A Long Long Way: A Novel (original 2005; edition 2005)

This is a good book set in World War 1.
The main character Willie Dunne a Dublin Policemans son volunteers to fight against the Germans he is sent over to Belguim.
Willie while on home leave witnesses the rebels in Dublin start to rise.

He is confused serves King and Country suffers huge loses to his regiment. He also falls out with his father when he writes to tell him his feelings. He returns to Dublin on leave but the damage to his relationship with his father has been done.

Willle returns to action is injured writes to his father his father sees sense replies to Willie, but the letter arrives to late. Willie dies in action just a few months before the war is due to end.

Very moving book. ( )

ebook version

Well, I wished I could give this at least 2 stars, but I can't get myself to do so. I'm quite thoroughly exasperated and riled in too many ways to do so.

There will be spoilers; be warned if you open them you'll know the end.

Maybe there are writers who are capable of doing away with basic writing rules and coming up with a good book, but Barry certainly is not the one in my personal opinion. I was dead tired of his pretentious prose and ceaseless cliched or overly smart similes after the first half dozen pages. His God-style narrative was all over the place, prattling about and preening like some senile auntie with a bad case of lingual diarrhea. If there was a way to use just one adverb in a sentence, Barry found it in himself to use two or even three instead, and he was exactly as plentiful with his adjectives. If he didn't use irritating similes, it were metaphors or even more convoluted structures. Foreshadowing was done with such a heavy hand that you spotted it when it happened and groaned when it was borne out. There wasn't a clean or elegant sentence in the whole book.

In consequence this created a fog of distraction and drivel separating me quite thoroughly from the characters. I didn't care fig about any of them, even Willie's death left me completely cold, especially as cheap tricks, such as a suddenly procured petty letter from a soldier pal (which wouldn't ever have made it through censoring, even if anyone at the time would have behaved like that!) and a near miss with the relevant hospital stay and the golden-hearted nurse, were used to dramatise it.

The plot was a dime a dozen, even though the angle of the Irish volunteers could have been used to create a good, a different war novel. Barry used this instead for cheap parlour tricks, such as adding artificial conflicts and drama to the book's end.

It's the story told so many times: virginal boy volunteers for silly or idealistic reasons, finds his manhood, death, fear, terror and heroism over the next years, sees his share of atrocities and stupidities and is killed the last moment for his own foolishness of committing a needless humane act, of course without being able to make it up with his father as another tearjerking device.

There wasn't a WWI cliche Barry didn't exploit, such as the SAD, singing at Christmas, faithless family and friends at home, but it has all been done much better by others. Particularly exasperating were the factual errors which riddled the book, such as the repeated mention of mustard gas employed long before it was manufactured, with its effects being faultily described as well. Actions which would have resulted in quite different consequences in the real army, and representations (SAD) which belittled and denied what took place in reality.

Something which really got my goat is how Barry "dumbed down" everything to represent a commoner/working class lad. That was done in such an arrogant manner, that I found it setting my teeth on edge. Barry's fascination with penises, peckers, clap-ridden whores (another gimmick) and soldiers pissing and shitting themselves didn't add realism, at least not the way he wrote it. Instead it just came over as another abuse of data.

I never developed any attachment to one of the characters in this book, no sympathy, no compassion or pity. I never found myself caring about what took place, and the many described atrocities bored me. The whole book was reeking with self-love and self-agenda, borne out by the repeated use of cheap manipulations instead of honest storytelling.

Something which needs specific address:

Barry did not write men of 1914-1918, he wrote modern men and how they would have behaved transposed to former time. There were so many instances where the behaviour he described was quite clearly modern (e.g. the backstabbing petty reaction of one of his pals, but also the open and acknowledged fear, something people then didn't do, the behaviour of the Irish SAD), that this was a constant itch while I read.

Without the facts got so wrong and a more sympathetic treatment of the main character I might have given this 2*, but needlessly engineering them for the scare and this arrogant treatment of working class people decided me to go with the 1*.

And as I feel I have to explain my gripe about style, here some examples of what I talk about:

The winter sleet bit into the Dublin cab-men, where they gathered in their mucky gabardines by the Round Room in Great Britain Street. The stony face of the old building remained indifferent, with its strange decoration of ox-skulls and draperies.

The new babies screeched inside the thick grey walls of the Rotunda Hospital. Blood gathered on the nurses' white laps like the aprons of butchers.

He was a little baby and would be always a little boy. He was like the thin upper arm of a beggar with a few meagre bones shot through him, provisional and bare.

When he broke from his mother he made a mewling sound like a wounded cat, over and over.
This is the first half page and he manages to cram 3 similes (two tired ones and a pretentious one) and 1 metaphor into a mere 115 words (or 4 sentences). He also manages to foreshadow the threatening war with such a heavy hand, that if this were a cheap movie you'd have foreboding music score right there. That's a feat to do in but 115 words.

Here's another example:

Death was a muddle of sorts, things thrown in their way to make them stumble and fall. It was hard and hard again to make any path through the humbled souls. The quick rats maybe had had their way with eyes and lips; the sightless sockets peered at the living soldiers, the lipless teeth all seemed to have just cracked mighty jokes. They were seriously grinning. Hundreds more were face down, and turned on their sides, as if not interested in such awful mirth, showing the gashes where missing arms and legs had been, their breasts torn away, and hundreds and hundres of floating hands, and legs, and big heavy puddles of guts and offal, all mixed through the loam and sharded vegetation. And as solid as the ruined flesh was the smell, a stench of a million rotted pheasants, that settled on their tongues like a liquid.
Now compare this big sauce of words meant to describe the horrors of death and carnage with a mere few short sentences written by Guy Chapman, who actually was there and describes practically the same basic scene of walking across a field of dead:

My eye caught something white and shining. I stooped. It was the last five joints of a spine. There was nothing else, no body, no flesh.
One is the description of someone enamoured with his own voice, the other is spare, truly horrific and restrained elegance driving home the salient point of it.

I could give further examples, but I think this is quite enough to illustrate what I talk about.


( )

Willie Dunne enlists in the British Army right at the beginning of World War I, and joins the 16th Irish Division, one of two southern divisions supporting Home Rule. Willie begins his service excited about supporting his country, but quickly faces the intense fear of daily living at the front. His regiment is composed of local boys, all from the same region, sharing common beliefs. Included are some memorable characters, like his Sergeant-Major Christy Moran, and Father Buckley, who ministers to the regiment. Their shared experience creates a bond of friendship, but even that is threatened by the stress of battle.

Barry's writing is beautiful. Early on, he sets the scene for the carnage to follow:
And all those boys of Europe born in those times, and thereabouts those times, Russian, French, Belgian, Serbian, Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, Italian, Prussian, German, Austrian, Turkish -- and Canadian, Australian, American, Zulu, Gurkha, Cossack, and all the rest -- their fate was written in a ferocious chapter of the book of life, certainly. Those millions of mothers and their million gallons of mothers' milk, millions of instances of small-talk and baby-talk, beatings and kisses, ganseys and shoes, piled up in history in great ruined heaps with a loud and broken music, human stories told for nothing, for ashes, for deaths' amusement, flung on the mighty scrapheap of souls, all those million boys in all their humours to be milled by the mill-stones of a coming war. (p. 4)

And, later, Barry describes the moments after a man has been court-martialed and shot, with echoes of the earlier passage:
The birds began to sing in the stand of trees behind the fallen body. It was as if he never had been. It was as if there never had been a proper reason for a life, as if all stories and pictures were a lie and a nonsense. It was as if blood were ashes and the song of a life was the only the painful tension of a baby's cry. How his mother had loved him and rejoiced in his coming and fed him were hardly known. He seemed in that moment to leave no echo in the world. (p. 161)

Despite this superb prose, A Long Long Way was too much like other World War I novels I've read. Think All Quiet on the Western Front, but with Irish soldiers, and the 1916 Easter Rising thrown in for good measure. The soldiers begin as raw, enthusiastic recruits, until they see the horrors of battle. Men are injured, left with lifelong scars or worse. Other men are lost; friendships end in an instant. Home leave is not the pleasant respite expected, but instead fraught with conflicting emotions. And after a time, the protagonist and reader alike have to ask themselves, "what's it all for?"

This is a well-written book, recommended if you're new to war literature or interested specifically in the Irish war experience. ( )

(spoiler)
This novel reminds me of “All Quiet”, a young man serving in the trenches, his friends gradually killed and then he himself dying at the end of the war. It also has an Irish theme about who is right and wrong in the Irish question and it also questions the point of war and has the people in charge not knowing what they’re doing.

In all, then, I didn’t find the story of Willie Dunne that original but it was reasonably told. Everything goes wrong for him just as in “All Quiet” with his father disowning him and the girl he was going to marry marrying someone else and having a baby. He visits a prostitute – the more I think about, the closer it is to Remarque – even the German enemy is made to see human, including the man he kills (as in Remarque!). ( )