The Long Take: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Chronicling the drift of a Canadian D-Day veteran across post-war America, Robertson’s Booker-shortlisted tour de force breathtakingly fuses poetry, cinema and the traditions of noir into a moving elegy for a lost age. A staggering achievement.

(Narrative structure in noir is non—linear, complex and twisting and the story is commonly told in the first person by a male narrator. It may be told in a fragmented, maze-like manner or in flashback - a technique which adds to the sense of hopeless/fatalism, since the outcome has already been decided.)

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018.
Winner of The Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018

A noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable - and 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, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles and 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 and 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 and racial division, spiralling corruption and the collapse of the inner cities. The Long Take is about a good man, brutalised by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it - yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself.

Watching beauty and disintegration through the lens of the film camera and the eye of the poet, Robin Robertson's The Long Take is a work of thrilling originality.

MEDIA REVIEWS

'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