The Long Take: A Noir Narrative by Robin Robertson – Book Review

(Note: This review was written in late July, and was briefly and accidentally published half-complete, thanks to an anxious mis-click during a thunderstorm. I intended and it still seems thoroughly appropriate to hold this completed posting back until now, in November.)

This is a sort of novel and it is also a sort of poem – The very noir-ish cover – actually a reproduction of a photograph from the 1940s – grabbed my attention as it was standing up at the end of a shelf at my local library. Knowing absolutely nothing more about it than what was on the covers and flap – it was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, and is a narrative-poem experiment about a man from Nova Scotia (Canada) who has fought in the second world war and is now wandering around American cities (New York. San Francisco, and, most of the time, Los Angeles,) observing the scene in the late 1940s and early 50s, coming across some film shoots now and then – I thought I’d give it a try.

First of all, to get it out of the way, even though I am a person who has watched a lot of the films that are mentioned within this text, I am not a huge fan of (fiction) texts where the author plays “remember that movie?” with the reader. (Even though I actually wrote an entire novella playing that game. Oops.) Anyway, I imagine it is frustrating for those who have not seen the movies, and it was often a distraction to me while I was pushed out of the narrative to try and remember which movie that was, exactly. (I’m generally not great at remembering movies by their titles.) Probably partially as a result, my favourite movie mention in the narrative is one that at first does not tell you which movie it is, I just recognized the description and was able to say to myself, “Yeah, I’ve seen that scene too! I don’t remember the title of the movie, but I know exactly what they’re talking about here!” (For the record, the movie/scene in question was in 1952’s Sudden Fear, which as it happens I re-watched last year.) So, while the allusion to “noir” was a significant part of what got me to pick up this book, as it turned out, the direct mentions of what we now term noir films became one of my least favourite parts of this reading experience.

Second thing, I have not read a lot of narrative poetry. Fairly early on in the book, I came across this passage, and had to do an appreciation pause.

Looking down through the night on the way to Los Angeles
he heard this noise over his tinnitus,
over the plane’s engines: a screaming.
The stewardess was standing over him – frightened
it looked like.
Someone in his seat was screaming.

from The Long Take, A Noir Narrative by Robin Robertson

What is this book about? The text includes the narrator’s memories of his youth on Cape Breton, which is a fairly sparsely populated part of the world today, and a place where, after a fair amount of warfare in earlier centuries, much of the remaining population descends from Scottish immigrants. (The maritime province Cape Breton is part of is called Nova Scotia or “New Scotland” for a reason.)

Although the Cape Breton mines are now closed, there is a significant history of coal mining (and ship building) in Cape Breton, with some infamous labour practices, union actions, and disasters in the mines. (There were 2498 recorded fatalities in Nova Scotian coal mines between 1839 and 1992.)

Our narrator has escaped provincialism and coal-mining by going to war. (This, to a not insignificant extent, mirrors the experience of my paternal grandfather and his brothers, who were from a different region of Nova Scotia, grew up on a small farm, and went to the same war as the narrator of this poem-book.)

The narrator of our book has also left a woman he loves behind. He remembers her, and life on Cape Breton, particularly it’s natural world, with considerable fondness, but he feels like he no longer belongs there. (Somewhat oddly to me, he does not once mention moose. There was a dominance of moose when I visited Cape Breton, but perhaps there were fewer in the 1930s and 1940s.)

Our narrator also, and increasingly towards the finale of the narrative, experiences flash-backs to the brutality and carnage he survived as a member of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders infantry regiment. Among other things, he is a survivor and witness to the Normandy massacres, which I learned of for the first time during this narrative.
More than 150 Canadian soldiers, who, finding themselves in a rapidly deteriorating position during the Normandy invasion, surrendered to Nazi forces, and were therefore prisoners of war and, you know, not supposed to be murdered, were subsequently murdered (and in some instances mutilated) by members of an Waffen-SS division. (The narrative in The Long Take somewhat misleading says the Nazi officer who was the only person ever convicted in relation to these murders was in prison for only five years, which does not seem to be entirely factually correct, but does make dramatic sense.)

I warn you, these flash-back sections are pretty grim. And… you might want to hold off a bit on feeling over-fond of our narrator, as there’s a bit of a surprise towards the end.

For the majority of the text, our narrator, as promised, wanders around mid-century American cities, mostly Los Angeles, living a fairly hard-scrabble and alcoholic life in and out of low-rent apartments and hotels, most comfortable talking with the homeless or near-homeless veterans he encounters, but also having interactions with a (somewhat hard to believe) number of Hollywood directors. He gets work as a reporter, and reporting on the homeless becomes his professional cause, as downtown Los Angeles undergoes post-war “revitalization” projects and Skid Row’s population increases.

It’s, um… not really a happy book.

Sometimes, the poetry and language in this book is, for me, really, really nice, but it’s not all wow all the time.

Some of the word choices bothered me a bit. The author, is, according to his author’s bio, born in northeastern Scotland and now living in London, and I’d be curious to know what made him choose Cape Breton as his narrator’s home place. (I don’t object to it, I’m just curious.)
Some times, it feels to me, as if the author has gone with a word or expression that might be more common in the author’s birthplace than in Cape Breton.
Granted, Gaelic was the majority language past the beginning of the 20th century in Cape Breton (although it’s use has been almost entirely lost in the region over the past hundred years or so, there are attempts to revitalize it’s use, with Cape Breton university being the only place in North America that I know of where you can study Gaelic.) I can also quite easily accept that Scots might be used in Cape Breton, but I was left wondering about the likelihood of some of it.

Maybe for me it was that there were actually too few insertions of these home-recall type expressions for them to feel entirely natural to the character, and a feeling that maybe the character would have in reality used them more, at least in his thoughts. I’m not really sure what it was, just that I felt somewhat uneasy with the way some of the language choices were made.

Also, I was somewhat embarrassed, what with my paternal heritage, to note that most of these “Scottishnessess” I only understood from context. (I have learned several things from this narrative and one of them is that there is a Scottish answer to the Scandinavian “hygge” trend – “coorie.“) (Although he way that “coorie” is used within the narrative of this book has only a very little to do with cosiness.)

Some of the politics of this book seem a bit simplistic. If you read this book with your sarcastic-hat pulled on real hard, you might come away with the impression that homeless addicts are roaming the streets of North America today only because of Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist shenanigans and the over-worship of automobiles.

I’m fairly sure it’s more complicated than that, and the book also leaves quite unaddressed the how of how, as far as I’ve been told, although they certainly had problems, with similar backgrounds as the fictional narrator of this book, none of my great-uncles (or aunts) ended up homeless after their war traumas, and it has been my general understanding that most allied (or Canadian, anyway) second world war veterans were better treated by mainstream society after the war than… basically any other cohort of veterans before or since, (given that mental health was even less understood at the time than it is now.) That is not reflected in this book at all. Again, if you had your critical hat on, you could say this book falsely leaves that impression all the allied veterans were shoved off the troop ships when they arrived home and told to find their suppers in the sewers.

So, it did sometimes feel like many things in this book were made to be a bit “extra,” a bit exaggerated, a bit overblown. Although I have no doubt that many of these things are true, and it’s evident the author conducted research into events (there is a “notes” section at the back of the book,) in a narrative, sometimes it’s not so much that I question a thing is true, but that it still feels “too much,” maybe, in some cases such as this book, as if truths that are very serious, might be being used slightly inappropriately to titillate and “entertain.” There was just something off about it sometimes.

And I also found that there’s a little too much trying to make modern political statements out of what could otherwise be an intimate historical tale. This leads to a few instances of what struck me as rather unlikely prescience and also what feel like a few anachronisms. From other reviews, I’ve learned that the author did have a political statement he wanted to make with this book, and I think that’s never a good thing to set out to do with fiction.

Maybe I shouldn’t be thinking of this book as fiction.

I do recommend this book. It might not be obvious, but I do. I enjoyed learning a bit of history (and language) through this book. While I didn’t really like the remember-that-film game, it’s always nice when you encounter another writer who watches old movies. I might be a little uncertain about the narrative’s politics, but I also didn’t really object to them.

I am more than willing to pick up another of Robin Robertson’s books some time, to see what he does with perhaps a different subject.

But, this book is not going to be for everyone. Again, I warn you, there are some pretty grim passages in this book.

But maybe you should try it anyway. Maybe you’ll find it intriguing too. November might be a good month for it.

It’s not a long book to read, at less than 250 pages and with a generous amount of white spaces on those pages. If you’ve read it, or give it a try, I’d be interested in learning what you thought.