Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018, this powerful and extraordinary novel follows a D-Day veteran as he goes in search of freedom and repair in post-war America.
Robin Robertson was brought up on the north-east coast of Scotland and now lives in London. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has published five collections of poetry and has received a number of honours, including the Petrarca-Preis, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and all three Forward Prizes. His selected poems, Sailing the Forest, was published in 2014.
The Long Take is like a film noir on the page. A book about a man
and a city in shock, it’s an extraordinary evocation of the debris
and ongoing destruction of war even in times of peace. In taking a
scenario we think we know from the movies but offering a completely
different perspective, Robin Robertson shows the flexibility a poet
can bring to form and style.
*Man Booker judges’ citation*
A beautiful, vigorous and achingly melancholy hymn to the common
man that is as unexpected as it is daring . . . The Long Take is a
masterly work of art, exciting, colourful, fast-paced – the
old-time movie reviewer’s vocabulary is apt to the case – and
almost unbearably moving.
*Guardian*
‘Absolutely stunning...his beautiful verse describes things better
than any picture could... The language is astonishing.’
*Front Row*
The Long Take shows it is perfectly possible to write poetry which
is both accessible and subtle, which has a genuine moral and social
conscience . . . This is a major achievement and will linger long
in the reader's mind
*Scotsman on Sunday*
Composed in a mixture of verse and prose, The Long Take is a book
with a big heart. The beauty of the language will seduce the reader
from the very start. How do we put ourselves back together in a
damaged world? . . . By taking this long journey west – across New
York, San Francisco, Los Angeles – Robin Robertson tells a
universal story. With its undeniable beauty; quiet, modest but
strong pull, this book will shift something in your soul. By the
time you have finished reading it, you won’t quite be the same.
*Elif Shafak*
As a work of art, this dreamlike exploration is a triumph; as a
timely allegory, it is disturbingly profound... One of the first
major achievements of 21st-century English-language literature.
*Financial Times*
This is a poem-cum-novel by Scottish writer Robin Robertson, the
prize-winning author of five previous poetry collections, which is
a cinematic road trip through America. It’s from the point of view
of Walker, a discharged World War II combat vet. Rather than return
to Canada at the end of the war, he drifts from New York to Los
Angeles to San Francisco. There are flashbacks to the war but he
basically walks through an America which changes around him. It’s
an incredible achievement, showing how poetry can reach the parts
narrative prose can’t.
*Metro*
Robertson has cast a national, cultural, psychological and class
outsider of vibrant and seedy post-war America into a palpable
anti-hero eerily resonant with our contemporary world. The result
is a ravishing achievement.
*Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner
of the T.S. Eliot Prize*
Like all of Robertson’s work, I approached The Long Take with great
anticipation, for few writers so expertly pull the curtains back on
the many collective fictions, both ancient and new, that constitute
our understanding of the world. All of Robertson’s extraordinary
gifts as a writer are on display here: his probing intelligence and
wit, the strangely tactile beauty of his lines, and his stubborn
refusal to ignore all that lingers unaccounted for at the edges of
our vision. I was genuinely bowled over by it.
*Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds*
The beauty of The Long Take lies in Robertson’s seemingly
effortless ability to evoke the magic of cinema on every page . . .
One of the most moving records in recent times of human fragility,
ambition, injustice, violence, and our deeply troubled path through
cities and nature...The Long Take will be remembered for its
unparalleled originality, and an uncompromising power of
storytelling that transcends the boundaries of film, fiction and
poetry.
*Poetry Review*
Modern, complex, political ... The Long Take is very much in line
with the tradition that inspired it, not least when Robertson
emphasizes “the dead streets of Los Angeles”, and the possibility
that the United States, with its hatred of the other, might soon
turn fascist... The Long Take’s larger theme is the capacity of
greed and politics to turn hope into despair. In this way, the poem
speaks to the present as well as to the past.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
The words flow like the frames of a classic film masterpiece.
*Mike Hodges, filmmaker, Get Carter, Croupier,
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead*
Having held his readers in the grip of many small tales, Robin
Robertson now launches into a full narrative telling, which is
alive with the details of post-war American life as well as the
jumpy subjective life of its protagonist. The Long Take will thrill
you with its shadowy mysteries and cinematic intensity.
*Billy Collins*
The Long Take is a bullet of a book. It is deeply noir, scything
open post-war Los Angeles to show us a living, breathing city: a
complicated social setting with cinema layered into its very
fabric, a place growing at the expense of many of its most
vulnerable citizens. It is a bold book – both imaginative and brave
– but, more than that, it is a book that hits its target. It flies.
It feels true.
*Ryan Gattis, author of All Involved*
The Long Take, by Robin Robertson, is a narrative in verse set in
the immediate post-war years in America, that is at once
heartbreaking and bracing. Think of it as the best black and white
1940s movie you will ever encounter in print.
*Guardian, Best summer books 2018*
Robertson has chosen a supremely uncomfortable, recognizable
flashpoint in US history, an almost perfect mirror image of the
nation today: crude, newly unleashed material ambitions mix with
off-the-chart levels of fear and paranoia.
*Sunday Herald*
Robin Robertson's wonderful new book is hard to classify. It would
be possible to review The Long Take as if it were a novel, even a
thriller of sorts . . . This is a poetic work in which human
degradation is afforded fleetingly beautiful expression . . . It
reads at time as a secular Pilgrim's Progress and many of it's
sequences put me in mind of Denis Johnson's reports from the abyss
of drugs and drink.
*Literary Review*
The Long Take is written in precise, deliberate English of lyric
grandeur. True literature at its most compelling.
*Eileen Battersby*
A blisteringly beautiful vision of America rotting in the aftermath
of the Second World War . . . Robertson's book is stylish, daring,
high concept and amazing.
*Evening Standard*
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