Can The Heart Hold Good? Willie Dunne’s Journey In A Long Long Way.

Can the heart hold good? Willie Dunne s journey in A Long Long Way.

The harrowing experiences of young Willie Dunne in the First World War are the subject of Sebastian Barry s historical novel. The end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries gave rise to a rich offering of war fiction, in which writers often placed the experiences of an individual against the vast backdrop of global conflict. Barry s novel, published in 2005, explores the particular Irish experience of lads like protagonist Willie, who volunteers at eighteen for the Royal Dublin Fusiliers at a crucial time in Irish revolutionary history. Although the novel is in part concerned with these political upheavals, its main interest remains personal, as Barry explores the question: what happens to the human heart in times of almost unimaginable brutality and suffering?

The title of the novel is taken from the lyrics of the music hall ballad, It s a Long Way to Tipperary , written in 1912 and adopted as a marching song by First World War troops. Barry s use of the lyrics in the title draws our attention to the journey structure of novel. It also invites us to consider parallels between Willie s experiences and those of the ballad s Paddy and his sweetheart Molly, where Paddy finally returns home to Ireland from his adventures in London because, famously, his heart lies there . Willie s physical journey inevitably takes him a long way from the familiar streets of Dublin. It is also a journey from innocence to experience which requires him to examine the values he has grown up with at home. In this, the novel can be read as a type of bildungsroman, a story of growth from youth to adulthood. Barry explores Willie s figurative journey from a simple acceptance of the values he has grown up with, to a more adult understanding of the complexities of loyalty, love and loss. Barry uses a distinctive lyrical third person narrative voice in the novel, but consistently merges it with that of the focaliser, Willie, in the manner of the free indirect style. This immerses us in the mind of the protagonist at different stages of his journey, both physical and metaphorical.

Childhood loyalties

Willie s strong impulse towards idealised loyalty is clear in the early stages of the narrative. Tragedy marks his childhood when his mother dies giving birth to his youngest sister, Dolly. Willie s father, left to bring up his young family, is one of the most influential figures in Willie s life. It is from him that he passively absorbs his early political understanding. His father, Superintendent in the Dublin Metropolitan Police, is a staunch Catholic loyalist. We hear early on of his leading the police baton charge against the workers uprising in 1913. Willie s subsequent meeting with Lawlor ( one of the thumped citizens ) encourages him to reflect on events in a less passive way. Barry perhaps signals the beginning of a political awakening at this point in the narrative: Four men killed that day. The phrase sat up in Willie s head like a rat and made a nest for itself there. Despite this early hint of conflicted loyalties, Willie still accepts his father s politics and values, and naively believes that joining up will prove his worth unable to join the police because he hasn t reached the mandatory height of six foot, at least he can be a soldier. His loyalty to his father s politics is mirrored next in his devotion to Lawlor s daughter, Gretta: Her voice to him was just music, and her face was light, and her body was a city of gold he thought she looked like an angel, at least how an angel ought to look , Barry s ethereal imagery suggesting the extent of Willie s innocent idealisation.

Off to war

Travelling through England with the other new recruits on the way to the transport ships for France, Willie experiences the onset of new sense of maturity: When he went to the jacks to piss, he thought he was pissing with a new dexterity. He could think of only one word to describe everything, bloody manhood at last. He is buoyed up by his new experiences, the camaraderie and ribald humour of his fellow recruits, and an unquestioning confidence in the rightness of joining up: It was this country he had come to heal, he himself, Willie Dunne. He hoped his father s fervent worship of the king would guide him, as the lynchpin that held down the dangerous tent of the world. Arriving in France, Barry highlights the childlike na vet of Willie s expectations of war:

They would smash the line in a thousand places, and the horses and their gallant riders would be brought up and they would go off ballyhooing across open ground, slashing at the ruined Germans with their sabres.

This old-fashioned vision of heroics, reminiscent of glorified images of earlier campaigns in the Crimean and Boer Wars, is quickly dismantled and replaced by the almost unremitting horrors of life at the Front. The gas attack at St Julien in April 1915 for example is described in shocking, visceral terms as Willie is confronted by the realities of modern warfare. Barry makes clear its effect on Willie, this time subverting the idealised angel imagery earlier attributed to Gretta:

In the corner of his eye there was always a black shadow now, something, someone, some afflicted figure looming there, like an angel or a meagre spectre.

Alienation

Barry uses Willie s two occasions of home leave to pinpoint changes in his relationship with his father. On leave for the first time at Easter 1916 , he is given a hero s welcome by his family, and there is a wonderfully intimate and tender moment when he is bathed like a child by his loving father. Willie s second leave takes place after the terrible losses at Langemarck near Ypres, and the death of Father Buckley. These events leave their mark on Willie but it is Pete O Hara s account of the brutal treatment of the French girl in the chapel which causes him to interrogate the effects of evil actions during war: What would Willie be capable of himself? What of such heart and souls? Could the soul hold good, could the heart? He knows that his letter home, expressing his political ambivalence about the Easter uprising, has angered his father, but still Willie is shocked at the violence of his rejection. His father s voice sounds like the terrifying voice of a stranger, of another. Alienation from his father is followed by the loss of Gretta. Again it is a letter, revealing Willie s night with the prostitute in Amiens, which leads to Willie s loss. Willie s estrangement from home and family is cruelly emphasised by the young Republican sympathisers who stone him and spit at him the next morning. Barry s imagery emphasises Willie s sense of loss, of being cast adrift from his old sustaining certainties, of losing his very sense of self: He felt like a ghost, a person returned from some dark regions, no longer a human person. He felt like just the wisps and scraps of a person.

Loss of the old world

Barry s rich lyrical style often seems starkly juxtaposed to the brutal events he describes. Strange and terrifying experiences are conveyed through pastoral imagery evocative of old Ireland. The Humewood estate where Willie s grandfather works as steward achieves an almost mythic status in the novel, symbolising the old certainties of social hierarchy and order which are to be refashioned by the revolutionary years in Ireland. Willie idealises his first commanding officer as he idealised Gretta. Captain Pasley, one of the Pasleys of the Mount from County Wicklow, is a paradigm of old fashioned values. Describing Willie s platoon swimming in a river near St Julien, Barry evokes an Edenic world of pastoral innocence where the willows seemed to float now in the breeze, like green clouds, and the river water was a piercing blue, the blue of old memory . The sight of the Captain s gas destroyed body shatters the pastoral ideal. Pasley s uniform is now cast all about him like the torn petals of a flower , and his old-fashioned notion of heroism (he refuses to retreat in the face of the gas attack) is questioned by Christy Moran s professional military pragmatism: He was a fool to stay there like that. Broken by his father s and Gretta s rejections, Willie visits the Pasleys farm in Tinahely in a state of despair. Barry s descri ption of Tinehaly itself seems to reassert a nostalgic pastoral ideal: it is close to the old realm of Humewood the farm house is low and simple, with a peaceful air, and the sun is content to lie on the pack-stones of the yard. Willie is rendered inarticulate with grief when he comes face to face with George Pasley s mother, and she must speak his thoughts for him: He had come, he thought, to comfort the captain s parents. How could there be comfort in a fool sitting in the kitchen with his tongue tied and his heart scalded?

The death of the heart

Where a bildungsroman is typically concerned with the formation of character and consciousness, in A Long Way Willie Dunne s innocence and identity are dismantled by war. The physical destruction of the trenches is mirrored by the destruction of Willie s hopes of love, and his political and familial certainties. The ending of the novel seems to offer little that is positive or hopeful. Unlike Paddy in the ballad of 1912, Willie does not return home to his girlfriend, and his final thoughts are those of abandonment: So far, so far they had come that they had walked right out to the edge of the known world and had fallen into other realms entirely in the thunder and ruckus of the falls. There was no road back along the way they had taken. He had no country, he was an orphan, he was alone.