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A Long Long Way

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Willie Dunne, who at seventeen is too short to follow in his father's footsteps and become a Dublin police officer, in 1914 volunteers to fight in the First World War. With beautiful prose that often rises to the level of poetry ("When the snow came it lay over everything in impersonal dislike.") Sebastian Barry weaves Willie's tale. As in every story of war, whether it is the ILIAD or THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE-- the soldiers opine, however, that Dante and Dostoevsky would have written about their plight-- the events are similar: the comraderie of fellow soldiers, the homesickness (much of the fighting takes place in Belgium), the filth, the omnipresent specter of death, the confusion of battle, the desire to live. Even though much of the plot then is predictable, it does not make for a lesser novel. Willie would like to marry and grow old with Gretta. The fighting Irish must believe that God in on their side. They must believe that they will prevail in the end.

In addition to the usual concerns of every soldier, Willie also must confront and resolve his differences with his own father over political tensions in his own country as well as his love and betrayal (his soul is "filleted") of the beautiful Gretta. There are many memorable characters (Willie's sister Dolly, Father Buckley, Sergeant-Major Christy Moran) and scenes here: when Willie sees his first death in battle (of Captain Pasley), when he kills his first German, when he returns to Dublin on leave and his father bathes him, when he visits the empty grave back in Ireland of Captain Pasley.

The horrors of war of course forever change Willie. He figures out that not King George but Death was the "King of England. . . Emperor of all the empires." His comrades try to define victory. "'You put out a crowd of lads on the field, and the other side put out a crowd of lads, and you had musket shot and calvary. . . And when everyone was dead on the other side, you had a victory. A victory, you know? Well, and that's not the same with us, then is it?' said Willie. . . 'And if more of us is left standing, then they might be calling that a sort of victory. . . Some f-----g victory. . . Some f-----g war.'"

Sadly some stories do not change.

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.

Don't even consider reading this novel unless you can handle extremes of cruelty, blood and guts - and, most of all, sadness; for this is one of the saddest tales I have read in a long time. Young Willie is very amiable but a bit simple... but he has gained some wisdom by the book's tragic end.

Mr Barry depicts the bottom-of-the-barrel place of young Irish Catholics in the hierarchy of Britain's WWI. When this fundamental problem is accentuated by the rejection of his father and girlfriend, the uncomplicated youth senses that his only community is that of his Flanders comrades.

Once you are used to the book's lilting language, it sweeps you up in the mud, guts and body parts that are its sad staffage.

This is an extremely fine book, but is not in any sense an easy read.

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.

There have been many novels set in the trenches in World War I; this is one of the best, almost up there with Sebastian Faulks' BIRDSONG, my personal standard for the genre. What makes A LONG LONG WAY stand out is the sheer quality of its writing, and especially its Irish perspective.

At the time war broke out in 1914, there was a general understanding that Ireland would be granted home rule within a few years. So young men like Willie Dunne, the son of an officer in the Dublin police, joined up to fight for King and Country with the thought of earning England's gratitude and further advancing the cause of freedom. But others had no such trust, and felt that the only solution was to snatch independence by force; their view ultimately prevailed, but split Irish society in the process. When Willie is home on furlough, he finds himself caught up in the Easter Rising of 1916, forced to fire on his own people. Back in the trenches, he becomes more aware of the anti-Irish prejudice of the English officers and the conflicted attitudes of his countrymen. Trying to explain this in a letter to his father, he only succeeds in alienating him. By the end of the book, such concepts as King and Country have been replaced by simpler realities: comradeship, survival, and mud.

For Barry keeps his focus very much at ground level. Willie remains a private throughout, and the author never steps back to take a more exalted view. But the book's realism is offset by a poetry in the writing that befits a countryman of Joyce. He has an extraordinary eye for detail: "Even the leaves of the trees, so fresh the day before, seemed to have gone limp on their natural hinges and twisted about sadly, not making the usual reassuring music of the poplars along the roadside, but a dank, dead, metallic rustling, as if every drop of sap had been replaced with a dreadful poison." The account of the first appearance of the strangely beautiful yellow cloud that precedes this is the first of many magnificent set pieces in the novel. Others include the Easter Rising, a regimental boxing match, several suitably bewildering battles, and the lovely oasis of a visit that Willie pays to the country home of his former captain towards the end of the book.

By the time the War ends, very few of Willie's original regiment are left. Sebastian Barry makes no attempt to suggest that death on such a scale is justified by some higher cause; no writer on the First War can do that with much honesty. But even as he questions notions of patriotism, he does succeed in portraying the War as a personal spiritual journey; the book ends with a quality of acceptance that does at least offer some kind of consolation.

Sebastian Barry's book is the story of a person Willie Dunne who is doomed from the beginning. Like the countless people, his goes nowhere but with additional tones of tragedy set in war. Willie wishes fails in a number of ways, he wishes to follow his father, who is a policeman, but fails in height and hence cannot serve his country. Though he does not reach regulation height, he reaches manhood when he serves his country, as he says to himself ironically. Fighting for one's country does get one kudos, however it depends on who rules the country. This part is brutal in the war where he is in the trenches and is depicted in detail from the raw terror to walking among the dead. In this harsh landscape, all normal relationships are forgotten and the person becomes a shadow of his original self. Whereas his previous work has tended towards a dream-like beauty, A Long, Long Way is soaked in blood, semen, excrement and filth. Yet it still manages to retain a trance-like elegance. Rage at the senselessness of Willie's death is balanced by Barry's determination to call up the dead with appropriate dignity

Barry has a poetic writing and his depiction of all parts including winter is done beautifully. They have a combination of luxury and bleakness at the same time which makes one shudder. This is in line with the depiction of war and its brutality. There are political and moral differences between the Irish and English soldiers that Willie sees. The English see Irish nationalist as mutineers and are despised. Despite this the novel keeps a good deal of restraint and Willie understands the simplicity of the situation in front of him. They had gone to fight the Germans but some of the biggest enemies where in their own country. He loses his country, the girl he loves, and even his father, who is horrified by Willie's ambivalent sympathy for the executed Dublin rebels. With no world in which to live, he becomes a kind of ghost even before he is dead. That is the sad part of the story. It is not unique to this one and has happened over and over again in many places. This story is wonderfully told and is a sad one worth reading. Both the story and the writing are marvelous.

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.

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.

Every once in a great while I read a novel that contains such beautiful language that the subject matter is irrelevant. This is one of those. The book is about the experiences of one young, Irish man, Willie Dunne, who leaves his home and family in Dublin to go fight in World War I. It's a novel set in Flanders during World War I, but it could be just about any front in any war. There's no big overview here, no great history to be learned. It's the point of view of one teenager and his experiences. He barely understands what's happening to him but the quiet heroism of his putting one foot in front of the other and doing his duty is incredibly moving.

But more importantly, the writing is just magnificent. Most of the novel is written in the third person and the language is exquisite. And yet the dialogue and Willie's letters home are just the way people speak. The characters feel absolutely, heart achingly real. Every note is near perfect, from the opening paragraph to the ending.

You could think of this as a war novel, but I prefer to think of it as simply the best writing I've read in a very long time.

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.