The Long Take

Robin Robertson
2019
Rating: 7 (very good, with some defects)

I highly recommend The Long Take, a Man Booker finalist, if, like me, gorgeous, dazzling sentences are basically enough to get you through a novel. I can assert, or maybe even attest, that the author, Robin Robertson, a Scottish poet, is a master of gorgeous sentences. There are too many to even provide examples. I would just reiterate that there was a “wow” moment on almost every page. Really inspiring, beautiful writing.

I hate synopses, but I’ll just say a couple of things about the concept and story. It’s billed on the cover as a “noir narrative,” which is accurate. It’s a novella, a nice short book, perfect for your Covid-shattered attention span. It’s set mostly in LA right after WWII. The protagonist, Walker, is a vet who gets a job as a reporter for a paper in LA. The tale is concerned largely with the changes to downtown L.A., the destruction of a community. The book also winds its way through the making of a number of noir films from that era.

Robertson is more than just a gorgeous-sentence-generating one-trick pony. The way he traces the city’s evolution is compelling. He also exhibits a real talent for mini-vignettes. Chunks of text, a dollop of sentences, that he somehow packs with enough weight to almost qualify as accomplished flash fiction. This one I am going to track down an example of, because I liked it so much. Hold on please.

[Fetches the book.]

There it is, page 122. The only context you need is that Walker is in San Francisco for work, and is just walking around, seeing the sights. I’ll maintain the line breaks as they appear:

He got to work. From the heights to the depths: Howard Street,
south of Market, between 3rd and 4th,
a few blocks away from the Chronicle.
He found a Salvation Army troupe with tambourines
singing in a semi-circle round a bunch of bums: men oblivious
to everything but their jugs of wine.
There’s deep discussion, laughing, hugging,
then a shower of loose punches, and the Army scattering,
some solemn gulps of wine
then more laughs, back-slapping, fumbled rolling of cigarettes.

The Long Take also has what might be the funniest threat I’ve ever read in a novel. I’m not going to write it here, you should just buy and read this book. The threat is on page 136 of the hardcover edition, if you want to cheat, but seriously, just buy and read this book, despite its flaws, which are forgivable, and which I will address in the very next paragraph.

My main complaint with the novella is the way that the plot is concluded, which is a bit of an odd thing to say, because the writing was so good that the story didn’t really need a plot. But, it tried to have one, and the plot that it tried to have held together pretty well for the first 4/5’s of the story (it was pretty minimal and mostly just stayed out of the way of the writing), but then Robertson in a way tried to swing for the fences, in terms of the drama. It’s not correct to say that he failed, it’s just that the final act in the book was a minor let-down relative to the great work that preceded it.

The Long Take to me at times seemed to channel Steinbeck and Hemingway. There’s maybe a bit of Cannery Row in The Long Take, but just a bit; the millieu, mostly. I was not a big fan of the nods to Hemingway (he was fond of “hard” and “clean” as adjectives, like Hemingway ), but these were minimal.

Overall, The Long Take was a pure pleasure, glad to have it on my shelf.