A Long Long Way edition by Sebastian Barry Literature Fiction eBooks
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One of the most vivid and realised characters of recent fiction, Willie Dunne is the innocent hero of Sebastian Barry's highly acclaimed novel. Leaving Dublin to fight for the Allied cause as a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, he finds himself caught between the war playing out on foreign fields and that festering at home, waiting to erupt with the Easter Rising. Profoundly moving, intimate and epic, A Long Long Way charts and evokes a terrible coming of age, one too often written out of history.
'A stunning achievement ... Barry has written one of the most moving fictional accounts of war that surely must rank alongside those real-life testimonies of Owen and Sasson.' Sunday Tribune
'The story grips, shocks and saddens; but most importantly refuses to be forgotten.' The Times
'In darkly beautiful, inventive and evocative prose Barry tells the filthy truths of war.' Ireland on Sunday
'With disarming lyricism, Barry's novel leads the readers into a hellish no-man's-land, where the true madness of war can only be felt and understood rather than said.' Observer
'[It] passionately documents a period of collective sacrifice and courage across Europe and beyond, as well as momentous political upheaval in Ireland.' Time Out
'The most remarkable shared imaginative universe in Irish writing belongs to the poet, playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry who, like an archaeologist, has slowly and deftly delved back through his myriad ancestors to let them breathe again ... A Long Long Way is a major novel ... perhaps his greatest work.' Dermot Bolger, Sunday Independent
'It is more mature, more modulated, more quietly challenging than any of his fiction heretofore, A Long Long Way therefore deserves to win for Barry a renewed attention.' Irish Times
'A deeply moving story of courage and fidelity' J M Coetzee
'Many say Sebastian Barry writes like an angel and they are right, provided they remember he is on the side of the angels that fell. He shares his longing that his heroes might roar with a horrified I will not serve. But they do serve and are destroyed. Then his sympathy overwhelms, as it does in A Long Long Way. A possessed, powerful novel.' Frank McGuinness
'This is Sebastian Barry's song of innocence and experience, composed with poetic grace and an eye, both unflinching and tender, for savage detail and moments of pure beauty. It is also an astonishing display of Barry's gift for creating a memorable character, whom he has written, indelibly, back into a history which continues to haunt us.' Colm Tobin
'The story of young Willie Dunne, caught between the competing and irreconcilable loyalties of family, faith and fatherland, is tragic - as indeed the stories of so many young Irishmen who joined up in 1914 must have been, whether they died or lived. But even more powerful is Sebastian Barry's prose, which fuses the vernacular with the poetic, in a way that is lyrical and yet entirely apt. Willie Dunne's voice, like his dilemmas, has the resonance of authenticity.' Hew Strachan, author of The First World War
'As always, I enjoyed the way in which Barry tells the Irish story from a reverse angle, from the un-easy, anti-heroic point of view. He proves once again that the artist makes the best historian, and that the tragic figures who are wrong-footed by history, provide the most compelling account of the past.' Hugo Hamilton
A Long Long Way edition by Sebastian Barry Literature Fiction eBooks
. . . the slaves of England and the kings of nothing."World War I on the Western Front was hell for soldiers from no matter where. But it probably was harder for the Irish from Eire (Ireland, excluding Northern Ireland) who responded to Lord Kitchener's call for volunteers. They were excoriated by Nationalists and Sinn Féiners, they were mocked and distrusted by the Unionists and Ulstermen whom they fought next to, and they frequently were treated derisively by the British top brass. Yet they faced misery and death in the same measure as everyone else.
The plight of the Irishman who volunteered to fight for the King and the Empire is personified in A LONG LONG WAY by Willie Dunne. He is the only son of the Chief Superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. He is too short to follow his father into the police, so, to be a man and do his duty, he volunteers and becomes a Private with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He participates in the Battle of Ginchy, the Battle of Messines, and the Third Battle of Ypres. He witnesses dozens of deaths up close and is responsible for killing at least one German soldier in hand-to-hand fighting. He is gassed and he is bombed, and he endures all the miseries of life in the trenches. He also has the misfortune to be among the troops hurriedly called in to deal with the first day of the Easter Uprising back in Dublin, and he unwillingly is involved in the court-martial, leading to the execution, of an Irish soldier who, conflicted by the competing demands on his loyalties, simply shuts down and refuses to obey orders. When, while on furlough in 1917, Willie Dunne walks the streets of Dublin in uniform boys hurl stones and spit at him. In the words of Ray Davies and the Kinks in a far different context, it's "a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world."
In its accounts of war on the Western Front, A LONG LONG WAY is much like many other novels of the Great War -- not quite as powerful as a few but better than many. I was exposed to a few new things. Most striking were the several references to Chinese coolies doing all sorts of dirty work, from repairing roads under fire to searching for and burying bodies and body parts. Those references spurred me to do a little on-line research and I learned about the Chinese Labour Corps, through which some 140,000 Chinese served as . . . well, as coolies.
What distinguishes A LONG LONG WAY from other Great War/Western Front novels of my experience is the Irish angle, and the anomalous position of the Irish Kitchener Volunteers. They were dealt a double-whammy by the mills of history.
But I am rather ambivalent about the way Sebastian Barry relates the tale of Willie Dunne. There is a lot to like, especially the dialogue and the episodes of Irish humor. Example: After sharing a watery trench with the rats for fifteen days following a battle, all the while assaulted by the stench of unburied corpses, the Irish get word that they are about to be relieved by a battalion of the Gloucesters; one of them quips, "All good things come to an end." But the Gloucesters don't show up, and the Irish are driven to killing more time by reading soldier's manuals, including the stuff about keeping the feet dry and clean and wearing "clean dry socks". "I like that bit best", said Willie Dunne.
But the novel is over-written. Example: immediately after Willie Dunne's observation about liking best the bit about clean dry socks, Barry writes: "There wasn't a clean dry anything for ten miles around." How dense does Barry think his readers are? The prose often is Irish in its lilt to the point of being mannered. Further, although the plot had some surprising twists and complications, there were times, too many times, when I felt that Barry was catering to rather vulgar expectations. And the best word for the novel's last six pages is "cheesy".
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A Long Long Way edition by Sebastian Barry Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
This novel of 2005, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, addresses a combination of 2 sad issues the trench slaughter of the Great War, of which at the time people didn't know that it would later be called World War 1, and the Irish trouble with British rule, or should that be the British trouble with Irish reluctance to be ruled.
We follow a young Irish volunteer into war, at 18. His father is a loyalist policeman in Dublin. Some of the Irish volunteers are in the war because they expect home rule to come after the war. Others are there because they hope that home rule will not come. It is a mess.
We get shown war in its worst shape, including horrific chapters about gas war. For our hero Willie Dunne, this is a Bildungsroman of the unfortunate kind. He grew up in a loyalist family, without mother, and with 3 younger sisters to mother him. He never even started to question his father's loyalist stance. It comes as a rude awakening for him when he finds himself suddenly shooting at Irish insurgents and is abused by them as Tommy.
The book adds to my understanding of WW1 by it's focus on gas war, and it clarifies for me aspects of the Irish problems of the time. Though I do not particularly like reading 'historical' novels, the subject of this one stays fresh.
Unfortunately.
In its gruesome depiction of slaughter, the book is comparable to Gert Ledig's German writings about WW2. Ledig wrote from experience, based on fresh memories. Barry's writing is based on research, and he adds ingredients that Ledig did without poetry of language, romance and emotions involving his individuals. Therefore Barry is successful in the market, while Ledig was rejected. We readers want our reading matter sugarcoated. In this case, the sugar is rather bitter.
How could a fella go out and fight for his country when his country would dissolve behind him like sugar in the rain?
I have deducted a star because of the impossibly schmalzy ending.
A young Irishman's service in the British army during World War I exposes some of the horrors of trench warfare but not in a way that gripped me or enable me to share the nightmare. Somehow, the novel just took me along in a protected bubble without the agony and terror of battle.
Willie goes to war, like many of his Irishman because of the promise of Home Rule, more than to fight the Germans. The title is was taken from the Song, "It's a long, long way to Tipperary" soon he discovers that the Ireland he left is dissolving behind him like "Sugar in the rain" amid betrayals and British contempt for the Irish in the Army and in Ireland. His reality becomes the constant trench warfare, a "Carpet of Crushed death". visits home become painful, but through it all, Willie Dune never loses his love for humanity. He sufferers for the first young German he is forced to kill.
Make no mistake, this book is not for the faint of heart. It brought tears to my eyes.
The descriptions of the poison gas attacks are heartbreaking. But Willie Dunne has a purity of heart and soul that are the joy of the story and the ultimate tragedy.
. . . the slaves of England and the kings of nothing."
World War I on the Western Front was hell for soldiers from no matter where. But it probably was harder for the Irish from Eire (Ireland, excluding Northern Ireland) who responded to Lord Kitchener's call for volunteers. They were excoriated by Nationalists and Sinn Féiners, they were mocked and distrusted by the Unionists and Ulstermen whom they fought next to, and they frequently were treated derisively by the British top brass. Yet they faced misery and death in the same measure as everyone else.
The plight of the Irishman who volunteered to fight for the King and the Empire is personified in A LONG LONG WAY by Willie Dunne. He is the only son of the Chief Superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. He is too short to follow his father into the police, so, to be a man and do his duty, he volunteers and becomes a Private with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He participates in the Battle of Ginchy, the Battle of Messines, and the Third Battle of Ypres. He witnesses dozens of deaths up close and is responsible for killing at least one German soldier in hand-to-hand fighting. He is gassed and he is bombed, and he endures all the miseries of life in the trenches. He also has the misfortune to be among the troops hurriedly called in to deal with the first day of the Easter Uprising back in Dublin, and he unwillingly is involved in the court-martial, leading to the execution, of an Irish soldier who, conflicted by the competing demands on his loyalties, simply shuts down and refuses to obey orders. When, while on furlough in 1917, Willie Dunne walks the streets of Dublin in uniform boys hurl stones and spit at him. In the words of Ray Davies and the Kinks in a far different context, it's "a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world."
In its accounts of war on the Western Front, A LONG LONG WAY is much like many other novels of the Great War -- not quite as powerful as a few but better than many. I was exposed to a few new things. Most striking were the several references to Chinese coolies doing all sorts of dirty work, from repairing roads under fire to searching for and burying bodies and body parts. Those references spurred me to do a little on-line research and I learned about the Chinese Labour Corps, through which some 140,000 Chinese served as . . . well, as coolies.
What distinguishes A LONG LONG WAY from other Great War/Western Front novels of my experience is the Irish angle, and the anomalous position of the Irish Kitchener Volunteers. They were dealt a double-whammy by the mills of history.
But I am rather ambivalent about the way Sebastian Barry relates the tale of Willie Dunne. There is a lot to like, especially the dialogue and the episodes of Irish humor. Example After sharing a watery trench with the rats for fifteen days following a battle, all the while assaulted by the stench of unburied corpses, the Irish get word that they are about to be relieved by a battalion of the Gloucesters; one of them quips, "All good things come to an end." But the Gloucesters don't show up, and the Irish are driven to killing more time by reading soldier's manuals, including the stuff about keeping the feet dry and clean and wearing "clean dry socks". "I like that bit best", said Willie Dunne.
But the novel is over-written. Example immediately after Willie Dunne's observation about liking best the bit about clean dry socks, Barry writes "There wasn't a clean dry anything for ten miles around." How dense does Barry think his readers are? The prose often is Irish in its lilt to the point of being mannered. Further, although the plot had some surprising twists and complications, there were times, too many times, when I felt that Barry was catering to rather vulgar expectations. And the best word for the novel's last six pages is "cheesy".
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