Book Club Guide

The Long Take

by Robin Robertson · 2018 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The veteran who cannot go home — Normandy's aftermath carried into American cities
Postwar Los Angeles and San Francisco being demolished for freeways
Verse and prose combined — a form that resists easy categorisation

About this book

Walker, a D-Day veteran from Nova Scotia, drifts through Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York in the years after the Second World War, unable to return home, haunted by what he saw and did in Normandy. Robertson's Walter Scott Prize-winning work — part novel, part book-length poem — captures postwar American cities being demolished for freeways while a generation of traumatised veterans disappear into them.

Published in 2018, The Long Take won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize — unusual for a book-length poem. Robertson is primarily known as a poet, and the novel reflects that background formally throughout.

Discussion questions

The novel is written in a combination of verse and prose. What does this hybrid form achieve — and how does it relate to Walker's fractured experience of memory and trauma?
Walker witnesses American cities being torn down — neighbourhoods demolished for freeways — in the same years he's processing what he witnessed in Normandy. How does Robertson connect these forms of destruction?
The novel doesn't use quotation marks or conventional punctuation throughout. What does this formal choice do to the reading experience — and does it serve the disorientation Walker experiences?
Walker is a Nova Scotia veteran who cannot return home. How does Robertson develop this displacement — what would 'home' even mean for someone in his condition?
The Long Take won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction despite being formally a poem as much as a novel. What does this recognition say about genre boundaries — and what does the hybrid form achieve that a conventional novel about PTSD might not?