I have been a bit slothful about reading the Man Booker prize lists for the last few years but it's the announcement tonight so I'd better make an effort.
Gone are the years of the Bookerthon when I would read them all and make predictions, but nevertheless I waded into the long list with some gusto, reading Warlight by Michael Ondaatje and Sabrina by Nick Drnaso and lauding both of them for different reasons. Then The Leg happened and August was swallowed up with caring, and before I knew it the short list was out, minus Michael Ondaatje, and I'll confess to a bit of a sulk at Warlight's omission.
However one book had caught my eye, and this in the wake of my June-long read of a book a day of The Odyssey in Emily Wilson's new translation. That experience left me in step with both the epic and the Homeric and I sensed both in The Long Take by Robin Robertson and published by Picador..
'A noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable – and unclassifiable – books of recent years...'
I detected many Odyssean similarities as I read of Walker, a survivor of the D Day landings, an army veteran from Nova Scotia who, after the war, pitches up in New York in 1946. The city is too much for him...
'If he stayed here
he'd end up in the East River, or Hart Island
with the stillborn, the nameless, the indigent dead.
He could feel the coal seam crackling underground.
He'd leave now. Tomorrow.
He'd try to get out.'
Walker travels west across America to Los Angeles in an attempt to shake off the traumas of the past and start a new life. Unlike Odysseus there has been no wife and family waiting patiently for him at home after the war, in fact there has been nothing to return home for, and so Walker must effectively start over but with what becomes clear is the intolerable burden of his wartime experiences. Los Angeles might be the most distant geographical shore from the beaches of France but there will be no escape from the traumas.
'As he lay in bed, he saw that
trying to forget was the same as trying to remember.
A lifetime's work and damn near impossible.'
Seemingly innocent triggers in the present ignite and inflame memories from the past, as Walker attempts to hold down a job as newspaper reporter against a backdrop of the homeless, the destitute, and the incongruous presence in its midst of Hollywood film-making. The irony of the film-makers, busy on the streets of Los Angeles creating an alternative reality for the masses, is powerful and threads through the book. The reality for many returning servicemen is unemployment, debts, gambling, addiction, loneliness, vagrancy and despair as American society also seems to fall apart around them....demolitions and earthquakes serve to emphasise this broken post-war world in desperate need of repair.
'You know something...
The war made sense at the time :
all in black and white, good and evil they said.
We came back to somewhere different
-those who came back at all -
every place full of people chasing something,
but no jobs for us, the guys who fought, 'y'know,
fought for freedom.'
The Bunker Hill slum clearances, where Walker had made his home, are referenced as is much else by Robin Robertson, so if you know Los Angeles the book will have real echoes for you.
Please don't be put off by notions of poetry combined with history, as a bit 'off the wall' and 'not my sort of thing' in latter-day fiction, as I almost was. This isn't the gimmicky Booker listing to fill the Oddball Slot, this is storytelling at its finest, taking it back to its origins and in fact might be the most profoundly genuine book on the shortlist (I haven't read the others I couldn't possibly comment). It reads as a novel minus all the extraneous wordage, distilling the experience and the meaning to its essence.
And whilst Post Traumatic Stress Disorder might not be high up the list of concerns for the collective social conscience of 2018, up against slavery or ecological disaster, this book feels just as profoundly important. Especially so given that Walker's experience was unrecognisable and largely dismissed in the 1940s and 50s and remains an invisible blight in the lives of servicemen today. This despite the lessons we should have learned from the shell shock traumas of the Great War.
'If only he could drain his eyes of all they'd seen,' thinks Walker towards the end of the book, as the memories of the traumas mount, the guilt surfaces and he makes an excruciatingly painful confession (thinking of those themes in Melmoth, these books, read in tandem spoke to each other in my mind). The final revelations are both stark, brutal and harrowing, but Robin Robertson is a safe pair of hands and has prepared his reader carefully. I had arrived at this point gradually in the previous 200 pages, I was alongside Walker and needed to know, for his sake. I won't reveal what happens next or how I felt, for fear of spoiling, but it was utterly convincing.
As I stiffen the sinews and brace myself to read The Iliad sometime this winter I realised that this book is a Homeric Iliad and and Odyssey of our time. It is an achievement of epic proportions and I would love to see a Man Booker jury brave enough to choose it as a winner, because The Long Take surely deserves a place in the pantheon of Books to Be Recognised and Remembered.
Meanwhile does anyone have any more Man Booker reading to report..
And at the risk of causing unrest (please don’t take this personally America) has interest in the literary bunfight diminished since the submission criteria was extended to include the USA....
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