‘The Long Take’ by Robin Robertson (2018) – 227 pages

This atmospheric and expressive poem of a novel ”The Long Take’ takes place in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the years 1946 thru 1953. Our man Walker, born and raised in Nova Scotia, went to fight on the European front in World War II. He was one of the soldiers who was in the D-Day landing force and battled the Nazis across France. In other words he saw the very worst fighting. Now he, unlike so many others, has returned physically intact and winds up in Los Angeles where he gets a job as a reporter.

However he is still haunted by his war memories.

“Naked soldiers dead on the beach, clothes blown off by an anti-tank mine. I was staring at their crew-cuts washed flat by each wave, then the hairs springing back up.”

After the war Walker travels by train from New York to Los Angeles in search of a job. In Los Angeles, Walker finds a seedy but clean rooming house to board in and heads downtown for the night.

“Six blocks of fairground, spilling out on the street: eyes

red as tail-lights, servicemen, longshoremen, oilmen,

Chinese, Japanese, Negroes, Filipinos, Mexicans, Indians,

even Hindus and Sikhs; streetcars, automobiles,

horns going, the panhandlers, streetwalkers, kids rolling drunks,

scuffles down the alleyways,; saloon doors,

swinging open to jukebox music

and a gash of laughter;

police cruisers,; the call of hot dog sellers,

whispers from the pimps and the whores,

the dealers; the cops out on the corners,

the soldiers and sailors, their whistles, shouts,

broken bottles, reefer smoke, beer and sweat

this was the city.“

As you can see, ‘The Long Take’ is a narrative poem with evocative imagery that captures both the horrors of war as well as the crazed free spirit of Los Angeles after the war Alongside the skid rows and the seedy sections of Los Angeles, the movie makers are filming the classic noir movies: ‘Night and the City’, ‘He Walked by Night’, ‘The Big Combo’, etc., etc.

Not only are the movies here noir; the suggestive writing of Robin Robertson is also noir:

“”And he noticed a girl over by the jukebox, dancing

on her hind legs,tipping her toes like a cat

at the end of a rope.”

By 1953, they are tearing down old Los Angeles to put up parking lots.

“The blade sign reading MASON – HOME OF MEXICAN FILMS

was being levered off the brick but this was once

the Mason Opera House, where Isadora Duncan danced

in front of fifteen hundred, according to the old guy watching,

and Sarah Bernhardt played – what? – forty, fifty, years ago.

As the sign came free of the wall and fell,

he turned and walked away.”

If a novel is written as a narrative poem and it is not too difficult for me to follow, it usually winds up being one of my favorite novels, combining both the delights of fiction and poetry. That is the case with the Booker shortlisted ‘The Long Take’.

Grade:    A