Disclaimer: This review may contain spoilers.
Welcome back to my reading corner and to another instalment in the Manbooker series I am doing on my blog. Today I will be reviewing The Long Take by Robin Robertson who, surprisingly, upon Googling has a repertoire of vegan non-fiction books alongside his works of poetry. Before I go on much further, I must say that I absolutely despised this book and just could not figure out what people have been enjoying about it. This led to a rather disappointing 1 star rating for me which is so uncommon for me to give out. This was reminiscent for me of Sing, Unburied, Sing which was another hyped book for a literary prize that I just could not stand.
The interesting thing about this book is that it is written as a long form poem with vignettes interspersed throughout of a first person narrative reflecting on the war, and a narrative from the future with excerpts from letters he has sent. The poem is written in the third person perspective and follows a young man named Walker who is Canadian born but has moved to New York, and then saunters from place to place in San Francisco and around California after the war. It is made clear from the start that Walker struggles with PTSD after seeing many of his friends and colleagues shot dead on the battlefields and this is something he continues to battle in his day to day life living in a loud and busy city.
The structure of this book fell completely flat for me, I felt as though Robinson was sticking to what he knew by making this book a long form poem. All it did was make it seem overly stylised and pretentious because the language wasn’t particularly poetic, and the sentence structure wasn’t exactly mind blowing either. The book could have easily been a standard work of prose and still have conveyed the same message that this ‘poem’ did. There was so much excess added to the ongoing narrative that I personally felt did not need to be there.
The book claimed to be about the rising popularity of film noir during a time of social anxiety in the States. While cinema definitely featured prominently I expected there to be more of a focus on the themes of film noir, and for the poem to potentially have a somewhat suspenseful narrative weaved throughout it to mimic these types of movies, but that did not happen. What Robinson chose to do was focus more on the social issues in America at that time, which sadly are still so relevant today. The main social problem that was highlighted was homelessness, poverty, and addiction with a special focus on skid row in L.A. and the destitution that many people faced post-war. While this is a massively poignant topic to delve into, it felt as though Robinson barely scraped the surface and for a large chunk of the book in the middle, we don’t hear from his homeless friend Billy at all. He also painted a highly unrealistic picture of homelessness and unemployment when the main character Walker, having no experience at all is able to walk into a newspaper office and land himself a regular job as a reporter.
There is an ongoing undercurrent throughout the poem of the emerging violence and people’s obsessions with homicide that began with a special mention to the Black Dahlia case which popularised crime reporting and unsolved murders. We see multiple times throughout the book people are found murdered and even in one gruesome scene, Walker himself witnesses someone stabbed to death in an alley, mistaking it for a young couple in the throws of passion at the beginning. This shows the parallels between society and culture as a whole with the violence and gore that happened in the war. But MY GOD, the war. Nothing bores me quite as much as depictions and in depth descriptions of war and battlefields and there was A LOT of that in this book. Far too much. Towards the end of the book I personally felt like I was trudging through it to finish it, there was nothing that was keeping me engaged with the book or any of the characters in it.
Robinson focuses towards the end of the book on a particular moment in America where many houses that homeless people were taking shelter in were being destroyed and uses this as a way to also demonstrate the dissolution of his protagonist’s mental health. At the end of the book in the ‘epilogue’ Robinson added some statistics to show how the urban renewal at this time dramatically and unfairly impacted the homeless communities at the time.
I felt that overall, this book was overly ambitious for what it actually ended up achieving which was a tepid and off-the-mark book about a lot of important issues being mashed up and added in any which way. I could not get on with the writing style and just found the continual name dropping of streets and areas (literally every SINGLE sentence nearly had a street name or location mentioned) to be ridiculous and unrealistic. Nobody thinks in terms of which street they are on as their ongoing narrative. I am glad to be seeing the back of this book.
Do I think this book should win the prize? No, absolutely not. I would rather Snap won. Do I think it could win the prize? Sadly, yes. I feel like this book is a DREAM for all the literary bros who love to be pretentious and self important. I hope that it doesn’t win and I hope the other works of fiction on this list are better and that none are worse than this.
I would NOT recommend this book and I don’t think I’ll be picking up any more of Robertson’s work.
Have you read The Long Take? What did you think of it? Do you think I’m missing out on something? Let me know in the comments.
Keep reading,
– A
Amy's Reading Corner 