The Long Take

A stunning modern epic that innovatively combines noir narrative and lyrical poetry, The Long Take follows Walker, a survivor of D-Day, from bucolic Cape Breton to an America beset by paranoia and corruption.

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 finds his way from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco, we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but — as those dark, classic movies made clear — the country needed outsiders to study and dramatize its new anxieties. Both an outsider and, gradually, an insider, Walker finds work as a journalist, and tries to piece his life together as America is beginning to come apart: riven by social and racial divisions, spiraling corruption, and the collapse of the inner cities.

An epic for the modern world, it is a tale of damaged people trying to find kindness in the world, of cynicism and paranoia, and of redemption. Robin Robertson's fluid verse pans with filmic immediacy across the postwar urban scene — and into the heart of an unforgettable character. The Long Take is a genre-crossing work of stunning originality, beauty, and immediacy.