The Book Club

@kent f OBE wrote:

Nearly finished reading – Call Me Elizabeth – not a brilliant book but a good book nevertheless. A true story by a lady from the Medway Towns in Kent, so a local lass (ish), who became a call girl to help keep afloat from debts and put her 6 children through private school. A book you can read in a couple of days, so if you fancy a quickie :lol: pick it up.

ok elizabeth

He was born in the dying days.
It was the withering end of 1896. He was called William after the long-dead Orange King, because his father took an interest in such distant matters. On top of that, an old great-uncle, William Cullen, was yet living in Wicklow, across the mountains as they used to say, where his father himself had been reared.
The winter sleet bit into the Dublin cab-men, where they gathered in their mucky gabardines by the Round Room in Great Britain Street. The stony face of the old building remained indifferent, with its strange decoration of ox-skulls and draperies.
The new babies screeched inside the thick grey walls of the Rotunda Hospital. Blood gathered on the nurses’ white laps like the aprons of butchers.
He was a little baby and would be always a little boy. He was like the thin upper arm of a beggar with a few meagre bones shot through him, provisional and bare.
When he broke from his mother he made a mewling sound like a wounded cat, over and over.
That was the night of a storm that would not be a famous storm. But, for all that, it rattled the last leaves out of the regal oaks in the old pleasure gardens behind the hospital, and it drove the wet harvest along the gutters and into the gaping drains and down into the unknown avenues of the great sewers. The blood of births was sluiced down there too, and all the many liquids of humanity, but the salt sea at Ringsend took everything equally.
His mother took him to her breast with the exhausted will that makes heroes of most mothers. The fathers stood well away, taking a beer in the Ship Hotel. The century was old and weak, but the men spoke of horses and taxes. A baby knows nothing, and Willie knew nothing, but he was like a scrap of a song nonetheless, a point of light in the sleety darkness, a beginning.

And all those boys of Europe born in those times, and thereabouts those times, Russian, French, Belgian, Serbian, Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, Italian, Prussian, German, Austrian, Turkish – and Canadian, Australian, American, Zulu, Gurkha, Cossack, and all the rest – their fate was written in a ferocious chapter of the book of life, certainly. Those millions of mothers and their million gallons of mothers’ milk, millions of instances of small-talk and baby-talk, beatings and kisses, ganseys and shoes, piled up in history in great ruined heaps, with a loud and broken music, human stories told for nothing, for ashes, for death’s amusement, flung on the mighty scrapheap of souls, all those million boys in all their humours to be milled by the mill-stones of a coming war.

So read the opening lines of Sebastian Barry’s masterpiece, first published in 2005 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Although losing out that year to another astonishing work – THE SEA by fellow Irishman John Banville, A LONG LONG WAY is an unforgettable experience charting heartbreaking division, unspeakable loss and the ultimate glory of artistic and imaginative redemption against the horrific backdrop of one of the bloodiest conflicts brought to the planet by man.
Young Willie Dunne marches into war with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, an Irishman fighting for the allied cause, just as trouble festers in his own homeland, culminating in the 1916 Easter Rising rebellion and the Irish Proclamation of Independence from Britain.
Where the most stringent loyalties are tested all round, from family and loved ones to patriotic duty, not only do the soul destroying trenches of World War 1 Europe hold deathly sway, but the entrenchment of spirit and thought itself. Mass carnage and collective sacrifice across Europe for a war fought to protect small nations running parallel to political upheaval, war and uprising in an Ireland seeking self determination itself.
At times almost unbearably savage, at times tearfully tender. Screaming and unflinching, yet elegant and beautiful.. A LONG LONG WAY is a work of intense humanity. Resonant and authentic.

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955.

It’s not the whole book :? :lol: