Summary
**Finalist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize**
**Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize for Innovative Fiction, and the Roehampton Poetry Prize**
From the award-winning British author--a poet's noir narrative that tells the story of a D-Day veteran in postwar America: a good man, brutalized by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it, yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself.
Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can't return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he finds his way from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco, we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but--as those dark, classic movies made clear--the country needed outsiders to study and to dramatize its new anxieties. Both an outsider and, gradually, an insider, Walker finds work as a journalist, and tries to piece his life together as America is beginning to come apart: riven by social and racial divisions, spiraling corruption, and the collapse of the inner cities. Robin Robertson's fluid verse pans with filmic immediacy across the postwar urban scene--and into the heart of an unforgettable character--in this highly original work of art.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this insistent novel in verse from Robertson (Sailing the Forest) captures a D-Day veteran's tortured reckoning with the postwar hollowing out of downtown Los Angeles. Back from Europe, Walker is mesmerized by L.A., "the city/ a magnesium strip; a carnival/ on one long midway." That romantic view is tempered by the city's underbelly of violence, racism, and poverty, which he encounters as a cub reporter. Dismayed by Skid Row, he pitches a feature on homelessness that sends him up to San Francisco and its "play of height and depth, this/ changing sift of color and weather." Walker returns to find downtown L.A. being "demolished and rebuilt" into highway interchanges and parking lots. "The drumfire of falling/ buildings" calls back Walker's war memories, and Robertson skillfully intermingles imagery of battles in France and L.A.'s demolished blocks to powerfully contend that "cities are a kind of war." Less convincing is when Robertson exchanges his magnificent depictions for pedantry, including the declaration that "they call this progress, when it's really only greed." Still, this novel succeeds in bringing life to a crucial moment of urban history; Robertson's vision of Los Angeles under siege is simply indispensable. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Scottish poet Robertson serves up an epic poem of homelessness, dislocation, and inequalityset not today, though it could have been, but instead in the years after World War II.Walker: It's a good name for the protagonist, who "walks. That is his name and nature." A Canadian washed up on the shores of Manhattan, he walks among ghosts, among anonymous people who wanted simply to be anonymous, "not swallowed whole, not to disappear," though that is what the city does to people. Walker is trying to shake off his wartime experiences, having landed at Normandy on D-Day and fought his way far inland; he spends his days in taprooms, his nights waiting watchfully for nightmares. A year passes, then another, and he makes his way west to Los Angeles, his fortunes not having improved much; as a fellow traveler says to him, meaningfully, "Just look at us now: two heroes in a hostel on Skid Row." Walker finally pulls out of it in a Los Angeles whose pulse is that of movies such as The Naked City and The Big Clock; Robertson's skillful weaving of cinematic history into a storyline that embraces hard-boiled journalism, the paranoia of the McCarthy era, and a kind of reflexive if sometimes-ironic nationalism that has never disappeared ("this here is the City of the Angels, Tinseltown, sit-yoo-ated / in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave") makes for juxtapositions that are sometimes unexpected but just right. Walker finally lands a job as a reporter, but, as Robertson makes clear, that only serves to accelerate his search among the hard-bitten, the hard-drinking, and the homeless for some missing part of himself, all the while against the hallucinatory backdrop of movies like Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper and tableaux like a rotting, beached humpback whale, "one pectoral fin stretched up like a sail."Robertson's novel in verse joins a tradition that includes Louis Zukofsky, Edgar Lee Masters, and Ed Sanders, and it doesn't suffer by comparison. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Arriving in New York City in 1946, young WWII veteran Walker is assailed by memories of his childhood in pristine Nova Scotia and tormented by PTSD and guilt. Unable to sleep, he paces the night streets, absorbing the city's hustle and edgy beauty, his restlessness eventually propelling him to Los Angeles. In this hypnotic and wrenching novel in verse, this noir narrative, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, award-winning Scottish poet Robertson draws on the aesthetics of classic noir films, which his protagonist loves, especially the dramatic long take. Walker, working as a newspaper reporter, performs his own long takes as he watches this desert city of celluloid dreams demolish its homes, shops, and sidewalks to build freeways and parking lots while veterans unable to find work form a desperate army of the homeless. Walker's ravishing observations, punctuated by visits to dive bars, are laced with cinematic variations on the yin-yang of dark and light as he witnesses the ravages of racism, poverty, and alcohol; takes measure of gruesome crime scenes; and despairs of ever making things right. Robertson transforms the long take into an epic taking of life, liberty, reason, and hope in this saga of a good man broken by war and a city savaged by greed, an arresting and gorgeously lyrical and disquieting tale of brutal authenticity, hard-won compassion, and stygian splendor.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2018 Booklist
Excerpts
from Part II: 1948 The heat was gone. They could feel it. There was a hectic joy downtown, a release. King Eddy's six-deep at the bar and still coming. 'Okay, guys. Best killing in the movies.' 'Tommy Udo! It's gotta be Tommy Udo!' 'That's up there, sure, but how about Raw Deal when the broad gets the flambé in the face?' 'Didn't kill her, though.' 'What about T-Men , when The Schemer gets cooked in the steam-room?' 'Nice . . .' 'That other film of his, the Western, what's it called? Border Incident ! That's got a death by tractor .' 'Or Union Station , half a mile away - death by cattle stampede!' 'I like that shoot-out in the hall of mirrors . . . ' 'Nah, too classy. I'd vote for Decoy - Jean Gillie crushing her boyfriend with her car.' 'Yeah, or that chesty dame with the ice-pick, Janis Carter.' 'He survived . . .' 'I'd take Raymond Burr in Desperate . Great movie. The way he goes over the stair-rail at the end and drops four flights. That's a lulu.' 'Well, if you're talking stairs it's gotta be Tommy Udo, c'mon . . . ' 'Yeah: hard to beat that - tying an old lady to her wheelchair then pushing her down a flight of stairs. Widmark's first film, and he was dynamite .' 'Okay. All agreed? Right. Kiss of Death . Udo gets the cake.' * He remembered the German on the barricade who took a magnesium flare in the chest and went up like a bonfire: so white you couldn't look, but you couldn't quite look away. * He dreamt the mountains were on fire and the flames were gliding down the sides like lava, the mountains were slipping into the sea which was on fire, into the city, which was also burning, and the ground opened up then and he dreamt that he walked away, streets full of stones, and he saw a black man black with flame, black leaves falling all around him: a black autumn, coming down. And Pike, he dreamt of Pike, pinning him by the throat to the ground, with a knife. And then he woke. * There was a new crack through the tiles in the bathroom, running in a straight line from the window to the door. * He was working nights at the Press , nights out on the street, sharpening now after the turn in the year, the air loosened after the rain, the pavement black and glinting. There were parts of the city that were pure blocks of darkness, where light would slip in like a blade to nick it, carve it open: a thin stiletto, then a spill of white; the diagonal gash of a shadow, shearing; the jagged angle sliding over itself to close; the flick-knife of a watchman's torch, the long gasp of headlights from nowhere, their yawning light - then just as quickly their falling away: closed over, swallowed by the oiled, engraining, leaden dark. He hears someone running but there's no one there. His shadow folds into the wall, then along it. Then gone. * 'Hey, Walker. Wanted in Overholt's office.' He went through, past the juniors: Pike, talking over the top of everyone, repeating his punch-line louder each time, harder. The old man was checking finals, but he pushed them aside. 'Very well, Walker, you can go this summer. Up to San Francisco. I like what you've done here on this homeless issue, so we'll use you as a stringer, see how it goes. I want a big piece on this, on the whole thing.' 'You mean the destitute?' 'Yes. Out on the streets while the mayor and the police commissioner are fine-dining in Chasen's or Musso's Back Room. I mean the fact that two thirds of this city is a fenced-off ghetto; that there's graft and corruption running right the way through. I mean the fact that this is a country where there aren't enough homes, enough jobs, where one in six Angelenos are ex-servicemen and they're lying out on Skid Row - but all anyone ever talks about is watching for Russians, HUAC locking up half of Hollywood, the government building more bombs. We won the war, but we're living like we lost it.' He stood, and went to the window. 'Things are hotting up, Walker. It's a good time to go.' Excerpted from The Long Take by Robin Robertson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
