A noir narrative written with the intensity & power of poetry The Long Take is one of the most remarkable
- & unclassifiable
- books of recent years Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can't return home to rural Nova Scotia & looks instead to the city for freedom anonymity & repair As he moves from New York to Los Angeles & San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history one that also allowed film noir to flourish The Dream had gone sour but
- as those dark classic movies made clear
- the country needed outsiders to study & dramatise its new anxieties While Walker tries to piece his life together America is beginning to come apart deeply paranoid doubting its own certainties riven by social & racial division spiralling corruption & the collapse of the inner cities The Long Take is about a good man brutalised by war haunted by violence & apparently doomed to return to it
- yet resolved to find kindness again in the world & in himself Watching beauty & disintegration through the lens of the film camera & the eye of the poet Robin Robertson's The Long Take is a work of thrilling originality