Barry´s novel A Long Long Way

Dear all,

Some time ago, I mentioned that I had found Sebastian Barry´s novel A Long Long Way in a bookshop in Oslo and several of you had already read it by then. Finally, I have now come around to start reading it. And what a read. Even if I have come only half-way through it, its impossible to put it down. 

Through the studies in the Oxford course on WWI English poetry and other history studies, most of what Barry tells is familiar. But it is the way he tells it all and the way he interweaves other violence ghat is going on at the same time, such as the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. 

Barry´s language is gripping and in places, even in the midst of the most violent fights, it can verge on poetic prose.

There is one passage that shows that Barry has done his home-work thoroughly, not only as fighting history goes, but that he also knows his history of the art of the WWI. About a page into chapter 9 we read:

"There were heaps of men there also. Up the jammed communication trenches moved those eerie lines of blinded, miserable men, a hand on the shoulder of the man in front, a cursing, still-sighted man at the head of all, leading them away. Of the twelve hundred, how many remained?"

Isn´t this an extraordinary verbal description of Sir John Singer Sargent´s famous painting Gassed from 1918?

Barry´s novel feels like a "companion" to Erich Maria Remarque´s novel All Quiet on the Wester Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) from 1929. Remarque has fictionalised his own experiences of the WWI, where as Barry, born in 1955, has had to study archives and other information. Remarque describes the life of a soldier on the German side, and Barry that of an Irish one on the Western side. But the experiences of the two soldiers in the trenches on the Western front, and they suffer the same horrors and terrors.

Barry´s novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2005, and I just wonder what novel did win the award? It would be interesting to know what you all think about Barry´s novel. Are you as fascinated of it as I am? 

Best wishes

Elsa