Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, tr. Simon Armitage

⭐⭐⭐⭐
I read Simon Armitage's translation (published by Faber & Faber in the UK, and Norton in the US), and the introduction and notes by Helen Cooper from the Oxford World's Classics edition, after also looking at those by Bernard O'Donoghue in the Penguin Classics edition.
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I'd half forgotten about Gawain and the Green Knight - and I'd definitely forgotten it was set over Christmas and New Year, until I heard this mid-December episode of In Our Time. As I thought during the programme how bored I now was of Simon Armitage - he's become a very regular fixture on BBC arts shows in the last few years - I didn't expect to end up reading his translation of Gawain. But I looked at a couple of others and they seemed too formal and RP. The poem's northernness (or perhaps more precisely north-west-midlandness) is one of the most distinctive things about it, and is what makes it different from other 14th-century English works like The Canterbury Tales or Piers Plowman, and I wanted that to be evident in the translation. Although the beginning of Armitage version didn't have as many dialect words as I'd hoped (nor did it in the full poem), you can hear an accent in it if you're looking, the way you can't in the Penguin or Oxford translations.

However, he says about the translation, "the often-quoted notion that a poem can never be finished, only abandoned, has never felt more true. Even now, further permutations and possibilities keep suggesting themselves, as if the tweaking and fine-tuning could last a lifetime" - and a new revised edition was published in October 2018, so there may even be more dialect in it now.

And - its other great advantage I only fully realised after starting to read it properly - Armitage's version uses alliteration like the original, rather than blank verse or a rhymed meter. One edition's introduction explains that Germanic languages frequently use alliteration as a poetic device, whereas romance languages use rhyme. I love alliteration, but it's kind of uncool: done to excess (and excess is easy to do with alliteration) it can seem like the dad-dancing of English wordplay. (Is that anything to do with its being an older, pre-Norman component of the language?) It was perhaps my favourite aspect of Armitage's Gawain, seeing, for the first time, alliteration used in such quantity and so well, and utterly *allowed*, and never once with a need to cringe.

On the appearance of the Green Knight at Camelot:

The guests looked on. They gaped and they gawked
and were mute with amazement: what did it mean
that human and horse could develop this hue,
should grow to be grass-green or greener still,
like green enamel emboldened by bright gold?
Some stood and stared then stepped a little closer,
drawn near to the knight to know his next move;

Gawain's adventures on the journey northwards in winter:

Where he bridges a brook or wades through a waterway
ill fortune brings him face-to-face with a foe
so foul or fierce he is bound to use force.
So momentous are his travels among the mountains
to tell just a tenth would be a tall order.
Here he scraps with serpents and snarling wolves,
here he tangles with wodwos causing trouble in the crags,
or with bulls and bears and the odd wild boar.
Hard on his heels through the highlands come giants.
Only diligence and faith in the face of death
will keep him from becoming a corpse or carrion.

It brings home how bloody cold a medieval winter felt, with so many fewer hopes of getting warm than we have.

And the wars were one thing, but winter was worse:
clouds shed their cargo of crystallized rain
which froze as it fell to the frost-glazed earth.
With nerves frozen numb he napped in his armour,…

So in peril and pain Sir Gawain made progress,
crisscrossing the countryside until Christmas
Eve…
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Now night passes and New Year draws near,
drawing off darkness as our Deity decrees.
But wild-looking weather was about in the world:
clouds decanted their cold rain earthwards;
the nithering north needled man’s very nature;
creatures were scattered by the stinging sleet.
Then a whip-cracking wind comes whistling between hills
driving snow into deepening drifts in the dales.

It's clear how exhausting a journey through this was, with rest and recuperation much needed, and no shame in the knight lying abed while the lord went out hunting.

“You were weary and worn,
hollow with hunger, harrowed by tiredness,
yet you joined in my revelling right royally every night.

What a contrast Christmas was with the rest of winter under these conditions:
And with meals and mirth and minstrelsy
they made as much amusement as any mortal could,
and among those merry men and laughing ladies
Gawain and his host got giddy together;
only lunatics and drunkards could have looked more delirious.
Every person present performed party pieces
till the hour arrived when revellers must rest,

(Which may have been later than you'd think; A Tudor Christmas, which I read a couple of weeks earlier, stated that in 1494, Henry VII processed at 11pm after mass on Twelfth Night.)

As with all good long poems, there are a handful of lines that don't work, but those that do outweigh those that don't sufficiently to make the off-notes negligible.


Needless to say, all this left me with renewed respect for Armitage, and I enjoyed watching this documentary in which he visited the likely locations the Gawain-poet thought of as he was writing. Lud's Church in North Staffordshire, the probable site of the Green Chapel, really did look like somewhere a high-fantasy film hero would fight a pivotal battle with a monster (or maybe they just filmed it well to make it look that way). If you also remember Armitage from the 90s Mark Radcliffe Radio 1 show, you will probably enjoy the soundtrack too.


Armitage's edition has a short - and interesting - intro, but if you want the best historical background info, the Oxford edition is the place to look, at Helen Cooper's introduction and notes. (The Penguin Bernard O'Donoghue version doesn't have nearly as much.) Info like this was exciting (to me at least) after having heard several briefer, less detailed histories of the text:

the precise detail of this location may however represent the origin of the scribe who copied the poems into the manuscript rather than of the poet himself, who certainly came from the same region but may not be possible to locate with quite the same degree of exactness.

The Wirral was notorious as a refuge for outlaws though the comment here on the wildness of its inhabitants could also be a joke against the poem's first readers since Gawain is travelling into their own home territory. This is, however, the dangerous past, not the familiar present. (So the Liverpool jokes have an ancient history…)

Other highlights included various estimates of when wild boar became hunted to extinction in England; the ranked, and also gendered, classification of hunted beasts; when carpets were probably introduced by Eleanor of Castile; mini-biographies of candidates for the authorship and dedication; the influential coterie of Cheshiremen around Richard II in the 1390s; and that Gawain was part of an Alliterative Revival in poetry, all known works written "in the north or west of England or in southern Scotland".


For a long time I was not all that interested in reading Gawain because I'd never found chivalric culture very interesting and couldn't help but imagine it taking place in the sanitised scenes of Victorian Gothic revival paintings, even though they were obviously hundreds of years later. Not only did I enjoy the alliteration and the descriptions of the winter weather and its effects in the poem, but it helped me start to see chivalry in a different context: grittier, for want of a better word, and part of what seems to have been a confusing, demanding and perhaps sometimes contradictory set of social standards for medieval nobility which I'd actually like to know a bit more about (but paper-length rather than book-length).

The only reason for giving 4 stars rather than 5 is the known fault with the original, that the purported plot by Morgan Le Fay, as explanation for events, is unconvincing. Otherwise, the poem ends with a beautiful and unexpectedly moving final line, as if it were a prayer; although the story is playful and mythical, this reminds the reader of the religion at the heart of medieval life.

(read Dec 2018, review Jan 2019. The review on Goodreads.)

Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania by Adam Mickiewicz, tr. Bill Johnston

The new translation published in 2018 by Archipelago Books. I received a free Advance Review Copy ebook via Edelweiss.

Pan Tadeusz is the Polish classic, the ‘national epic’. In English, there isn’t a sole work with comparable stature and ubiquity.

Given my heritage, the way I'd felt about not having read Pan Tadeusz was much as if I hadn't read - or even really known the stories of - Pride and Prejudice, or Jane Eyre, or Oliver Twist as soon as I could.

But I’m also particular about translations: I didn’t want to read Tadeusz in an old translation with poor style. It was easy not even to try, given the disgraceful lack of Polish classics in UK bookshops and from major British publishers. Pre-internet, I didn’t even know of English translations, and I’ve certainly never seen one to browse in a shop or library, whereas I stumbled on the Oxford edition of the Finnish national epic The Kalevala in a bookshop round about 2002. The sing-song style of Kenneth Mackenzie’s 1964 translation - Amazon preview here, if you scroll past the introduction – was one I knew I could not enjoy, nevermind love, or recommend without apology. Long sequences of obvious line-end rhymes don’t sound good in contemporary English - worse than in some other languages. Mickiewicz’s hero and near-contemporary Byron may have used them in English, but a) twentieth-century translators aren’t Byron and b) I don’t really like the sound of them in Byron anyway.

The lack of a great new translation of Pan Tadeusz in the late 00s - 2010s had puzzled me, given the current enthusiasm for translated books in the English-speaking literary world, and the visibility of Poles in Britain (by the biggest foreign-born minority, and for some years before that, the second). It had been so long that I’d become resigned to never reading it my whole life, and just watching the Andrzej Wajda film instead. (I watched a few of his in the spring but - now, it seems, luckily - hadn’t got round to his Pan Tadeusz.)


So I don’t think I’ve ever been as delighted to see a book appear in my Goodreads feed as I was to sight this, Bill Johnston’s new translation of Pan Tadeusz, just over a week ago. Bill Johnston, who translated my favourite contemporary Polish book, Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk, a thing of intoxicating atmosphere and exquisite descriptions. Thank you very much to Goodreads friend Lee Klein for posting about the advance review copy he’d received from Archipelago, and thereby alerting me to this translation's existence. I went straight over to Edelweiss, which I hadn’t been on for about 18 months, and was able to get an e-ARC there. Reading it has been accompanied by strange synergies: learning of a direct ancestor named Tadeusz whose lifetime overlapped the fictional one, and this morning finding the Windows Spotlight random lockscreen picture was of another, entirely different, ancestral area.

Once or twice, as I started the book, I felt foolish for not having read an earlier translation cover to cover, that I wouldn’t be writing a full-scale comparison in a review. But a quick look back at the beginning of the Mackenzie, and the Project-Gutenberg-age Noyes prose translation, made me glad - as first impressions have a stronger effect on me than they ought - that I was reading it for the first time in a version which I could love in the way that I love a few great English classics.


This is a seriously impressive feat of translation. (Johnston’s webpage indicates he’s been working on it since 2013.) I think I’ve only read two other volumes of translated poetry I found as good in themselves, Edna St Vincent Millay’s version of Baudelaire (in a class apart, and a reworking as much as a translation) and the [book:New Collected Poems|305941] of Tomas Transtromer, translated by Robin Fulton. I also loved Keith Bosley’s translation of the Kalevala – which I now hanker to re-read – but much of that was for the story and atmosphere, and I more often wondered how lines would have sounded in the original, than marvelled at the construction in English.

Mickiewicz wrote Pan Tadeusz in a characteristic Polish meter, thirteen-syllable alexandrines. Johnston has transposed it into the classic English iambic pentameter, and made wonderful use of enjambment, half-rhymes and similar devices that feel like real poetry which has stood the test of time and sound right to the contemporary reader. (The meter also augmented the quality of the multiple-wedding ending, by association with Shakespearean comedy.) The rhyming couplets do not weigh down the ends of lines as they would from a lesser pen. Johnston states in his introduction that this is also a line-by-line translation. As someone who has never been able to write so much as a decent limerick, I find that phenomenal. There is the occasional line or word that doesn’t quite work on more than a scansion level, but in such a long poem, that is only to be expected, and the great stuff by far outweighs the misfires.



I didn’t realise how little I knew (or maybe how much I’d forgotten) about Pan Tadeusz before I read it. Tadeusz himself is only nineteen. (He first appears in a wonderful scene of returning home after finishing university, one which in some respects could only have occurred so far in the past, and in a large country - he didn’t visit during his studies, nor hear much news from relatives - but which is also beautifully familiar in its evocation of how a place once known has changed, and seeing one’s old room repurposed.) He is present in many scenes, but is by no means at the centre of all the action - I can see why the poem has an alternative subtitle. It is contemporaneous with parts of War and Peace, and is another of the 19th century great works springing from the Napoleonic Wars – and of course the ominous Great Comet of 1811 is sighted:

Then hauling them north, toward the polar star.
All Lithuania, filled with dread untold,
Nightly would watch this spectacle unfold—
An evil sign, with other auguries:
Birds of ill omen gave portentous cries
And gathered in empty fields, bills sharpened, massed
As though expecting corpses for a feast.
Dogs, rooting obstinately in the earth,
Howled and howled shrilly, as if smelling death—
Betokening war or famine; foresters
Saw the Plague Maiden in the graveyard firs,
Head higher yet than where the treetops stand,
A bloodied scarf aflap in her left hand.

The portent is left hanging in the air, because, as Johnston explains in the introduction, the text largely conveys a sense of hope, by ending before battle, when the Napoleonic army might still help Poland-Lithuania free itself from the Russians. Even snapshots of historical defeat can sound victorious to the uninitiated:

Next comes Jasiński, handsome, young, unbending,
Alongside Korsak, his bosom companion, standing
On Praga’s ramparts on heaped Russian dead,
Hacking down more as Praga blazes red.

Old Maciej, one of my favourite characters, is more circumspect about the forthcoming battle, but is finally shifted aside for this opinion. Emotionally, the story’s ending feels happy, even if you know it’s not actually going to be later. It’s evident why Pan Tadeusz endured, and sustained Poles through partition and the Soviet bloc years.

A lot of the poem is made up of two types of scene. There's pastoral description, which I love - I’m one of the few people who would have liked Anna Karenina better if there were more of it – but the sheer quantity of scenery probably has a lot to do with the low rating of the book by Poles, for whom it is a permanent, national fixture on their equivalent of the A-level syllabus. And secondly, large-scale, largely drunken fighting. Most of the conflict is related in a detailed and exciting way which worked brilliantly for me as a fan of action films. I liked hearing about the characters (lots of the ‘retired badass’ trope, a favourite of mine) and their histories and weapons, and there was just the right number of them – enough to give a feeling of scale, but not so many it was confusing or that they were reduced to the sort of brief mentions that, IMO, made parts of the Iliad little more than a casualty list. A ‘foray’ here is a kind of armed raid by neighbours that took place to enforce a court decision in an area without police, and there seems to have been something of a raiding culture – although not as lawless as the Scots/English Border Reivers – which had declined through the later 18th century and which by the time Pan Tadeusz is set, had pretty much disappeared under Russian rule.

For those who love to absorb social history through fiction and poetry, especially this kind of rural setting found in Tolstoy, and as Johnston points out, Thomas Hardy (now I want to read more Hardy!), Pan Tadeusz is a feast. And boy are there feasts in this book...


Some readers may wish to be forewarned that there are hunting scenes; these occur in much the same way you’d find in Tolstoy, couched in descriptions of nature and landscape. The age of one of the female love interests may bother some English-speaking readers, although from the perspective of historical understanding, I found the way she was presented interesting. When Zosia first appeared, I read her as 16, 17 or 18 (and with her peasanty clothes and habit of using windows as doors, I imagined her looking like a slightly younger version of Malina in Wajda’s Brzezina). Throughout the story - if it hadn’t been for the one scene in which Zosia’s aunt mentions that she is 13 and now of age - I would have assumed that she was in her mid to late teens. She simply seems to be regarded by society in a way that, in an English novel of the same period, reflected a girl a few years older. (I have seen a few genealogical records of 15 year olds married in late 18th-19th century Poland, and this was a region in which the West European Marriage Pattern did not apply.)

The aunt, Telimena (probably in her 30s) may not always be so flatteringly portrayed later in the poem as she is at first, but what stuck with me most strongly was the first scene in which she appears:
So she asked about new books, and how he rated
Their authors (she spoke in French), while his replies
Led to more questions touching on his views.
And then—well, then she turned to music, dance,
Art, sculpture too. Her knowledge was immense,
Whether of canvas, score, or printed word.
Her learning left Tadeusz stunned, and scared
That he’d end up exposed to ridicule;
He stammered like a pupil quizzed in school.

This is a work that has a place for an intelligent woman, in a way that by no means all 19th century literature does, even if, it’s later indicated, she might be a bit too much of a pretentious hipster and too modern. She doesn’t meet a bad end, either, it’s a pragmatic one, even if she doesn’t remain on a pedestal.


I’m pretty sure no-one had ever told me before that Pan Tadeusz is humorous. It gives it whole layers of enjoyment I never expected. (What did I used to think it was? Probably something about a 60-year old man reminiscing about his life and travels.) This is the Romantic movement partly being itself, and partly laughing at itself. Perfect for my sensibilities. It’s epic poetry… but it also mentions things like swatting flies while preparing to cook; the epic form is sometimes mocked, sometimes used in earnest. It struck me that another classic Polish poet, Juliusz Słowacki, criticised it as 'piggish' for its low rural comedy and domesticity - this is the stuff for which I like it so much. Even calling it Pan Tadeusz after a character who isn't the centre of the action and who is neither hugely heroic nor anti-heroic, seems part of the semi-satire. Older characters and customs reflect Sarmatianism, essentially an earlier, institutionalised form of Romanticism particular to Poland-Lithuania, Hungary and some neighbouring countries. The foray happens basically because a young nobleman who’s been on the Grand Tour thinks ancient family feuds are really cool.


Pan Tadeusz was written in Polish, is seen as a Polish work, and several characters are described as ‘good Poles’ – but the action takes place in what is now Belarus, where Mickiewicz was born, and the narrative frequently hails Lithuania. This is the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the greatest powers of early modern Europe (Russia’s incipient colonial expansion had not yet made it the looming great bear) but barely known to many Westerners who don’t read East European history or play historical strategy games. As Johnston relates in his introduction, its apparently progressive system of elected monarchs also led to its weakening and demise, and to the partition of Poland among neighbouring powers in the late 18th century. Pan Tadeusz is the story of Polish-speaking gentry, szlachta (some Polish by ancestry, some Lithuanian, many mixed) and their rivalry with local aristocrats – the former had some differences of status from English gentry – but it doesn’t relate what local Lithuanian-speaking peasantry (serfs) thought of all this. This mélange of nationalities spilling across borders doesn’t, again, have direct equivalents in the contemporary English speaking West, and it reflects the multicultural pre-Second World War Central and Eastern Europe, before many of those identifying as Poles, Germans etc were resettled within the current borders of those countries, and of course before the Jewish communities were destroyed. (Through the whole poem, there are 3 or 4 lines that read as antisemitic or negative stereotypes of Jews – in 2018, the notes’ description of the blood libel as a canard doesn’t look a strong enough word ... even 3 years ago these things seemed more of the past. But there are a lot more lines representing Jewishness positively, via the innkeeper Jankiel, who is shown as very popular and an all-round top bloke.)

Pan Tadeusz is a text haunted by a future its author could never have known. Look up character surnames online and there are famous people born long after Mickiewicz died, who must spring to mind for many modern Polish readers. Look up place names online and it’s massacre after hideous massacre, the repetition reinforcing horrific statistic that over 95% of Jews in Lithuania were killed, by Nazis and locals from 1941-44, to the point that I started wondering how on earth anyone descended from Lithuanian Jews made it – although of course, like Bob Dylan’s grandparents, most of their forebears would have left quite some time earlier.

This edition has good notes which stick to the directly relevant 18th-19th century history – Mickiewicz’s original notes, which he wrote because he was writing about an area and mostly-vanished customs unfamiliar even to many Polish readers of the 1830s, and more by Bill Johnston. (Johnston’s introduction is also great for historical context. One small point I’d like to respond to: he says that the only gratuitous glorification of anything Polish is of coffee; I think I noticed one more: frogs.)

It was because I was reading on desktop that I looked so much on Wikpedia and elsewhere, and took so long to read the book. (It is quite a short text, with a Kindle count of 3600.) I don’t mind the layout issues of PDF ARCs converted to Kindle when a book is in prose, but for poetry, I want to read the words on the right lines. Reading on desktop did mean, though, that I got a fuller cultural picture of references in the book when I looked things up online – which is what I wanted for such a momentous read in personal terms. It was also interesting to follow tangents such as photos of ethnographic folk museums, the disagreements between the pre-war Litvak and Galician Jewish communities and the Gefilte fish line, and the mostly-complimentary Chicago Polish stereotype, Grabowski and associated, less flattering, comedy sketches. If you don’t feel compelled to read all the history you will be fine with the endnotes in the book – only snag is they are not linked in the text, at least in the e-ARC.


If you are going to read Pan Tadeusz in English, you should read this translation, which deserves to become the definitive modern one. If you’ve read it previously in another version and didn’t like it much, but the work is important to you, re-read it in this one. I hope Johnston’s version ends up as a Penguin or Oxford Classic, because it bloody well should - though one of them bloody well should have done Pan Tadeusz a long time ago. (Random House’s buying up of Knausgård from Archipelago leads me to hope that this edition might get the distribution it deserves by a similar route.)

Sometimes it seems a shame that the best-known translation prizes, like the Booker International and the BTBA don’t accept re-translations. It's obvious why they don't, as a rule: a Pevear & Volokhonsky rendition of a popular Russian novel that’s already been translated fifteen times doesn’t need the publicity, but lesser-known classics may – and when a translation of one of those is superlatively good, as this one is, it deserves acclaim and attention.

This is a bit like when I finished War and Peace, except that then, there had been longer to get used to it: I still can’t quite believe I’ve actually read Pan Tadeusz. And I really can't believe that it was this enjoyable.

(read and reviewed September 2018; the review and comment thread on Goodreads.)

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize. A first for a verse novel?


I bloody love long narrative poems, and I wish there were a lot more modern novels in this form. Not sure why I find poetry faster to read - know it isn't the case for everyone. For me, it goes straight into the veins, and it omits the extraneous, leaving only the most vital impressions. Or maybe it's the presentation: shorter lines and more white space on the page make it visually easier to take in.

It was the form that made me keen to read this, but the US setting held little interest. If a prose novel about a demobbed Canadian serviceman adrift in post-WWII America had been longlisted for the Booker, I'd have been in no hurry to get round to it. And if The Long Take had been set anywhere other than North America, I could have seen myself giving it five stars.

I haven't read anything about Robin Robertson yet; it would be interesting to learn why a Scottish poet chose to set a long work there. I have a hunch that the protagonist, Walker, was one of those characters who appears to a writer from the subconscious: a British writer's use of Dad's Army names Walker and Pike for characters who bear little resemblance (other than Pike's youth) to their sitcom namesakes feels like the product of a dream.

The Scottishness of Nova Scotia, where Walker grew up, was a revelation, full of shielings and strathspeys and slaters. (The last of course being a better word than the standard English, reflecting the creatures' hard, flat dark-panelled appearance; 'woodlouse' has always sounded like it ought to mean another, leggier, creepy-crawly.) The place felt Scottish or British even without dialect words: at first in the nostalgic passages about nature, I thought Robertson was writing about Scotland, perhaps from a different viewpoint, maybe his own, and perhaps we would hear later in these sections about the writing process. (There turns out to be no such meta content.) He is at his most vividly poetic and metaphorical when writing about animals and nature - these are largely asides in this book, such as the spider that winches itself from the lampshade in Walker's apartment: were I to read more of his work, it would be nature poetry I'd look for first.

Thank you to this thread for a couple of insights. Firstly, putting me on the alert for elements of contemporary relevance; what jumped out at me, as if it had been highlighted, was the homelessness problem in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, and characters' criticism of the government and media being more concerned with Russians it said Russians rather than Soviets) and McCarthyism than with the housing shortage. A modern feature of the narrative, when set against 1940s attitudes and writing, is that characters are never explicitly described by their race: there were once or twice names that might be Latin, or Native American, and characters who were explicitly stated to be black only once it came up in conversation, in both instances due to racists. (This approach seeks to transmit a sense of comradeship between men in the story as veterans and/or as homeless, regardless of colour, and to imply Walker's progressive outlook, in contrast with some of his contemporaries.) Secondly, a point which is a spoiler if you enjoy working out conundra while you read - but as I read a good chunk of The Long Take whilst I had a headache so bad it hurt even to put my head on a pillow, and could not have read anything very complex, it was simply useful: that Pike is probably more than one person. I would add that I think he only becomes so in the final chapter, 1953. As Walker's mental state deteriorates, Pike becomes a generalised identity he maps on to various antagonists.

The story sometimes felt nebulous, but the final chapter (about 1/3 of the book) pulled it together - and retrospectively it became increasingly obvious that this randomness and half-rootedness, interspersed with episodes of purposefulness, had always reflected Walker's state of mind, as trauma seeped in, even when intrusive memories of horrific army experiences were not at the forefront of his memories. I hadn't bonded with the book until that final third; what led me to was seeing the trajectory of how Walker worked with a group of disadvantaged people with whom he felt an affinity, only to later find his own situation deteriorating so that he gets closer and closer to becoming one of them; to being on the other side of the desk, object not subject. A revelation during that chapter also explains certain points earlier in the story. Though are we meant to be sure that Walker did those things - or to wonder if he imagined them in his traumatised state?

But The Long Take is not all psychological drama. It's immersed in the culture of its time. There is jazz. And it is a paean to US film noir of the late 1940s and 1950s, set alongside the messy real lives of some of the men who watched it in movie theaters, and witnessed it being filmed in the streets where they went about their daily lives. It is suffused with references to favourite scenes (the 'long take' is from Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy aka Deadly is the Female), and characters are described as looking like actors of the period. (And at least one, from a 1958 film seems to denote a lapse of time once years stop being mentioned explicitly.) If you like these films this book will probably be rather amazing. I've hardly seen any of the films referenced, yet something is still added in the general understanding, as they conjure visuals for Walker's story in trenchcoat-clad black and white, and in the symbiosis between man and city, Walker disintegrating as 1950s LA becomes less human in scale, more corrupt and more corporate. (I could imagine just how much I'd love an equivalent prose-poem shot through with cinematic movements I know well, such as French New Wave, or British films of the 1960s and 70s. Or, for that matter, classic Ealing films being made on the other side of the Atlantic contemporaneously with these noirs.)

It is an impressive work in pulling together, as poetry and narrative, elements of this era that the public rarely regards together. The modern idealisation of the Greatest Generation, bulldog spirit and so forth disregards the extent to which the war was traumatic for many, and that not everyone could keep calm and carry on, no matter how much they wanted to. Noir and jazz, still seen as epitomes of cool were created against this backdrop. The death of Charlie Parker, born the same year as the protagonist, is starkly announced to make his and the reader's blood run cold. This is echoed (two years) later with the bombshell news "Bogart is dead", like another big bump downwards in Walker's trajectory: an end of an era and an icon of always keeping it together under pressure. In a very subtle way, using history, cinema and music, Robertson appears to be looking at the demands on men to keep up a façade, and how things may be when they can't. (The white men in the book are dealing with war trauma, the black men with that and racial violence.) But interpretation is optional here: this is a story so fully about itself and its setting (absolutely no sledgehammers here) that it also doesn't have to be anything else.

(read & reviewed August 2018; the review on Goodreads.)