From Tipperary to hell and back

There are plenty of books about the first world war, but that’s not to say there isn’t room for another. In any case, this, I think, is the first novel to take as its hero a young Irish volunteer, stepping up to fight for the Allies in 1915.

Too short to be a policeman like his father, 18-year-old Willie Dunne sees his chance to be a soldier and a hero when he reads of Kitchener’s appeal. And indeed, John Redmond the Irish leader has ‘echoed the call’, having received from the British ‘the sure and solemnly given promise of self-rule’ when the war is over. So Private Willie Dunne is shipped out of Ireland and flung into the trenches. Surviving a desperate year, he returns home on leave only to be dragooned into fighting his fellow countrymen on the Dublin streets: it is the Easter Rising. He knows so little about the circumstances that he believes the Germans have invaded. Horrified by the carnage, confused and despairing, he returns to the trenches. He can no longer be certain that his cause is just — for whom is he fighting? His country? His family? King and empire? The clear, true motives which got him into the war have been poisoned and spoiled.

Barry has realised Willie’s character before, in The Steward of Christendom. In this highly successful play set in the 1930s Thomas Dunne, a deranged old man, is tormented by voices from his past, one of which belongs to his son. This boy, with his haunting singing voice, becomes Willie, the hero of A Long Long Way. Willie Dunne is a wide-eyed youth who doesn’t reflect so much as experience. He spends much of the time afraid, confused, and ignorant, but stumbling blindly on.