The Long Take

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 allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but - as those dark, classic movies made clear - the country needed outsiders to dramatise its new anxieties. While Walker tries to piece his life together, America is beginning to come apart: deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties and brutalised by social and racial division, spiralling corruption and the collapse of the inner cities. This is the story of a good man, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it - yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself. An examination of beauty and disintegration through the lens of the film camera and the eye of the poet, The Long Take is a work of thrilling originality.

Featured in the 2018 Man Book Prize Longlist newsletter.
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