The paper said he could try out on movie reviews,
so he went to see Deadly is the Female in the Cameo, or the Star,
one of those theaters next to the Arcade.
He thought about it all night. That long take
inside the getaway car: one shot lasted three minutes easy
and was just real life, right there.
The Long Take is another Man Booker shortlist title that I wouldn't have picked up if not for its place on that list; another book this year that challenges my idea of what makes a “novel”. Written as a book-length free verse poem – as were all the great epics – not only do the short stanzas and plenty of white space on the page make for eye-friendly reading, but because it was written by multiple award-winning poet Robin Robertson, the writing is able to pack an abundance of mood and meaning into every carefully crafted line. In the moment, I found this to be a very engaging reading experience, but in retrospect, I have to wonder if maybe this was a little too crafted; a little too tricksy.
Walker (just Walker) is a PTSD-suffering D-Day veteran, freshly demobbed, and finds he simply can't return to his Cape Breton home; not after what he has seen; not after what he has done. Travelling first to NYC and eventually to LA (from where he decamps to San Francisco for a couple of years), the would-be writer eventually gets a job at the City Desk of a newspaper; specialising in movie reviews and exposés on these cities' underclasses. Identifying best with the indigent ex-servicemen, Walker spends most of his free time drinking hard with them on Skid Row, and as the years go by (1946 – 57) and he watches the flophouses and fleabag hotels of L.A. (his friends' homes) be razed for freeways and parking lots, his own mental state seems also to be crumbling, brick-by-brick. This is all done fairly subtly and we meet a lot of interesting characters who deserve better from their government.
As for the format, Walker is constantly moving through the present in prose-like poetry, but just about anything can trigger a memory – either of his happy life with the girlfriend he loved in Cape Breton, or some horrifying memory of landing at Normandy and what followed – and these are inserted in italics. And as a budding writer, sometimes Walker's bolded literary observations are included as well, making for pages that look like this:
5:30,
Sunday morning,
a man with a hose preceded him up Main Street,
fanning an aisle through the Styrofoam, food wrappers,
cigarette packets, torn shirts, snapped stilettos, and the sour mulch
of broken glass, blood, and butts and sick –
moving like a priest with a censer,
hosing the center down.
The rating with the bilge-bucket is swilling off the puke, and what was left of Joe McPherson who hadn't timed it right, his jump from the nets to this landing craft below.
a man with a hose preceded him up Main Street,
fanning an aisle through the Styrofoam, food wrappers,
cigarette packets, torn shirts, snapped stilettos, and the sour mulch
of broken glass, blood, and butts and sick –
moving like a priest with a censer,
hosing the center down.
The rating with the bilge-bucket is swilling off the puke, and what was left of Joe McPherson who hadn't timed it right, his jump from the nets to this landing craft below.
Sunlight blooms in one window – five – ten – twenty – fifty – and the city was a
field of standing light.
April, 48This did not feel gimmicky, and I liked the format very much (ultimately, it didn't really feel like reading poetry; I probably need a better definition of “poetry”.) Walker spends most of his time, er, walking, and whether in NY, LA, or Frisco, he is constantly naming and describing streets, neighbourhoods, and the significant buildings that were there at the time. He also watches countless films (even watches them being filmed when he can), and their titles (and many of the actors that he namedrops) were fairly obscure to me. At one point Walker writes, “American cities have no past, no history. Sometimes I think the only American history is on film.” So while the listing of street and film names became a bit repetitive to me, I can appreciate that Robertson was likely trying to bring life back to this history; the history of streets and old buildings and the films in which they can still be seen. (As an added bonus, the book contains many lovely black and white photos of these old spaces.)
Beyond the poor treatment of returning war veterans, The Long Take is a very political book – describing greed and corruption at City Hall, racism (from segregated troops to Emmet Till and Rosa Parks), common disbelief at entering a new war in Korea. Writing often about shadows and light, keeping the action at the edges of polite society, Robertson pulls off the literary equivalent of film noir and there's an oppressive sense of pessimism that seems to belie the official Happy Days memory of these times. (Walker's boss at the newspaper declares, “We won the war, but we're living like we lost it.”) And because this is mostly set in the LA of the time, and because Walker is so interested in the movies, Joseph McCarthy and his HUAC witch-hunt are malevolently hovering over everything:
McCarthyism is fascism. Exactly the same. Propaganda and lies, opening divisions, fueling fear, paranoia. Just like the thirties: a state of emergency, followed by fascism, followed by war. You’ve just defeated Hitler. Can’t anyone see you’ve made another, all of your own?To ensure that the parallels to modern day America are obvious, Robertson notes in the “Credits” at the end that Senator McCarthy's legal adviser was Roy Cohn, and in the 1970s, Cohn was a friend, mentor, and legal adviser to Donald Trump. Ah, so there's the real point of it all then (which, in interviews, Robertson confirms: McCarthyism led directly to the current administration). I like that Robertson chose a Cape Bretoner as this book's main character – the nonpartisan witness to the effects of America's postwar, hyper-Capitalistic, greed and corruption years – and I particularly identified with Walker as I spent time this summer exploring his highlands homeland, from Broad Cove to Chéticamp; just exactly as described (maybe the point is that some paradises don't get paved over to put up a parking lot?). Ultimately, I found the parallels to modern day America to be a bit too overt, I found the constant street and film names to be tiresome (even if a worthy act of commemoration), but there were many, many fine scenes – related in this engaging jump scene format – and the overall mood and ethos were masterfully accomplished by a practised poetic hand. I don't think I loved this book, and I only grudgingly acknowledge it as a “novel”, but I can't really give it fewer than four stars.
Man Booker Longlist 2018:
Snap by Belinda Bauer
Milkman by Anna Burns
Sabrina by Nick Drnaso
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
The Overstory by Richard Powers
The Long Take by Robin Robertson
Normal People by Sally Rooney
From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan
I just barely squeaked in reading the Man Booker Prize shortlist this year - after having to order half the titles from England - and I really don't know if any of them stand out to me as "a real Booker winner to stand the test of time". In order purely of my own reading enjoyment, I'd rank the shortlist:
The Long Take
Washington Black
The Mars Room
Everything Under
The Overstory
Milkman
The Long Take
Washington Black
The Mars Room
Everything Under
The Overstory
Milkman
* The prize was eventually won by Milkman, my least favourite of the shortlist, so what do I know? *
