A Long Long Way

Book Review

Sebastian Barry

A Long Long Way takes its name from the old traditional song with the lines, ‘It's a long long way to Tipperary .” It is the story of an ordinary young lad named Willie Dunn. Orphaned at a young age, he grows up attended to by his young sisters with much love, counter-acting the palpable disappointment he engenders in his father, who gives up on Willie following in his footsteps as a police officer because of his short stature. When World War I arrives, Willie joins the Royal Dublin Fusilliers, hoping to support his country and perhaps gain his father's respect and approval into the bargain. As Willie endures life in the trenches, he beings to tentatively question everything he has come to know as fact in his brief life.

This novel is a remarkable and moving account of the horrors of war, as experienced through the eyes of an unremarkable young man. It is a profoundly moving, and at times, deeply disturbing novel.

“And all those boys of Europe born in those times, and thereabouts those times, Russian, Belgian, Serbian, Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, Italian, Prussian, German, Austrian, Turkish – and Canadian, Australian, American, Zulu, Gurkha, Cossack, and all the rest – their fate was written in a ferocious chapter of the book of life, certainly. Those millions of mothers and their million gallons of mothers' milk, millions of instances of small-talk and baby-talk, beatings and kisses, ganseys and shoes, piled up in history in great ruined heaps, with a loud and broken music, human stories told for nothing, for ashes, for death's amusement, flung on the mighty scrap heap of souls, all those million boys in all their humours to be milled by the mill-stones of a coming war.”

“The curse of the world is people thinking thoughts that are only thoughts which have been given to them. They're not their own thoughts. They're like cuckoos in their heads. Their own thoughts are tossed out and cuckoo thoughts are put in instead…”