Reviews for A long long way

The average rating for A long long way based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-07-14 00:00:00 Andrew Templeton Oh, Willie Dunn, a painfully earnest young man off to the trenches. He loves his family, his girl, and his comrades at that tender age when life is all first times. The Algerians were just over to his right. The Algerians sang fine, strange songs most of the day, and at night now he could hear them laughing and talking in a sort of endless excitement. The trench was soon looking fairly smart. "That's fucking better now', said the sergeant-major religiously. They did all that and then lurked in the perfected trench, getting muggy like old boxers. The poor human mind played queer tricks, and you could forget even your name betimes, and even the point of being there, aside enduring the unstoppable blather of the guns. What day oftentimes it was, Willie would forget. Then a different day arrived. Everyone had had a lash of tea, and there was a lot of farting going on after the big yellow beans that had come up around twelve. As usual after they had eaten, they were beginning to look at each other and think this St Julian wasn't the worst place they'd been in. It was the essential illusion bestowed on them by full stomachs. A breeze had pushed through the tall grasses all day. There was a yellow flower everywhere with a hundred tiny blooms on it. The caterpillars loved them. There were millions of caterpillars, the same yellow as the flowers. It was a yellow world. Captain Pasley was in his new dugout writing his forms. Every last thing that came in and every last thing that went out was accounted for. Item and bodies. Captain Pasley, of course, was obliged to read all the letters the men sent home, and he did, word for blessed word. He thought it might break a man's heart to read them sometimes; there was something awfully sad about some of the soldiers' letters. They didn't mean to make them sad, which gave their efforts to be manly and cheerful a melancholy tinge. But it had to be faced. God help them, they were funny enough efforts sometimes. Some men wrote a letter as formal as a bishop, some tried to write the inside of their heads, like that young Willie Dunne. It was a curiosity. The yellow cloud was noticed first by Christy Moran because he was standing on the fire-step with his less than handy mirror arrangement. looking out across the quiet battlefield. That little breeze had freshened and it blew now against the ratty hair that dropped out of Christy Moran's hat here and there. So the breeze was more of a wind and was blowing full on against Christy's hat and mirror, but it was nothing remarkable. What was remarkable was the strange yellow-tinged cloud that had just appeared from nowhere like a sea fog. But not like a fog really; he knew what a flaming fog looked like, for God's sake, being born and bred near the sea in fucking Kingstown. He watched for a few seconds in his mirror, straining to see and straining to understand. It was about four o'clock, and all as peaceful as anything. Not even the guns were firing now. The caterpillars foamed on the yellow flowers. And the grass died in the path of the cloud. That was only Christy Moran's impression maybe; he hoiked down the mirror a moment and wiped it clean with his cleanish sleeve. Back up it went. The cloud didn't look too deep but it was as wide as the eye could see. Christy Moran was absolutely certain now he could see figures moving in the yellow smoke. It must be some sort of way of hiding the advancing men, he was thinking, some new-fashioned piece of warfare.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-12-03 00:00:00 Noel Adams This novel about the experiences of an Irish private during WW1 didn't really engage me until about the half way point when it did massively improve. Firstly, I felt the author bluffed his way a bit through WW1 - sacrificing detail to abstractions, which meant I never quite felt myself in the boots of a private on a WW1 battlefield. And the grandiose biblical (Hemingwayesque) prose style dwarfed the characters for me, turned them into puppets which maybe was clever as what else were all those young men who lost their lives in that daft war? Like Days without End the characters were for me the weakest part of the novel. Again, Barry chooses as his focus a good-natured blank canvas of a character, Willie; again, he tends to idealise and sentimentalise relationships. That said, in the second part of the novel, I did begin to warm to Willie's relationships with his male mentors - his father, his commanding officer, his Sergeant Major and Father Buckley, the chaplain. He also has a sweetheart who inflicts on him a kind of Old Testament punishment for a misdemeanor which shows brilliantly the gulf between her domestic reality and his nightmare frontline reality. As a backdrop, the novel also dramatises the Irish rising for Home Rule. This was nicely done. However, I'm not sure it really added anything to my understanding of WW1 or the Irish problem. Essentially, it's a story about one young man's loyalties and loves with a thunderous historical backdrop - rather like Days Without End in other words. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it'll live long in my memory.