The Long Take by Robin Robertson: book review

The Long Take: A Way to Lose More Slowly (2018) is set in America from 1946 to 1953, after the Second World War.

Canadian D-Day veteran Walker returns home from the war with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Haunted by violence and the deaths of too many friends and colleagues at the Normandy landings, he returns in a state of mental fog and fatigue.

He does not want to return to his family in rural Nova Scotia where people will ask too many questions about what he has experienced. Instead, he loses himself in the anonymity of the large cities of America: New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Written in poetic form, the writing is evocative and full of strong atmospheric imagery as he writes of a man in search of the American Dream and the vision of America – but Skid Row is not the dream. He desperately tries to find a way to stop his descent to depression and doom.

This is an extraordinary novel, with postcard messages, flashbacks, narrative, poetry, and black-and-white photographs of a post-war life in America.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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