A Long Long Way
Sebastian Barry, 2005
Penguin Group (USA)
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143035091
Summary
History is made up of memory, and memory is a storyteller. Sebastian Barry knows this, and knows that the vast movement of history, politics, and war is a cloth woven of the threads of personal experience, of the ways in which we come to cherish personal beliefs.
In A Long Long Way, Barry uses his exceptional gifts to tell the story of Ireland’s entry into the First World War through the heart and mind of one young soldier.
Willie Dunne, brother of Annie from Barry’s previous novel Annie Dunne, joins the Royal Dublin Fusiliers at age seventeen because he is less than six feet tall. Six feet is the height requirement for becoming a policeman. Willie’s father is a policeman and is disappointed that his son cannot follow in his footsteps. Willie becomes a soldier instead. While many around him are willing to fight because of the promise of home rule for Ireland, such beliefs are still foggy in Willie’s young mind. Like so many young men, he wants to please his father and prove himself a man. One of the many truths revealed in this story is the way in which the relentless violence of war is fueled by such simple motivations.
The history of Ireland’s role in the Great War is not well remembered, and Barry is a master at embodying political issues in the hearts of his characters, with all the ambivalence and emotion of the human heart. Willie’s father is devoted to king and country while Willie must question many familiar assumptions as he develops the ability to hold his own opinion. The hideous daily violence of war and the larger political beliefs that seem to make it necessary are the raw material that Barry uses to ask a more fundamental question: How does a person come to think for him- or herself?
As one character says to Willie, "The curse of the world is people thinking thoughts that are only thoughts which have been given to them. They’re not their own thoughts. They’re like cuckoos in their heads. Their own thoughts are tossed out and cuckoo thoughts put in instead" (p. 9). Barry is asking what makes people think and behave as they do. Almost one hundred years after the events in this novel, with the world still engaged in war after war, could any question be more important?
Barry, who is also a poet, writes with a lyrical power that makes this lost world pulse with reality. The music and beauty of Irish speech is everywhere here and is all the more poignant when brought to bear on the terror and madness of life in the trenches.
Barry’s knowledge of his characters is deeply felt, and their story is shared by all of us who live in a world continually threatened by war and by unexamined beliefs. A Long Long Way is a work of profound sadness and beauty that rings with the truth of what it is to be human. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 5, 1955
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—Catholic University School and Trinity College
• Awards—Costa Book of the Year; James Tait Black Memorial Prize;
Cezam Prix Litteraire Inter CE (France); Walter Scott Prize
• Currently—lives in Wicklow, Ireland
Sebastian Barry, an Irish playwright, novelist and poet is considered one of his country's finest writers, noted for his dense literary writing style. Born in Dublin, his mother was the late Irish actress Joan O'Hara. He attended Catholic University School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he read English and Latin.
Barry's literary career began in poetry before he began writing plays and novels. In recent years his fiction writing has surpassed his work in the theatre in terms of success, having once been considered a playwright who wrote occasional novels.
He has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his novels A Long Long Way (2005) and The Secret Scripture (2008), the latter of which won the 2008 Costa Book of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His 2011 novel On Canaan's Side (2011) was longlisted for the Booker, and his most recent novel was published in 2014, The Temporary Gentleman.
Novels and plays
Barry started his literary career with the novel Macker's Garden in 1982. This was followed by several books of poetry and a further novel The Engine of Owl-Light in 1987 before his career as a playwright began with his first play produced in 1988 at the Abbey theatre, Boss Grady's Boys.
Barry's maternal great-grandfather, James Dunne, provided the inspiration for the main character in his most internationally known play, The Steward of Christendom (1995). The main character, named Thomas Dunne in the play, was the chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police from 1913–1922. He oversaw the area surrounding Dublin Castle until the Irish Free State takeover on 16 January 1922. One of his grandfathers belonged to the British Army Corps of Royal Engineers.
Both the play The Steward of Christendom (1995) and the novel The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998) are about the dislocations (physical and otherwise) of loyalist Irish people during the political upheavals of the early 20th century. The title character of the latter work is a young man forced to leave Ireland by his former friends in the aftermath of the Anglo-Irish War.
He also wrote the satirical Hinterland (2002), based loosely on former Irish Taoiseach Charles Haughey, the performance of which caused a minor controversy in Dublin. The Sunday Times, called it "feeble, puerile, trite, shallow, exploitative and gratuitously offensive", while The Telegraph called it “as exciting as a lukewarm Spud-U-Like covered in rancid marge and greasy baked beans.”
Barry's work in fiction came to the fore during the 1990s. His novel A Long Long Way (2005) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was selected for Dublin's 2007 One city one book event. The novel tells the story of Willie Dunne, a young recruit to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers during the First World War. It brings to life the divided loyalties that many Irish soldiers felt at the time following the Easter Rising in 1916. (Willie Dunne, son of the fictional Thomas Dunne, first appears as a minor but important character in his 1995 play The Steward of Christendom.)
His novel The Secret Scripture (2008) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction (the oldest such award in the UK), the Costa Book of the Year; the French translation Le testament cache won the 2010 Cezam Prix Litteraire Inter CE. It was also a favourite to win the 2008 Man Booker Prize, narrowly losing out to Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.
Barry's most recent play is Andersen's English (2010), inspired by children's writer Hans Christian Andersen coming to stay with Charles Dickens and his family in the Kent marshes.
On Canaan's Side (2011), Barry's fifth novel, concerns Lily Bere, the sister of the character Willy Dunne from (the 2005 novel) A Long Long Way and the daughter of the character Thomas Dunne from (the 1995 play) The Steward of Christendom, who emigrates to the US. The novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the 2012 Walter Scott Prize.
His most recent novel, The Temporary Gentleman (2014), tells the story of Jack McNulty—an Irishman whose commission in the British army in WWII was never permanent. Sitting in his lodgings in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, he’s writing the story of his life with desperate urgency.
Academia
Barry's academic posts have included Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa (1984), Villanova University (2006) and Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin (1995–1996).
Personal
Barry lives in County Wicklow with his wife, actress Alison Deegan, and their three children. (From Wikipedia. Retreived 5/8/2014.)
Book Reviews
After four years of brutal trench fighting, Willie Dunne...is still a "long long way" from home.... Barry lingers too long on the particulars of the battlefield... [and the book] often lacks the nonsoldier human faces necessary to fully counterpoint the coarseness of military conflict.
Publishers Weekly
This novel of Ireland and World War I wears a cloak of gloom and doom.... Those not familiar with British-Irish history may find some of the personal conflicts and politics in the novel confusing, but nevertheless a compellingly sad, if difficult, read. —Marta Segal
Booklist
Barry's prequel to the fine Annie Dunne (2002) turns to WWI for the story of a young Dublin soldier who loses love, crown, country, and family in the war-torn desolation.... Willie's end will be alone—and utterly, utterly pointless. Flawless, honest, humane, moving.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Gretta’s father, Mr. Lawlor, tells Willie, "I don’t care what a man thinks as long as he knows his own mind," (p. 90) and he is also the character who talks about "cuckoo thoughts," as quoted in the introduction above. Does Willie come to know his own mind in the course of this story? What is it that he comes to know? Is it a matter of knowing what his political opinions are or something more?
2. Willie enlists because he isn’t tall enough to become a policeman, and other characters reveal their motivations for joining the war to be just as personal: poverty, family circumstances, a wife’s burned hand. Does this mean that these young soldiers are not affected by the larger issues of the war or by the question of home rule for Ireland? How do they come to terms with these larger political questions? How do personal motivations interact with political beliefs for these young men?
3. Willie’s father is loyal to England, and as a teenager Willie has no reason to question his father’s viewpoint. But as he begins to see more of the world and its politics, he must struggle to make sense of ambiguity and conflicting emotions. Barry writes, "The Parliament in London had said there would be Home Rule for Ireland at the end of the war; therefore, said John Redmond, Ireland was for the first time in seven hundred years in effect a country. So she could go to war as a nation at last—nearly—in the sure and solemnly given promise of self-rule. The British would keep their promise and Ireland must shed her blood generously" (p. 14). How does Barry represent the complexities of this historical struggle through his characters? Are they naïve? Are they exploited by political forces beyond their understanding?
4. Barry’s descriptions of life in the trenches are detailed and vivid. He writes, "When they came into their trench he felt small enough. The biggest thing there was the roaring of Death and the smallest thing was a man" (p. 24). Willie spends most of the war in these trenches, where one can’t see out, can’t see the enemy, has little or no idea of what is happening, and has only one’s immediate neighbors for comfort or sources of information. Is this a useful metaphor for war itself? How does Willie’s experience in these trenches influence his developing ideas about the war, the enemy, nationalism, and his own life?
5. The larger issues in this novel are all based in history: The Royal Dublin Fusiliers are real, and the story of Ireland’s role in World War I, and of the war’s influence on Ireland’s struggle for Home Rule, is true. How does Barry represent these historical events through his characters’ thoughts and emotions? Is this an effective way of revealing deeper truths about historical events? Do the personal struggles of these characters add to an understanding of what happened in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century?
6. Willie and his father are different in many ways, as they come to hold very different beliefs about the war and about Ireland. In what ways are they the same?
7. One of the most powerful passages in the novel describes Willie’s first encounter with mustard gas and its horrible effects. Part of what makes it so fearful is the fact that the soldiers have no idea what it is or what it will do to them. And after they learn what it is, they consider it a sign that the Germans do not respect the rules of war. "Now they knew it was a filthy gas sent over by the filthy Boche to work perdition on them, a thing forbidden, it was said, by the articles of war. No general, no soldier could be proud of this work; no human person could take the joy of succeeding from these tortured deaths" (p. 51). Why would one form of killing be considered more respectable than another? Why is this form of attack considered less "human" than direct combat? Would it be seen in the same way today?
8. Why does Jesse Kirwan want to talk to Willie before he dies? What is the significance of this character in this story? What does he know that Willie does not know, and what does Willie learn from him? What meaning does Kirwan’s execution have, both to Willie personally and to the Irish army?
9. In what ways are women important in this story? How do Gretta and his sisters influence Willie? What do they represent to him? How does the war affect the roles of men and women in Irish society?
10. As the war approaches its end, Willie wonders how to go on in life when so many of his cherished ideals have been undermined. "How could a fella go out and fight for his country when his country would dissolve behind him like sugar in the rain?....How could a fella like Willie hold England and Ireland equally in his heart, like his father before him, like his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father, when both now would call him a traitor, though his heart was clear and pure, as pure as a heart can be after three years of slaughter?" (p. 282). What kinds of answers might Willie’s story suggest to these questions? Does the novel resolve any of the ambiguity it raises in the conflict between the personal and the political? What kind of meaning seems important to Barry in the face of the bleak suffering of this story?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)