"The Long Take" by Robin Robertson (Picador, 2018)

Written as a long poem, but on shortlists for novel prizes.

It's 1946. New York. Walker, an ex-soldier from Cape Cod, Canada who served in Normandy, Belgium and Holland is looking for work. There's much imagery, some better than others.

• So this is what happens between one night and the next: this is day. A never-ending rehearsal with a cast that changes all he time but never gets it right (p.5)
• The city's gone./ In its place, this gray stone maze, this/ locked geometry of shadows, blind and black,/ and angles hurt into the sky, symmetries breaking/ and snapping back into line. (p.5)
• Going up the Empire State it's like "A ladder at the center of a maze/ he climbs to see where he is,/ where he went wrong" (p.29)
• The subways are rivers, underground,/ flash-flooding every five minutes/ in a pulse of people. (p.7)
• "Central Park: a clearing/ in this forest of stone" isn't so good.

After a year working in the docks he spends all his savings on a train ticket to LA. He finds Billy straight away, who gives him some useful tips. He looks for him on the street every so often over the years. He becomes a reporter, and drinks with colleagues, never knowing them that well. He visits film sets. He's sent on an assignment to SF, then returns. Nobody likes colleague Pike who's trying to impress bosses - "Pike was always in a movie, the cameras always rolling". Walker's haunted by war memories, which thanks to the episodic, fragmented style are easily inserted -

5.30, Sunday morning, a man with a hose preceded him up Main Street, fanning an aisle through the Styrofoam, food wrappers, cigarette packets, torn shirts, snapped stilettos and the sour mulch of broken glass, blood and butts and sick - moving like a priest with a censer, hosing the center down * The rating withe bilge-bucket is swilling off the puke, and what was left of Joe McPherson who hadn't timed it right, his jump from the nets to this landing craft below. (p.44)

Here are some of the more memorable/thematic phrases -

• Billy says 'Los Angeles is like a fridge or a car now,/ it's built to break, so it's temporary./ When you get tired of your world you just upgrade'
• the watermelons/ cleavered: falling open, rocking/ slowly into still and perfect halves (p.60)
• Old men were out, on corners, watching the world,/ stroking cats and dogs, chatting, picking up scraps of litter/ and looking at them, directing trucks as they reversed - p.73
• He'd had some kind of a stroke/ and his face dragged down on one side, like it had/ missed a button - p.75
• He'd come to know, over time, to only watch/ what women hide,/ not what they show - p.86
• Stage machinery, with the grillwork balconies,/ roped proscenium, bright acoustic, the light-well drop.// This hidden dream of another century's Europe/ here, right here on Broadway - p.96
• He dreamt a plane carrying troops crashed-landed/ onto the cemetery outside Caen, and the long-dead/ were churned up with the newly-dead/ and he had to walk through it all./ Looking for himself - p.138
• In Cape Breton there was just the past./ Here in California, they're only thinking about the future -/ the past is being torn down every day - p.154
• The river ... is a bed of coiled silver, springs and movements, an escapement of minnows on the face of the water; the long shadows of trout lying like clock-hands under the stones - p.188
• Benjamin took some shrapnel in his throat: his windpipe torn open, so he's gargling blood and staring at me, fumbling at his neck like he feels his napkin is sipping - p.190
• He coughed a little blood then and, as if embarrassed to be dying, covered his face and went still - p.201

Right at the end Walker tracks Billy down to confess that he killed a German in cold blood. It takes a while for us to get to know Walker. Others have trouble too. He hears colleagues talk about him - 'You can't get an angle on Walker, y'know?/ He's a tricky bastard - not easy at all./ Like trying to catch a dropped knife.' (p.154). On p.174, Jan 1955, we learn he's 34. He has War flashbacks. Noises still scare him - New Year's Eve fireworks. Demolition reminds him of Normandy. He sees analogies. There's a section towards the end where paragraphs about the war alternative with ones from the present. He empathises with the homeless. He sends postcards to his ex back in Canada. He sometimes buys whores. He's a watcher. At the end there's a real or imagined earthquake.

There are many kinds of readers. They won't all like the same things. One option for the writer is to throw in various types of material hoping that each reader will pick out the parts that suit them. If they're editors or writers they might be pretty good at that. But what do they do about the material that doesn't suit them. Suppose, rather than feeling neutral about it they don't like it? How does the writer encourage the reader to be indulgent?

With a novel one tolerates the odd longeur - half a page isn't much lost time because one's reading quickly. With a poem one tolerates discontinuities, one delays trying to understand. It helps to use different fonts for different types of entries, to use line-breaks in some sections but not others. Star-separated sections help too - parts that are disliked are easily discarded.

6 pages of notes at the end attest to the authenticity.

Other reviews

• John Banville (composed in a mixture of verse and prose. It is a beautiful, vigorous and achingly melancholy hymn to the common man that is as unexpected as it is daring. Here we have a poet at the peak of his symphonic powers taking a great risk, and succeeding gloriously.)
• Anna Tipton (The form of the book is difficult to categorize, moving between free verse, lyrical prose, diary entries, and photographs. )
• Sibbie O'Sullivan (Moving between poetry and prose, dialogue and history, Robin Robertson’s “The Long Take” is a propulsive verbal tour de force. ... The juxtaposition of poetry and prose dissolves the psychological distance between Walker’s past and his present. His diary entries, initially objective, soon become introspective, fueling his self-destruction. )
• Brian Morton (much of The Long Take seems to work just as well when set out as prose. Sure, it’s written in verse lines, albeit without rhyme or assonance, but parts of it are almost discursive in tone. It appears in a poetry imprint, and in an unfamiliar trade format, but it is unmistakably a novel. ... Walker is that other modernist trope, a camera eye, shuttering the cityscape in a series of vivid monochromes. One of the book’s attractive but disturbing oddities is the juxtaposition of ‘still’ images you wish might quicken into motion and moving images that you very much hope will stop soon. ... Sometimes, though, the detail trips, especially when the research is too obviously flagged. ... Robertson understands that poetry can survive not just discord but also a prosaic plainness. There are passages in The Long Take that might come from Lewis Mumford or Jane Jacobs, but their presence doesn’t diminish but instead enhances the musicality of the whole structure.)
• John McAuliffe (The verse novel is an unusual genre, emphasising intensity and tone with its line-breaks and stanzas. Robertson intersperses present-tense narration with italicised flashbacks and bold-type excerpts from postcards and diaries that gesture at a gently pastoral reminiscence of a teenage love affair in Nova Scotia, but the overall effect is uneven and bitty. ... The book’s disturbing, powerful depiction of traumatic violence and its reverberating aftermath might have been better served by a shorter take.)
• Woody Haut (although The Long Take is definitely a poem, I can’t think of anything quite like it. There is, of course, Kevin Young’s recent Black Maria (2005) ... The Long Take, set mostly in and around Los Angeles’s Bunker Hill from 1946 to 1957, and subtitled “A Way to Lose More Slowly,” is considerably more modern, complex, political, and, though cinematic, probably less filmable than March’s narratives. It’s also more sustained and situated in the real world than Young’s excellent episodic endeavor. And despite its peregrinations in time, place, and rhythm, Robertson’s poem, when it comes to its inner workings, is also surprisingly novelistic. ... Since noir is the spirit of the time, and Bunker Hill is a de facto film set, Walker cannot help but co-opt the language, imagery, and perspective of that genre. ... Though the poem’s diffuseness tends to lessen its visceral impact, The Long Take remains a remarkable work. An occasional phrase may be out of sync with the era, like “watching each other’s back” or “getting totalled,” and there are moments when the poem, introduced by a map of old Bunker Hill, reads like a tourist guide to the city’s noir hot spots. But, for the most part, Robertson gets it right,)