A long long way

Willie Dunne is born in a storm during the dying days of Ireland. It is not an auspicious beginning. This novel of Ireland and World War I wears a cloak of gloom and doom as thick as the opening storm. Willie's mother dies young. Willie enlists in the army and fights on the Western Front. Willie's sweetheart marries another, and so on. The wartime scenes are brutally realistic. Throughout this dark novel, though, are glimpses of sweetness and light, such as a scene where Willie's father bathes the returning soldier in an attempt to rid him of lice. Those not familiar with British-Irish history may find some of the personal conflicts and politics in the novel confusing, but nevertheless a compellingly sad, if difficult, read. --Marta Segal Copyright 2005 Booklist

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori-that's the line from Horace (later famously quoted by war poet Wilfred Owen) that Irish poet, playwright and novelist Barry seeks to debunk in this grimly lyrical WWI novel. After four years of brutal trench fighting, Willie Dunne, once an eager soldier in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, is still a "long long way" from home. Irish Home Rule seems a distant fantasy after the miserable Easter 1916 uprising in Dublin, which Willie, back in Ireland on his first furlough, was forced to help quell, firing on his own people; relations with his pro-British father, who abhors Willie's equivocal stance on Irish nationalism, have soured; his beloved Gretta has married another man; and most of his original Irish band of brothers have been slaughtered. The novel's dauntless realism and acute figurative language recall the finest chroniclers of war (Willie supposes that dead French soldiers "lay all about their afflicted homeland like beetroots rotting in the fields"). Still, Barry lingers too long on the particulars of the battlefield-the lice, the putrid muck-while failing to adequately develop the disasters Willie must face back in Ireland. As such, this somber novel-unlike Barry's moving previous book, Annie Dunne, whose eponymous narrator is Willie's younger sister-often lacks the nonsoldier human faces necessary to fully counterpoint the coarseness of military conflict, though its inevitably bleak conclusion is heartrending. Agent, Derek Johns at A.P Watt (U.K.). (Feb. 7) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Barry's prequel to the fine Annie Dunne (2002) turns to WWI for the story of a young Dublin soldier who loses love, crown, country, and family in the war-torn desolation. Willie Dunne is the older brother of Annie (she was born in 1900), and all might have been very different for them indeed had Willie only grown tall enough to have entered the metropolitan police force. His own stern and principled father was himself Dublin's chief superintendent of police, looking very much the part from his towering height of six-foot-six, an entire foot above small Willie, only son among four siblings in this motherless family. Since six feet was required for entering the force, Willie was impelled in other directions--and there did happen to be the war ("if he could not be a policeman, he could be a soldier"). And so he ships out for Belgium, leaving behind his beloved Gretta, whom he'd met when she was only 13 (and he 17). Barry is authentic and unflinching as a novelist of the war, neither sparing nor overdramatizing anything as Willie goes under fire, sees death all around him, undergoes his first gas attack, even visits a brothel--an incident, indirectly, that will bring about his loss of Gretta. But politics is what really traps Willie. At the end of a home leave, he and other troops are employed in putting down the Irish nationalists' Easter 1916 uprising, and, when he sees the nationalists simply shot down, Willie's own sense of identity with them is awakened. A letter home carries a hint of this feeling, and on Willie's next leave, his father--conservative, royalist, servant of three monarchs--bans him from his home. Back on the front, Willie no longer has Gretta, is despised by the Irish nationalists for serving England, by the loyalists for sympathizing with the nationalists, and by the English for being Irish. Willie's end will be alone--and utterly, utterly pointless. Flawless, honest, humane, moving. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

"In 1914, Willie Dunne, barely eighteen years old, leaves behind Dublin, his family and the girl he plans to marry in order to enlist in the Allied forces and face the Germans on the Western Front. Once there he encounters violence on a scale he could not have imagined and sustains his spirit with only the words on the pages from home and the camaraderie of the mud-covered Irish boys who fight and die by his side. Dimly aware of the political tensions that have grown in Ireland in his absence, Willie returns on leave to find a world split and ravaged by forces closer to home. Despite the comfort he finds with his family, he knows that he must rejoin his regiment and fight until the end. Sebastian Barry renders Willie's personal struggle as well as the overwhelming consequences of war."--BOOK JACKET.