3.5

Outstanding. This poetry-verse-prose telling of a Canadian WWII vet trying to piece his life back together in New York and L.A. broke my heart in two. The language is so compelling that I felt like I was watching the story, not reading it. I could hear it and smell it and taste it by the end, so clearly are the characters drawn and the mid-20th-century cities recreated on these pages.

Walker is the vet trying to find his footing. As the buildings and neighborhoods of L.A. are dismantled and paved over into freeways, the blasts and wrecking balls retraumatize him, bringing him back to the battlefields in France. The text on the page is beautiful: clearly showing Walker's day-to-day existence in the city, his memories of Nova Scotia and war in italics, his own voice as he tries to piece himself back together in bold. I also listened to the audio recording of this book, masterfully narrated by Kerry Shale.

Phenomenal.

Kaupunkirunoelma ja aikalaisrunoelma keskuspaikkana 1940-50-lukujen Yhdysvaltojen länsirannikko. Kaupunki ja ihminen rajujen muutosten keskellä. Kiinnittää huomion eriarvoisuuteen, rasismiin ja kylmään ruutukaava-ajatteluun, jossa inhimillisyys irrotetaan ihmisestä. Keskushenkilö Walker (!), joka 2.ms:n veteraani. Paljon ajattelemisen aiheita antava proosallinen runoteos. Kirjoitan kirjasta myöhemmin lisää ainakin instaan.

It all just flooded in then, and he talked and talked about the flashbacks and tinnitus, the hearing loss and panic attacks and how he’d flipped at the building site. The way he held himself together like a piece of glass. ‘I used to have a family of two hundred men, a company, and we were all we had. Watching each other’s backs. And after that, I’m lost. I’m fucking lost.’

The Long Take by Scottish poet Robin Robertson, is a novel written in the form of narrative poetry. Before turning the first page, I had little inkling of what to expect. Even the title doesn't give much away. It's the second novel that I have read in the past week which has a poetic slant to it; the first was A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimar McBride. And both works have left a lasting impression, in only the best sense of the term.

The key element of Robertsons work, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Booker prize, is the indelible scarring that combatants suffer after they have experienced the trauma of war; in this case, specifically the Second World War. The protagonist, a man named Walker, suffers an agonising and slow-burning mental decline following his return from the European Theatre of that conflict. Walker is a Nova-Scotian and Robertson makes every effort to draw the contrast between the formerly idyllic and simple life that was led by his main character, in his remote and scenic homeland and the terrifying, blood-soaked, explosive existence which he endured in France.

There was a huge hit to the left of my trench; the shock-waves knocked me over on my back and I took all the stones and mud before something the weight of an ammunition pouch landed square on my gut. I couldn’t see through the smoke, but when I reached down I found I was holding something warm and familiar: a human hand.

With these brief paragraphs, representative of the flashbacks that accompany Walkers PTSD, we are given the opportunity to step inside his mind and catch a momentary glimpse of the WWII experience that he lived through. Their brevity, as well as the ugly, sickening events that they relate, are highly effective in conveying the horror of war. Often, they are juxtaposed with the current situation in which Walker finds himself. Their abruptness in shattering an otherwise idyllic and peaceful setting unsettles the reader, just as it would with Walker himself.

The 'setting in which Walker finds himself' is the postwar USA and specifically, New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Robertson's lurid and vivid descriptions of the urban environment allow bring his poetic skills to the fore.

The real carnival is the other side – beyond the midway, the concession stands, ‘Hot dogs a nickel, three for a dime’, the merry-go-round with its lights and bobbing horses, the churning calliope, shouts, screams, sprays of laughter, gimcracks, baubles, stuffed animals, those feather-headed Kewpie dolls on sticks, the children crying out, the barkers calling. Follow the lights: the colored electric bulbs strung up on spitting wires, the smell of burning fat and engine oil, cheap perfume, sweat and food and dung. Here are the pinheads, the half-boys, the lobster-boys, snake-men, midgets; the cage and the geek inside, the man with the horrors, waiting to eat the heads off chickens for a bed of wet straw and a pint of rye.

The other setting is Walkers homeland of Nova Scotia, his memories of lost love and former friendships, of familial relationships, the landscape and terrain of the peaceful birthplace that he grew up in. He spends the rest of his life seeking the sense of peace that he felt before he went off to war, before he was scarred and brutalised by his experiences. There is a very real and tangible sense that Walker is lost, seeking something but never being quite fully aware of what that something is and more importantly, how and where to find it. Robertson's work is nothing if not an experiential whirlwind. The turning of the final page leaves you with an incredibly moving and yet disconcerting sense of what Walker went through and ultimately, by that measure alone, it is a powerful work of literary merit.

An interesting and different read for the man booker, being a novel-length story of free verse, with a particular strong ending that I feel has been lacking in books of late. However, I struggled to truly get into this story.

As I started reading this book- lyric verse being a new format for me coupled with a post war story of a solider, I really wanted to fall in love with the book. There was a line fairly early on in the book:

"Keep dogs and cats inside on the Fourth of July
but nothing of ex-servicemen."

This just hits hard. With just those limited words the author gives you a very innate understanding of PTSD which the protagonist clearly suffered from. Though the effectiveness of these lines got lost as the verse got more descriptive. The emotions, I felt, got lost in the long winding details. The descriptive over-powered the shift I was hoping to experience while reading this book. Between the advent of cinema and 'fall' of LA and all the other multiple storylines, I feel that the desired impact on the reader was lost.