A Long Long Way, by Sebastian Barry

Trigger warning for brief description of rape and mutilation.

I always read historical fiction about soldiers with my heart in my mouth. I never know if the author is going to pull the rug out from under me by killing the protagonist or the protagonist’s love interest. This goes triple for books set during World War I, when it seemed like only the sheerest dumb luck kept men from being killed by bombs, poison gas, illness, trench foot, and their commanders’ idiocy. Therefore, reading Sebastian Barry’s beautifully written account of Willie Dunne, A Long Long Way, was challenging. At any moment, Willie could be struck down. On the other hand, he might be one of the few to survive.

Willie was raised to believe in protecting order by his father, a Dublin policeman. He’d’ve become a police officer himself but he was six inches too short to be recruited, much to his father’s disappointment. He finds an opportunity to serve the English king when World War I breaks out. A Long Long Way (a reference to the song, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary“) follows Willie for years as he and the ever-shifting ranks of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He and his fellow soldiers see some of the worst of the war. They’re gassed in 1915. They fight in the first Battle of the Somme in 1916. His fellow soldiers witness the aftermath of German atrocities in Belgium. They’re told to march across lethal mud and charge into machine gun emplacements. Some of them have to be returned to England because they can’t stop shaking.

On his first furlough home, Willie witnesses the outbreak of the Easter Rising. He has no idea at the time that a good portion of Ireland will win independence from the United Kingdom in a few years. All he sees are bullets coming from buildings into soldiers of His Majesty’s army, accompanied by shouts from his officers to fire on civilians. There’s a good chance that Willie knows some of the people among those civilians and seeing a young revolutionary die in front him rattles Willie in a way that few other deaths (and he sees many in the course of this book) have. What does it mean to fight the Germans in Belgium when British soldiers are in Ireland killing Willie’s countrymen? Whose soldier is he now?

Barry’s writing—episodic and vibrant with cussing and tale-telling—carried me through this deeply affecting novel. I don’t know how Barry did it, but so much of this book feels true, as though the Irish men who fought the war are still here to tell their stories. The men we meet, some heartbreakingly briefly, come to life with small details: a soldier who carries a small library with him to lend to his mates, a priest who lets the small sins go, a sergeant who doesn’t know he talks to himself aloud. Willie himself is a bit of an every man, who “doesn’t know his own mind” for much of the book. Barry uses him to describe incredible moments of emotional intensity as Willie witnesses friends blown to pieces or reflects on the brutal punishments meted out to soldiers who refuse to obey orders or even the astonishing beauty of landscapes before they’re destroyed by artillery.

A Long Long Way is an outstanding work of historical fiction.