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A Long Long Way [Large Print] (Hardcover)

by Sebastian Barry (Author)

5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product Details

Hardcover: 461 pages
Publisher: Thorndike Press; Lrg edition (May 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0786275669
ISBN-13: 978-0786275663
Product Dimensions: 21.3 x 14 x 2.8 cm
Shipping Weight: 545 g

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #1,460,614 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori--that's the line from Horace (later famously quoted by war poet Wilfred Owen) that Irish poet, playwright and novelist Barry seeks to debunk in this grimly lyrical WWI novel. After four years of brutal trench fighting, Willie Dunne, once an eager soldier in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, is still a "long long way" from home. Irish Home Rule seems a distant fantasy after the miserable Easter 1916 uprising in Dublin, which Willie, back in Ireland on his first furlough, was forced to help quell, firing on his own people; relations with his pro-British father, who abhors Willie's equivocal stance on Irish nationalism, have soured; his beloved Gretta has married another man; and most of his original Irish band of brothers have been slaughtered. The novel's dauntless realism and acute figurative language recall the finest chroniclers of war (Willie supposes that dead French soldiers "lay all about their afflicted homeland like beetroots rotting in the fields"). Still, Barry lingers too long on the particulars of the battlefield--the lice, the putrid muck--while failing to adequately develop the disasters Willie must face back in Ireland. As such, this somber novel--unlike Barry's moving previous book, Annie Dunne, whose eponymous narrator is Willie's younger sister--often lacks the nonsoldier human faces necessary to fully counterpoint the coarseness of military conflict, though its inevitably bleak conclusion is heartrending.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Willie Dunne is born in a storm during the "dying days" of Ireland. It is not an auspicious beginning. This novel of Ireland and World War I wears a cloak of gloom and doom as thick as the opening storm. Willie's mother dies young. Willie enlists in the army and fights on the Western Front. Willie's sweetheart marries another, and so on. The wartime scenes are brutally realistic. Throughout this dark novel, though, are glimpses of sweetness and light, such as a scene where Willie's father bathes the returning soldier in an attempt to rid him of lice. Those not familiar with British-Irish history may find some of the personal conflicts and politics in the novel confusing, but nevertheless a compellingly sad, if difficult, read. Marta Segal
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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5.0 out of 5 stars The Terrible Toll of War, April 2 2009

By	Ian Gordon Malcomson (Smithers, Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Long Long Way (Paperback)

There have been a lot of great novels published about life in modern Ireland. Many focus on the country's passionate fight for independence from Britain, or the brutal land evictions, or the sadness of having to emigrate to a new land. While there is still a great story or two coming out of these times, none really compares in power and vision to Sebastian Barry's works. Through very colorful and detailed descriptions of everyday Irish life, Barry equips his main characters with a heroic determination to make sense of their troubled lives. While politics, religion, and social mores play the traditional roles of trying to hold the individual back, Barry's protagonists have the courage to persist in their search for their true identity. The results of Barry's literary efforts so far are a series of complex and cautionary tales that describe the vast opportunities and uncertainties awaiting those who go it alone. Barry's "The Long Long Way" is just one such example of his ability to make his characters come alive. Young Willie grows up in a Dublin that is still under British Rule as World War I is about to break out. His parents are Anglo-Irish, and his father works for the British government as a high-ranking police officer. Theirs is a comfortable existence that Barry regularly compares with the urban poor of Ireland living close at hand. Young Willie grows up trying to understand where his loyalties should lie in a divided Irish society. Along comes the war, and he joins the Royal Dublin Fusiliers on the side of the British. It is during this protracted turmoil that Willie comes to see war as a brutally destructive and inhumane force that threatens to destroy everything he holds dear: his family, his girl, and Ireland. Obviously, the British army is using the Volunteers as cannon fodder which forces him to question its legitimacy, but still he soldiers on. As Willie returns home near end of the war in 1918, he realizes that his former life have changed forever. Britain treats him as cannon fodder; his dad rejects his cynicism about the failure of Home Rule; the Irish see him as a traitor to the cause of independence; and his girl has decided to marry someone else. He will now return to the killing fields of Flanders for one more chance to wrestle with his destiny. There are two especially dramatic moments in this story that showcase Barry's brilliance as a writer: one is the trench scene where the Volunteers experience a deadly gas attack and the occasion when one of Willie's army buddies is executed for disobeying a direct order. Both incidents underscore the futility of trying to assert oneself while fighting other people's wars. As usual, Barry has written a novel that goes right to the heart of who we are as humans: the need to define who we are under fire! Great piece of writing that highlights the author's ability to move beyond what is generally accepted as standard Irish literary fare.

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