Bookworm By John Andrews
Last month I reviewed Sebastian Barry’s ‘The Secret Scripture’ and promised readers more of the same this month. I will not disappoint therefore and offer you a work of First World War fiction by Barry that is as strong and powerful as the memoirs of Sassoon and Graves.
‘A Long Long Way’ was first published in 2005 and was immediately short-listed for the Man Booker Prize the same year. It is a novel of only 292 pages, but finds the space to tell the compelling story of young Willie Dunne and his comrades in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who are caught between the competing and irreconcilable loyalties of family, faith and fatherland.
Barry’s novel is a radical view of the relationship from the other side and from the personal perspective of the volunteer.
The prose is at all times exquisite and evocative leading the reader towards an ending that lingers in the mind long after the completion of the final chapter.
The intriguing question that the novel poses is what happened to the young Irishmen fighting for an English King in the trenches of France when their countrymen in Dublin rose up against the British in 1916?
You will have to read this beautifully written novel to find out. It is strong stuff, but through its richly textured language it creates for Willie Dunne a no-man’s land unlike any other.
What of Willie’s girl back home whom he loves, his policeman father who is horrified by Willie’s sympathy for the executed Dublin rebels? It is Barry’s considerable achievement to bring all this together in the tone of an elegy and to let us share his perspective and understanding.