and how it is failing its inhabitants and its homeless. There is a real sense of urgency as the rise of McCarthyism mirrors the creeping sense of unease about modern America and how it is failing its most vulnerable citizens today.

This rating reflects a 'its me, not the book' relationship. Long listed for the Man Booker (hence my reading it), this is a long form poem with some truly stunning linguistic turns. It is, however, well and truly outside of my reading 'comfort zone'. That said, it is easy to appreciate good writing, regardless of form, and despite my unfamiliarity with the genre, I wouldn't be surprised to see this on the 2018 short list.

I'm generally not fond of poetry, but this transcends the genre in not getting overly flowery in its language, and having a strong narrative drive. I really liked the noirish elements, and especially enjoyed the glimpse of my native San Francisco around the same time I appeared on the scene there as a baby (yay shout-out to Spenger's Fish Grotto, may it RIP). I could have done without some of the more gruesome passages, especially the war scenes, but appreciate why they were necessary. Don't have much more to say about it... I suspect as one of the few 'masculine centered' nominations, it will make the Booker shortlist, with which I am in agreement, but since it is not 'really' a novel, I don't think it should win.

There are always one or two Man Booker nominees that are all about the form, excessively so. That's not a bad thing, because sometimes those books still have substance, or maybe just a beauty that astonishes. But it's not uncommon for some of these books to lack all but form. Enter this year's novel in verse, The Long Take.

What's great about The Long Take? There are some gorgeous passages that read in their poetic form with pure delight:

The view from the window was west, over to Russian Hill,
and the bay, and the Golden Gate.
He doesn't deserve this city,
its play of height and depth, this
changing sift of color and weather.
The water held in it a shimmy of light
and the days were warming through June and July
and the road that threads through the hem of the Highlands
would now be decked with wild stock, lupins and apple blossom
all the way to Chéticamp and Pleasant Bay.
She will be wearing her sleeveless dress, cornflower blue
and walking away.
He could not call her back to his life: which is a horror,
which is the dead calf in the bank-head field, a black flap
bubbling with maggots,
ugly and wrong.
Her clean eyes could not see this,
what he has become.

And there are passages that when put into verse drag and drag, particularly the lists Robertson likes to utilize throughout this work:

This afternoon there was a film-shoot going –
all the regular stuff, generators, cables, lights on tripod,
camera tracks, grip stands, hangers, wardrobe rails –
and there was Cornel Wilde having a smoke,
talking to this short guy, so they all strolled over, friendly like,
to say hello. Rennert wanted to talk about Leave Her to Heaven
and Gene Tierney, so he did,
and the actor was smiling and nodding,
so Walked turned to the other guy,
who said: 'Hi, I'm Joe.'
'Are you in the picture?' Walker said.
'Nah,' he smiled. 'I'm just making it.'
Then it clicked. He'd seen his face in Photoplay.
This was the man who shot Deadly Is the Female –
Gun Crazy, as it came to be.
This was Joseph H. Lewis.
'How did you shoot that sequence, eh?' he was asking, suddenly,
'Y'know, from the back of that getaway car?'
'Well, son, I'll tell you –
if you tell me a decent bar on Main Street
near the Banner Theater. We're there tonight.'
'Easy. The King Eddy's on the very same block, east of 5th.'

The Long Take vacillates between these two extremes: poems that are not allowed to breathe in the confines of the larger narrative; a narrative that is broken into verse purely for the sake of being verse.

Once I began to treat each brief section as a single poem linked to a larger collection, once I began to read them aloud, or imagine them being read aloud, I started to enjoy this “novel” much more. Still, the lack of narrative and story, paired with the inconsistency of the verses, did not make a very favorable impression on me. The promise of a story about a veteran dealing with PTSD fell flat. There are some good moments in The Long Take, but sometimes it takes far too long to find them.

Robin Robertson is a Scottish writer who has published several successful collections of poetry. His book “The Long Take” is described on the inside flap of the dust jacket as “a noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry.” I'm all for cross-genre novels and blended forms of writing. I don't think categorization of books makes an impact on the actual reading experience. But I do get slightly anxious when self-proclaimed poets write books which are classified as novels as I described in my post about Katharine Kilalea's debut novel “OK, Mr Field” because sometimes the lyricism of the language used can overwhelm the narrative. Robertson's story follows a WWII veteran named Walker who feels like he can't return to his home in Canada because the war changed him. Instead he treads the streets of NYC and cities in California where he becomes a journalist investigating the homeless and other dispossessed broken individuals who are churned under the wheels of progress. Interspersed with his conversations and encounters are italicised recollections of his time in battle and with his family. It forms a powerful portrait of an individual haunted by the bitter truth of war who casts a skeptical eye on a country determined to progress forward while forgetting the past and its downtrodden people. The narrative is formed like an epic poem but completely works as a novel with many breathtakingly beautiful passages.

Read my full review of The Long Take by Robin Robertson on LonesomeReader

Oh, another gem from this year's Man Booker longlist. In this novel length poem, a Canadian WWII veteran is trying to rebuild his life while haunted by the fear that he has lost part of himself forever. From New York, to L.A., to San Francisco, he finds a country that seems to believe it has moved on from the war that he can't forget, but there is clearly fear at the root of all of the consumerism and commercialization. A beautiful, brooding book that I would recommend to anyone. Even if you think you are afraid of poetry! Booker 8/13

If there was a book on the 2018 Man Booker shortlist that would have never crossed my radar, it was The Long Take. I've never been partial to poetry--it is a form that has always eluded me--but was willing to test the waters with this narrative poem.

Unfortunately, I still don't have much kind to say about the medium despite some powerful lines here and there from Robertson. The language and formatting of passages here conveys a story in a truncated fashion that, to me, never felt worth the trouble. By the time I finished the book, about a WWII veteran with PTSD who roams the US, I didn't feel like being poetry added anything to my experience. Instead, I felt like I was attending a stuffy dinner where all topics of conversation were above my level of understanding.

Ah well, at least it was short. I'll be sure to see what some of the more poetry-adept have to say about the book!

4.5 stars. The form was a perfect match for the story and the main character's fractured thoughts. Incredibly well researched. I think I'll be revisiting this in the future. Maybe I can get some of my Canadian, English major, and urban planning friends to join me and explain all the parts that flew over my head.

'I'm interested in film and jazz. Cities.'
'Cities?'
'Yes, American cities.'
'What about American cities.'
'How they fail'

Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker prize and now winner of the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize, The Long Take is, in the author's word, a narrative poem.

The novel, set in the decade after World War II, is narrated Walker, a traumatised Canadian veteran. His reminiscences on the Normandy D-day landings forms a spine to the novel as, in the novel's present day, he drifts from New York to San Francisco and, most significantly, Los Angeles, observing how the latter in particular is developed in the late 1940s and 1950s, and also how American society becomes increasingly suspicious of outsiders, a theme with clear nods to the present day Trump-led USA. Noir movies, both in content but also the very style of the novel play a key part.

In the author's own words from his interview on the Man Booker website:

I wanted to write about an outsider, a Canadian soldier damaged by PTSD, coming to this land of opportunity and finding a country that had won the war but was destroying itself and its people. I was interested in how those years saw the entrenchment of civic corruption and division, and the institutionalisation of the ‘circling the wagons’ philosophy: the deep paranoia about all ‘outsiders’ (including their own black citizens) which has led directly – through McCarthy, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – to the current administration.

The style of the novel drifts from pure poetry to more simply broken prose - what MBI-longlisted [b:The Flying Mountain|34448015|The Flying Mountain|Christoph Ransmayr|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1490290696s/34448015.jpg|1789245] author Christoph Ransmayr called 'flying lines'.

An example of the latter - as well as the way allusions to noir movies are worked in to the text - comes in the section that gives the novel its title:

The paper said he could try out on movie reviews,
so he went to see Deadly is the Female in the Cameo, or The Star,
one of those theatres next to the Arcade.
He thought about it all night. That long take
inside the getaway car: one shot lasted three minutes easy
and was just real life, right there.

Actually three minutes, twenty seven seconds and one can find the long take here: https://youtu.be/5IUU6w_zvMg

Another feature of the novel - one that left me with ambiguous feelings - is how references like this are explained in an appendix, or 'credits' at the end. It does remove the frustration one can sometimes feel in a novel where one isn't a subject expert, but I did find myself turning to the back too frequently, interrupting the flow of the prose poetry.

The book is at its best when Robinson reverts to more pure poetic descriptions, for example this of San Francisco, that morphs neatly into a description of the Omaha Beach landings in 1944:

The view from the window was Gray, tumbling. The fog,
breaking in waves from the west,
had already taken Russian Hill
and only the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge still stood
above the layer of mist, pouring,
its dry ice into every crack of the city.
The occasional sunbeam like search-lights; the two-tone moan of then l foghorn blowing.
Our boys laid smoke so you could hardly see the beach
and the black dots. Some of the moving;
most of them not.
A sudden blazing, like gas flares from an oil-well, but lateral -
the flame-thrower tanks
burning off the sides of the beach - and you could hear nothing
but the drumfire that beat in our faces,
shivered our ungrounded souls.
Only the sea opened its arms to us
Welcoming, drinking us down.

But too much of the description, particularly of Los Angeles, seems to be a box-ticking list of street names, places and key movie locations. As Walker first is introduced to Los Angeles and travels around the city with two newspaper colleagues he notes:

The map of the city unfolded as they drove, and every day,
at every light or stop-sign he was noting down what he saw:
the theaters, bars and restaurants, hotels, stores,
bus stations, churches, banks and gyms, each street-corner
in every part of town.

And Robertson, at the Man Booker readings, stated that he watched hundreds of noir movies to reconstruct a map of the now-vanished 1940-50s Los Angeles, particularly the Bunker Hill neighbourhood. An impressive feat of mental recreation, but too often represent in the novel by simply noting down what he saw:
the theaters, bars and restaurants, hotels, stores etc.

The other key weakness of the novel for me personallu was that much of it simply failed to grab my attention. My favourite passage of all was this:

One of the boys said Monty had his HQ in some school around here, but we only cared about the Palais and the girls, and it was humming inside, that Saturday night, with the band playing swing tunes nice and loud - Miller, Goodman, Louis Jordan - and the girls so pretty and new.

The school referred to is Colet Court, preparatory school for St Paul's School (and not as the appendix has it, St Paul's School itself), and the location Brook Green, near to Hammersmith Palais, from where it moved with the main school to Barnes in 1968. Why my interest? My daughter attends St Paul's Girl's School, still based at Brook Green.

Similarly I enjoyed the sections set in San Francisco.

But where the novel touched on topics where I had little prior knowledge - 1940s-50s movies, Los Angeles, jazz - it failed to pique my interest. I would contrast this to say [b:Playing Possum|36316186|Playing Possum|Kevin Davey|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1506564681s/36316186.jpg|57989947] or the IFFP winning [b:The Film Explainer|585523|The Film Explainer|Gert Hofmann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388374237s/585523.jpg|572372], where despite a similar lack of prior knowledge, I found myself looking up the films and other culture referenced.

And as a third weakness, Robinson has simply tried to put in too much, and fails to do it all justice as a result, particularly the rather forced link to present day US isolationism. In his own words from the Booker interview: I threw everything I had into this omnium gatherum of a book.

Although that to be fair did send me on a music research trip - except unfortunately I don't think he meant the Swedish melodic death band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FJlxMPE5b0

Overall 3 stars at best and I would normally not see it as Booker material. As for the Goldsmiths - well perhaps in a way more suited given the relatively innovative format of the prose, but again one of the weaker books on the list.