The Long Take

"Shortlist"

"It is a poem, mostly. It’s not in rhymed verse; it’s in free verse. The Long Take has many layers through which it works. The protagonist is essentially somebody who grew up in Canada, goes to the Second World War and ends up first in New York, clearly with what we would now recognise as post-traumatic stress disorder. There are flashbacks to his time in the war. Ultimately, most of his life is a life in Los Angeles. He arrives in a post-war Los Angeles being torn apart by development. The movie industry is growing; parts of the old town being wiped out and replaced with new buildings. There’s a lot of street poverty, people living on the street, people like him, who have suffered from the war and haven’t really processed it in a way that means they’ve come through unscathed. The novel is interspersed with images and photographs of the city in this period. It’s about the rise of the movie industry in Hollywood and uses Hollywood techniques—or at least the techniques of sophisticated film-making and great cinema artists, not Blockbuster movies. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter On one level, you’re following this man who’s been ruined by the war in some way. He’s a writer and journalist, so he’s also looking into what’s going on. You learn about the city; you learn about the destruction of the old world by the new, post-war world. You learn about how rapacious the business of a growing city is, and how indifferent it is to individuals. In that sense, it’s partly a novel about post-war capitalism. Because its central social problems are alcoholism, homelessness and poverty, the issues it raises haven’t gone away, even though it’s set in the past. The issue of veterans that haven’t recovered from the psychological trauma of war is very present in the United States. We’ve been at war since 9/11. We’ve had soldiers coming back wounded in part because modern technology, modern medicine, means the number of people who die goes down while the number of people who survive but are wounded goes up. We’re living in a society that doesn’t really want to face the fact it’s at war, despite having huge numbers of wounded warriors. The novel isn’t about that, but great novels make you think about things in an intense or new way. I admired this book very much. Again, you might say, ‘Oh, you just put a poem on there because you thought it would be edgy and different.’ But it’s on there because we all loved it and we admired it. If you choose verse, you’re operating with an extra formal constraint. It allows you to evoke strong emotions more naturally than prose, in a way. So there are things it makes possible, but it also just imposes constraint. Anybody who reads seriously admires writers who can make the constraints work—who can set themselves a challenge, a formal challenge, and solve it. That’s what makes Robertson a great poet and this a great poem, albeit one which has a long plot. Yes. As I said, I don’t normally read this many novels in a year. I’m an academic philosopher, so I usually have to read a lot of philosophy—though, on the other hand, it wasn’t odd to pick me; I do read quite a lot of contemporary fiction, and I enjoy reading and thinking about fiction. But I wasn’t sure what I’d feel at the end of this about the state of the novel. Even though 171 is a huge number, it’s a tiny proportion of the novels published in English in any given year. It’s likely also a small proportion of the good novels published in any year. That makes me feel good, too. These novels are sent to us mostly because their publishers think they’re among the best novels they’ve published. There’s a pre-selection by editors and publishing houses—people who know a lot about this, people who’ve thought deeply about what makes great fiction. It’s a deeply unrepresentative sample in some sense, but if this is what the best ones are looking like, the second-best ones are probably pretty good, too. I’m not sure there were any that we all hated. There were some I didn’t like very much, for one reason or another. But even the ones I didn’t like, I could see why they’d been sent to us. Every book sent to us—I think there’s literally one exception to this, and I can’t even remember the name of the author—set itself an interesting challenge, and set about solving it. There were no novels where we thought, ‘Okay, this person got up in the morning, wrote the first 300 words that came to their mind, and went about their business, and the next day wrote 300 more words.’ They were novels of ideas. And the best of them were also novels of character, plot and language."

"It’s hard to categorise The Long Take , but essentially we follow the inner journey of a Canadian veteran of the Normandy Landings as he tries to rebuild his life in the bleak and sometimes violent streets of post-war America. An outsider now, unable to settle back with his family and his love, he escapes the silence and “the long stare out to sea” of Nova Scotia and travels from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco witnessing the destruction of communities in favour of cars, the sly horrors of McCarthyism and the forging of an America he won’t live to see. We meet Walker, “that is his name and his nature”, and a memorable cast of other characters in 1946, and through poetry, prose, filmic images and grainy black and white photographs—the text too offered like a series of film stills—we walk with him, right up to his final confession. If that sounds depressing, don’t be put off. Robin Robertson may offer us great suffering, but he also offers great beauty and it’s this combination—suffering and beauty—that draws you back to this book again and again. There’s so much to admire in this book, but perhaps, to the Walter Scott Prize judges, what made the book a winner was the success with which The Long Take transcends conventional literary boundaries, keeping narrative drive and poetic pulse completely in balance. This doesn’t mean that formal novelty will always win out. Not at all. Even without its unconventional form, The Long Take is a deeply moving, memorable and unexpected work. Add in the unconventional form and you have the Walter Scott Prize criteria laid out: original, innovative and (in our judgement) durable, with writing of such power that you occasionally have to stop to recover. Imaginatively (story, character, evocation of place and time) and technically (organisation, structure, pace, tone), The Long Take is a work of supreme artistry. Walter Scott would have read it and marvelled."