A Long Long Way

Red Badge of Courage, The Thin Red Line, Gallipoli, All Quiet on the Western Front, Squad, Johnny Got His Gun...
"A Long, Long Way" goes beyond all these novels and films about wars and the men who fight them. The divisions within Irish society, the contradictions of the British Empire, the insane carnage directed by ignorant and indifferent staff officers, all combined with the evolution of a young recruit during a nightmarish time. A coming of age novel in a setting where coming of age means losing one's soul.
Marvelous description, perfect pacing, characters and situations seen through the eyes and thoughts of a young man with little knowledge of the world. Unsettling, touching, thought-provoking. And a great read.

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His play 'The Steward Of Christendom', first produced in 1995, won many awards and has been seen around the world. He's the author of two highly acclaimed novels,'The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty' (1998) and 'Annie Dunne' (2002). His most recent play, 'Whistling Psyche', had its first performance at The Almeida, London, in 2004.

Barely eighteen years old, Willie Dunne leaves Dublin in 1914 to fight for the Allied cause, largely unaware of the growing political and religious tensions back home.

Told in Sebastian Barry's characteristically beautiful prose, 'A Long Way' evokes the camaraderie and humor of Willy and his regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, but also the cruelty and sadness of war, and the divided loyalties that many Irish soldiers felt. Tracing their experiences through the course of the war, the narrative brilliantly explores and dramatizes the events of the Easter Rising within Ireland, and how such a seminal political moment came to affect those boys off fighting for the King of England on foreign fields - the paralyzing doubts and divisions it caused them.

It also describes Willie's coming of age, his leaving behind of his sweetheart Gretta, and the effect the war has on his relationships with his family and his friends. The most remarkable person in the novel is the father of Willie. He cannot forgive his son to fight alongside the British.

Running throughout is the question of how such young men came to be fighting in a war, and how they struggled with the events that raged around them.
Good-Bye to All That

Sebastian Barry's Booker shortlisted "A Long Long Way (LLW)" isn't just about the First World War. If it were, there wouldn't have been much of a point to it, since landmark works by Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Own, etc already define the canon of war literature. The accolades that have greeted the publication of LLW have much to do with the fact that Barry offers a fresh perspective of the war experience and the poetic sensibilities he brings to the telling of it.

LLW is about the heartrending confusion and torn loyalities one Willie Dunne of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers fighting for king and country against the Germans experienced when the 1916 Easter uprising erupted that would destroy trust among compatriots, strain family relationships to breaking point and precipitate personal identity crises. It is Willie's ordinariness that generalizes his simple hopes and dreams, making them the symbol of Irish consciousness.

Ironically, despite the many battle scenes of war, terror and destruction common to war stories, restraint and understatement typify Barry's richly poetic prose which spawn fully drawn and utterly memorable characters like the sergeant Christy Moran, Father Buckley, little sister Dolly, and the tragic Jesse Kirwan. Scenes that show little Dolly's unconditional love for her big brother, Willie's father's rejection of his son for siding with the nationalists and committing - in his mind - treason are poignant, though more often heartbreaking. The brutality of Jesse Kirwan's execution and the discovery of a buddy's betrayal that would lead to Willie losing his sweetheart Gretta only heighten the pain that's felt when the knife is driven deeper into the wound.

"A Long Long Way" is a wonderful piece of work, an exceptional book. The subject may seem a little well worn, but Barry doesn't just give it a special spin, he offers a perspective rarely encountered in war literature. Highly recommended.

There is a lyricism and rhythm to Sebastian Barry's writing that is so beautiful, it takes your breath away. In the case of "A Long, Long Way" which is about a young man's experiences of the horrors of trench warfare in WWI, Barry's telling of the story does nothing to diminish the brutality of this war and everything to humanise the young soldiers who were sent to fight it. Willie Dunne, just turned 18, is like young men everywhere. It so happens that his transition from boy to man takes places in one of the most ghastly settings of modern time. This is his life and Barry gives us his perspective in the most powerful and moving way. He also gives us new eyes to see and weep for Willie Dunne and the millions of others like him whose sacrifice is recorded on the cold war memorials around the world.

Ireland has a strange relationship with England. For generations we were part of the British Empire and we still have the echoes of this in the designation "British Isles". Many of our countrymen answered the call to arms in World War I and fought on the side of the British Army, something that is often glossed over in history books. Another thing glossed over is the treatment of the Irish soldier after the 1916 rising.

That's really what this book is about. Willie Dunne is the son of a British Police officer, living in Dublin Castle, born in Ireland to Irish parents but for all intents and purposes a Briton. Too short to become a police man he answers the call to fight for England. This story follows him through the trenches, to return to Ireland and experience some of the 1916 rising and back to the trenches. The 1916 Rising is only a short part of the book but with a big impact to Willie's life when the leaders of the British Army start asking questions about the loyalties of their soldiers.

It's an interesting read, I am glad I picked it up because of Dublin City's One City One Book project.

Barry provides a sort of prequel to "The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty," whose clumsy title masks a powerful narrative of coming of age across the panorama of 20c Irish history and conflicted identities. From what I understand, Barry himself comes from a family similar to those of which he describes in both novels, divided between serving the Crown and rebelling against it, and such tensions permeate also his fine drama.

Willie Dunne's story, as one of the dwindling, by 1918, 16th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, can be emblematic of all those southern Irishmen who fought for what they confusedly supposed would be a cause that would attain not only British victory and the salvation of Belgium against the Hun, but Home Rule for their island nation. While the pace does sag in parts due to the dreariness of the protracted trench life that Willie must endure, Barry labours mightily to keep a light touch upon a heavy subject, and his depictions of the sights that Willie and millions of others saw effectively keep a reader's interest, even if there is not much of a plot other than the boredom of a common soldier for long stretches at a time. In parts that may be a bit confusing for those without knowledge of Irish nationalism, Barry, for the uninitiated, blends the complicated Easter rebellion against the English in 1916, the Ulster contigent, Redmond, and what became known rather inaccurately as the "Sinn Feiners" into his tale of Willie, mostly in the trenches for most of four years, sometimes on leave as short as to a French bordello, longer to field and soldiers' hospitals, and then home to Dublin--once to be summoned as he is going back to Flanders off the ship to fight against his fellow Irishmen in his hometown's streets. His confidant, Fr Buckley, gains exceptional resonance as one who has elected to take on the spiritual and mental burdens alongside the men in the trenches.

The tone of the omniscient style Barry selects, as in "Whereabouts," approaches near-biblical cadences and its sensitivity and literacy jars against the more earthbound nature of the less eloquent Tommie's struggle. Still, Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" is one of the most popular reads shared among the entrenched, and the level of reading that even the average private may have attained makes for a thoughtful observation, given the large number of memoirists, poets, and novelists who reported on this awful four years.

This disjunction, in fact, works effectively to heighten the breach between the longing the inarticulate soul keeps within the most physical and expletive-laden of moments, and the terror and wonder that coincide or juxtapose on the battlefield, when months of pent-up tedium collide with moments of terror. And when the fog of war is man-made as well as natural, all the more cruel become the grey vistas the soldiers slog and gaze across.

Barry's best in descriptions that strain to make new scenes out of all too familiar settings. Out of dozens of examples, here's three: "It was line officers only that knew the drear paintings and the atrocious music of the front line." (146) "There was no town or village on the anatomy of the human body--if the body could be considered a country--that had not tried the experiment of a bullet entering there." (171) "The poor lads of the Royal Army Medical Corps, stripped to the waist, hauled down those morsels of humanity away if they were still breathing and gabbing and praying. The remnants were left to decorate the way. Hands, legs, heads, chests, all kicked over to the side of the road, half sunk in the destitute mud. And front ends of horses and horses' heads sunk in with filthy foams of maggots and that violent smell; horses that looked even in death faithful and soft." (231) For comparison, a graphic novel, "Charley's War," about a WWI soldier and his horse, has just been published and would make a fine comparison. A more scholarly counterpart to Willie's letters could be "The Moynihan Brothers in Peace and War 1909-1918," (Irish Academic Press, 2004) in which two Kerrymen exchange correspondence; one brother's service on the front almost exactly overlaps that of Willie Dunne's.

Speaking of books, Barry appends a brief list of the recently growing shelf of books devoted to the long-taboo subject of Irish involvement in the Great War. His research is evident but never overwhelms the limited but representative experience of Willie. Coolies from China, Algerians, Africans join the Europeans and their descendants in this world conflict, and the fruits of such globalisation mobilised for the first time culminate in one of the most poetic and horrifying vignettes I have ever read. Once, summed up in less than ten pages, a yellow day meets a yellow cloud.

An extraordinarily moving account of the fate of a teenage soldier, Willie Dunne, in the trenches of World War 1. Although the theme of the story and the point it drives home are not original, Barry brings to life the lad at its centre with such grace, honesty and empathy that it is impossible not to be moved. Willie's bewildered efforts to understand the malevolent forces of history and his eventual resignation to the hopelesness of his situation are conveyed with words both brutal and beautiful.

Barry's ultimate success is to show that the trumpeting of generals and politicans, so free with the blood of a generation, are no match for the simple dignity of the likes of Willie Dunne.

Willie Dunne was born too short. His height became a sore spot for his father, a strapping police officer in Dublin; but his size was not an issue for volunteering as a soldier, so he signed up to fight in the First World War, under the British flag. He left behind his family and Gretta, the girl he loved since they were both children, and left to fight in Belgium.

Most of the book is a stark description of the brutalities of war, marked by Willie Dunne's apparent innocence throughout. At times he reminded me of Forrest Gump: a simpleton whose sense of honor, loyalty, and courage carries him through hardship. It also describes Willie's struggle as an Irishman, at a time when his countrymen were revolting against British rule, to follow his heart even when his decision led to a falling out with his beloved father.

There were many descriptions and imagery in this book that I found so beautiful and lyrical, I had to stop and revisit. But, as often happens with stories about war, this one holds many tragedies.

My first novel by Sebastian Barry and the story had me slowing down to read becuase of the double whammy it packs: a deeply personal look at the young Dubliner Willie Dunne at the time of World War I and the precision of language and imagery. When I have book in my hands that has the double hook of story and language, it means it will be a slow delightful read, even if it leaves my heart in shrapnel-like fragments, as this particular novel does.

The protagonist, Willie Dunne, is trapped in colonized Ireland while the world wages its war. Fighting in another land while his own country remains under the thumb of Britain, Willie's questions haunt him as he tries to battle in the trenches. On leave while at home, family and internal political events turn him even more confused and strain his personal relationships. Barry could not have composed a better story than A Long Long Way, to depict the intense human dilemma of a young man like Willie Dunne.

Irish and Russian writers seem to be able to best locate where things fall apart and how they affect us all. Barry now writes from within that haunting tradition.

Barry has created an unforgettable character in Willie Dunne. I wept through a great deal of this book; the character is so poignantly, delicately drawn--I've never seen a writer capture a simple soul's truth with such complexity. Truly a tour de force of a novel. Willie Dunne's confusion, his appreciation for life in all it's starkness, in its few, tiny, intermittent pleasures, the depth of his feeling and purpose and loyalty, the unwavering power of his love and committment to his family, heritage and past, are seismic and earth-shattering. One of the books I shall carry with me forever, and I don't say this lightly. I find myself thinking about Willie Dunne on a regular basis, in the way one can with truly great literature; an utterly vivid--and in a sense ordinary--individual is at the same time an archetype, in a way that feels deeply personal. A rarely achieved accomplishment in my experience as a life-long avid reader. Don't miss this book.

Difficult to read, especially since we are so far removed from that kind of life, yet not so far removed that it seems from another world. The author depicted the lives of these soldiers in a harsh yet very real way - or so it seemed to me. I believe it's important for us, at this age, and living in the international situation such as it is , to see what life was back then, when it was both easier and more difficult.

So declares the review of the (English newspaper) the 'Independent'.

Now, I haven't read a lot of First World War fiction, but I reckon that statement is as true as declaring the war was horrible.

It's one of those books you feel sad for leaving behind the characters you've come to know, if not befriend and love. Barry's book is beautiful. Beautiful and horrible. A great read.

Somehow you feel you're honouring the dead best by living this book than by reading the war's key facts or watching a documentary or film. Somehow it makes you more fully alive.

I say "Thank you, Sebastian Barry."

"He knew he had no country now."

This is an outstanding book. Barry spins a great tale of an Irishman swept up in WW I. Undoubtedly, for me the strong points of the book were the authors graphic depiction of the horrors of WW I ( If you see a cloud of yellow gas moving towards you, leave immediately ), and the complexities of the involvment of the Irish in that war. He also succeeded in personalizing the war by folding in the lives of the soldiers
away from the front.

This book should be required reading for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other Chicken Hawks who continue to feed our young soldiers into this meat grinder of a war that is the Iraq mess.

I recommend it unqualifiedly as not only a good reminder of just what Hell war is, but also as a really great read.

This is a superbly written and moving novel about the thousands of Irish men who fought in the British Army's Irish Divisions in the Great War and were later largely written out of the histories of both countries. It tells with wonderful pose the story of their sacrifice, immense bravery, and eventual disillusionment through the eyes of a young Dublin Fusilier Willie Dunne. It is a novel that says a lot about Ireland in those years and the Great War in general from the view point of some of those caught up in the tragic events. Its central themes have echoes that can be seen in many of the later the conflicts of the 20th century and those of today.

A truly outstanding novel of the Great War that tells the poignant story of the thousands of ordinary Irish soldiers that fought in that conflict and the over 35,000 that died.

I love the Booker Prize because of books like this that I never would have picked up had it not been longlisted for the prize. I haven't read a book about WWI since All Quiet on the Western Front. It is quickly becoming a forgotten war. This book brings back the trenches, mustard gas, and no-man's land where an incomprehensible number of men were slaughtered. It also adds in the troubled history of Ireland during a time when they were all Irish but divided between those who believed in Home Rule and those who supported the English. Heartbreaking, beautifully written, and rewarding for those interested in WWI and Irish history.

What a beautifully written book about difficult subject matter. Although a relatively short book, it covers the ground it tackles well and eloquently. I would recommend to anyone.A Long Long Way