I read this for the 2014 War Challenge with a Twist at the reading challenge blog War Through the Generations
A Long Long Way – Sebastian Barry, 2005
Like
The Soldier’s Song (Alan Monaghan,
2002), this novel examines an Irishman’s experience in the trenches during WWI
and the way in which the war acted as a catalyst in pushing nationalists and unionists
further apart. A Catholic from Dublin, Willie Dunne enlists in the King’s army
to protect home and family from barbarism, only to find himself fighting the
adversary but oppressing his own people during the Easter rising in Dublin in
1916.
When
he sees a nationalist murdered on the street during the rising, his own
national identity stirs. After his inarticulate expression of this stirring in
a letter causes a terrible rift with his father over politics, street boys spit
on and stone him, despising him as a “British Tommie.” This calls to mind the
scene in The Soldier’s Song when
Stephan Ryan is beaten by thugs on a Dublin street because he is wearing a
British army great coat. To be beaten by the same people that cheered its
soldiers on to war months earlier – it’s irony as tangled and knotty and
intractable as you’d find in the Balkans.
Considered
one of Ireland's finest writers, Sebastian
Barry writes dense prose, in various registers, gentle, tough, peaceful,
reverent, harsh but never melodramatic or excessive. For example:
When they came into their trench he felt
small enough. The biggest thing there was the roaring of Death and the
smallest thing was a man. Bombs not so far off distressed the earth of
Belgium, disgorged great heaps of it, and did everything except kill him
immediately, as he half expected them to do.
There is occasional overuse of adjectives. As for
writerly writing, in one line, I wondered if a “scent” could leave an “echo,”
but maybe that’s just me distracting myself.
I thought this book was interesting because it brought in the Easter Rising, which I knew nothing about. I do remember the overuse of adjectives, but in the end, it didn't bother me too much.
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