The Long Take's portrayal of PTSD seems to me to be deadly accurate. I wouldn't exactly know exactly since I haven't had first-hand experience of it or know anyone how does. I read somewhere that PTSD is the inability to remember without reliving. This book captures that sensation with great precision. Walker, the protagonist, lives such a life, drifting through it, sleepless, reliving the experiences of the war and the ones that lead up to it. And it is his intention to kill his past, but this impulse only amplifies the past's effect on him. Walker roams restlessly through cities, trying to find a place where he can stay, but the entire world seems alien to him. The alienation coming from the world's disregard as to what happened in the war and the soldiers in it. He seeks out people who have had similar experiences as him, to talk about the war in general. But when it comes right down to him, his POV of story, the past becomes weighty, it can't be told and he alienates himself from them too, although he gets back to them now and then through a span of years.
The writer's ability to describe the city of cinema in a decade, the change it goes through, the very mild insinuation that McCarthyism is one the path of becoming the new fascism, the historical events that seared into the memories of everyone of that time is one point. Better of all is the dialogue of noir- which has the danger of being exaggerated or sounding unreal- which again is precise.
Plotwise, there is nothing that is going on which is exhilarating. In case, the reader lived in the time this book is set in, then it can act as a nice dose of nostalgia. The reader is compelled to read on to know the war experiences of Walker and the others and how it affects his present. In the end, when the city is completely torn down, Walker finally feels at home, he chooses the city, perhaps because it is reminiscent of the rumble of the war he lived through.

Remarkable.

A wonderful experiment and a beautiful, harrowing account of PTSD.

A Canadian soldier suffering terribly from the effects of WW2 tries to build a life for himself in LA. He finds work as a reporter but is haunted constantly by memories of what he has seen and done. And the reminders are everywhere - explosions as buildings are torn down and rebuilt; new year's celebration fireworks; scores of homeless, drunk vets on the streets.

This is a bleak and brutal tale which, written mostly as a longform poem, could have been gimmicky. But it works wonderfully. Telling a novel-length story in this way opens new doors where others close. Sure, characterisation is harder in this format, but a new world of imagery is suddenly possible. Some sections describing the city are as beautiful as any I've read. And the flashbacks to WW2 battlefields are shocking, raw and hugely affecting.

Killer ending, too.

At the beginning of this book I felt daunted by the prospect of a narrative poem at over 200 pages long wondering what would it achieve that could not be expressed in the format of a novel yet by the end I was entirely absorbed by the writing and felt that as a reader the style and form allowed me to fully appreciate the dark beauty of the poetry and the experience of the main protagonist Walker a D Day veteran.
This is a book that is incredibly atmospheric as over more than a decade we follow Walker as he gets a job in newspapers in New York before moving to Los Angeles and spending time in San Francisco reporting on the homelessness of veterans. As a lover of film I loved the reference to post-war American movies , those hard boiled detective stories where the smell of cigarette smoke, cordite and bourbon ooze of the screen and fed in to narrative of Walker as he walks the streets passing film crews and observing the sites of famous scenes .
It also brilliantly explores the experience and the effect of PTSD and how it gradually destroys Walker's ability to develop relationships beyond the itinerant veterans who haunt the streets and the drink hardened fellow reporters.
The book shows us glimpses of what could have been in his life in NewFoundland before the war with a poignancy that reinforces the horror of his service and its emotional impact and the description of scenes as he disembarks in Normandy and marches through France are visceral . Some of the pictures of brutalities that are inflicted on his comrades which he subsequently revenges are perhaps amongst the toughest depictions of war I've read.
Walker's emotional disintegration is shadowed by the gradual destruction of the old city as it is bulldozed for modern developments and the ending is a difficult read as Walker finally confronts his ghosts.
A brilliant book and definitely one that I am still thinking about several weeks after I finished it.

Upon finding out a verse novel had been longlisted for the Man Booker prize, I was - as a lifelong lover of poetry - extremely excited to read it. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy The Long Take nearly as much as I expected to, for a couple of reasons. Robertson's obsession with American street geography and 1940s pop culture references detracted from the rhythm he worked so hard to establish. The glimpses of poetic greatness were undercut by the heavy-handed treatment of Walker's PTSD and the motif to early cinema that felt largely forced. Perhaps Robertson's intention was that the focus on film and LA street names would mirror Walker's attempts to suppress memories of the war, but it didn't quite work for me. Robertson chose to tell this story in verse rather than prose, but then ignored all the amazing qualities of poetry (e.g. its ability to convey abstract emotion) and used it instead to tell a fairly two-dimensional story. There were definitely moments of pure poetry (like his description of Coney Island during daylight), but as a whole, the book fell flat.

War vet restarts in
West coast. Poetic noir
Frames late confession.