Mar 8, 2008 Posted by Nancy Williams on Mar 8, 2008 in 888 Challenge, Books read, Recommended Books, Twentieth Century, War | 0 comments

A Long Long Way – Sebastian Barry

So many books written about World War I recount the misery, horror and subhuman conditions the soldiers were forced to endure on the Western Front. A Long Long Way continued this tradition, but despite having read a lot about the period, having visited the battlefields of Belgium and having studied the Great War at length, it never reduces the shock and sadness.

This story is about a very ordinary Irish boy. Willie Dunne is no-one special. He is a lad from Dublin who never grew quite tall enough to follow his father into the police force, so who opted to sign up when war was declared. What followed was a sad progression as he matures on the battlefields, and each horror he is forced to endure removes one more slice of idealism from his personality until all that is left…is nothing.

My heart ached for Willie. Caught up in a war which, in reality had little to do with Ireland, by the close of the book he struggles to find any purpose whatsoever for continuing to fight. But fight he does because everything else is lost – his companions, his leaders, his hopes and his dreams. The story is set with the secondary backdrop of the struggle for and against Home Rule in Ireland which peppered the twentieth century. While death was wreaking havoc in Belgium, it hadn’t turned it’s eye away from Ireland and the differing perspectives of that struggle cause a once close family to fall apart.

The book is written like poetry. Although it is standard prose, so many of the turns of phrase are beautifully poetic that it seems wrong to ignore them. From the tadpoles appearing like “rusty commas” to the snow laying over everything “in impersonal dislike”, Barry’s writing is exquisite. It is the kind of book you have to go and read again, not for the story, but so you can go back and pick up all of the beautiful use of the language again.  For the story is heartbreaking, and yet one can’t help feel a sense of relief at the tragedy. The ending is absolutely right, despite causing me to cry. It couldn’t have ended another way.

Rating: 9/10
ISBN: 0-571-21801-6
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Year: 2005
Date Finished: 7 March 2008
Pages: 292
Challenge: 1 of Category 7 of the 888 Challenge: Books with World War I as the Theme