Everyday language paints evocative images
The Long Take Author: Robin Robertson Publisher: Picador
FOR this year’s Man Booker Prize longlist, the judges chose several unconventional literary works (including a crime novel, a graphic novel and two novels that incorporate stand alone short stories) that push the boundaries of what a novel can be.
Robin Robertson’s The Long Take is perhaps the most unusual in form, though: 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 II veteran so broken by his experiences in France that he feels he can no longer return to his Canadian home. He decides instead to start a new life in America; first in New York City and then in Los Angeles where he gets a job as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times newspaper before being sent on assignment to San Francisco.
He has a particular interest in the plight of the homeless, especially veterans who end up on Skid Row because there are no jobs and society doesn’t care.
As Walker (“he walks. That is his name and his nature”) wanders the streets, Robertson provides descriptions of the cityscapes of the postWWII years that are finely detailed and sensuously evocative. Woven into the novel is a fascination for films of the era and jazz. The research Robertson has put in to get the period details so precise is most impressive, and the sense of time and place is further enhanced by the inclusion of black and white photographs.
Walker still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder so any small sound – “A dropped crate or child’s shout or a car backfiring” – creates a whole string of terrible associations. Within the fractured narrative are vivid flashbacks to the past: to the natural landscape of Cape Breton Island where he grew up, to the woman he loves and whom he can never go back to, and then increasingly to 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.