Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way has received a lot of good press, and it was short-listed for the IMPAC award administered by Dublin City Libraries this year. So I picked it up not sure what to expect, since I tend to find literary book award nominees to be either excellent reads or excellent sleep aids, and it's pretty much a complete coin toss as to which road any given book takes.
A Long Long Way is an excellent sleep aid. Unfortunately, I was trying to read it on the bus, where falling asleep just makes you miss your stop, rather than in bed, where falling asleep gets you a good night's rest.
This book is the story of young Willie Dunne, born in the closing years of the 19th century, son of a Dublin policeman. We get the story of his childhood in a few short pages at the start of the book; then we jump straight into Willie's volunteering to go and fight in the British trenches in 1914. He then proceeds to spend an interminable number of pages (and years) sitting in trenches scratching lice and seeing fellow Irish die. This appears to be interspersed with randomly spaced visits home, where he argues with his father over the events in Ireland at the time - the Easter Rising, and all the political tension both leading up to and arising from the British screwups handling it. Although to be honest, I'm not entirely sure how that impacts the storyline, because by the time it showed up, I was skipping fifteen to twenty pages at a time, skimming through to try and pick up any threads of storyline that might actually be worth reading through the intervening pages for. I didn't find any.
If you're looking for a good read, don't pick up this book. If you're looking for a cure for insomnia - might as well try it, it's surely not good for much else.
I'd put it up for mooch, but I got it out of the library.
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2 comments:
I read this book as part of The Morning News' Tournament of Books for last year. While I didn't love this book, I didn't find it quite as bad as you did and actually managed to read all the pages. I was engaged in the characters enough to continue reading which is saying something for me because I'll put a book down if I don't like it.
Yeah, I could see where it could be a decent book if you could get into it. It was well-written, it just... bored the hell out of me. I found the style distancing, I guess, rather than bringing Willie more to life, which made connecting with or caring about the characters pretty difficult. This is definitely a YMMV book, though.
I usually *do* finish everything I start. So abandoning this one (the skipping fifteen or twenty pages at a time until you hit the end is as close to abandoning as I get *G*) was pretty dire...
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