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A review by sharonbakar
The Long Take by Robin Robertson
4.0
This year’s Booker prize judges chose several unconventional literary works (including a crime novel, a graphic novel and two novels which incorporate stand alone short stories) pushing the boundaries of what a novel can be.
Robin Robertson’s The Long Take is though perhaps the most unusual in form – a long prose poem which also happens to be a most moving account of the personal toll that war takes. It tells the story of a World War 2 veteran so broken by his experiences in France that he feels he can no longer return to his home to Canada. He decides instead to start a new life in America, first in New York and then in Los Angeles where he gets a job as a reporter in the crime section of the LA Times before being sent on assignment to San Francisco. He has a particular interest in the plight of the homeless, especially those veterans who have ended up on Skid Row because there are no jobs for them and society just doesn’t care. This is the American dream gone sour.
Walker (“ … he walks. That is his name and his nature”) wanders the streets and the descriptions of the cityscapes of the post-war years are finely detailed and sensuously evocative. Woven into the novel is a fascination for the films of the era (some of which he sees being shot) and jazz. The sense of time and place is further enhanced by the inclusion of black and white photographs. The research Robertson has put in to get the period details so precise is most impressive.
Walker still suffers from PTSD so any small sound “A dropped crate or child’s shout or a car backfiring” creates a whole strong of terrible associations. Within the fractured narrative are diary entries detailing his observations of the city, vivid flashbacks of the past – the natural landscape of Cape Breton isle where he grew up, of the woman he loves and whom he can never go back to, and then increasingly of Normandy; until we learn in the terrible climax of the novel exactly what he did.
The poetry never gets in the way of the story-telling. Robertson writes in the language of the everyday, but every image shines.
Robin Robertson’s The Long Take is though perhaps the most unusual in form – a long prose poem which also happens to be a most moving account of the personal toll that war takes. It tells the story of a World War 2 veteran so broken by his experiences in France that he feels he can no longer return to his home to Canada. He decides instead to start a new life in America, first in New York and then in Los Angeles where he gets a job as a reporter in the crime section of the LA Times before being sent on assignment to San Francisco. He has a particular interest in the plight of the homeless, especially those veterans who have ended up on Skid Row because there are no jobs for them and society just doesn’t care. This is the American dream gone sour.
Walker (“ … he walks. That is his name and his nature”) wanders the streets and the descriptions of the cityscapes of the post-war years are finely detailed and sensuously evocative. Woven into the novel is a fascination for the films of the era (some of which he sees being shot) and jazz. The sense of time and place is further enhanced by the inclusion of black and white photographs. The research Robertson has put in to get the period details so precise is most impressive.
Walker still suffers from PTSD so any small sound “A dropped crate or child’s shout or a car backfiring” creates a whole strong of terrible associations. Within the fractured narrative are diary entries detailing his observations of the city, vivid flashbacks of the past – the natural landscape of Cape Breton isle where he grew up, of the woman he loves and whom he can never go back to, and then increasingly of Normandy; until we learn in the terrible climax of the novel exactly what he did.
The poetry never gets in the way of the story-telling. Robertson writes in the language of the everyday, but every image shines.