A Long Long Way Study Guide

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1955. His father, Frank J. Barry, was an architect, and his mother, Joan O’Hara, was a famous actress. Sebastian Barry attended Trinity College and began writing novels, plays, and books of poetry in the 1980s. His most well-known play is The Steward of Christendom, which first premiered in 1995. A Long Long Way, Barry’s third novel, was published in 2005 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Barry’s most recent literary work is the novel Old God’s Time, published in 2023. Throughout his career, Barry has won many awards and achieved acclaim as a renowned Irish writer. From 2018 to 2021, he was named Laureate for Irish Fiction. Barry lives in County Wicklow, Ireland, with his wife Alison Deegan, who is an actress and screenwriter.

A Long Long Way is set primarily during World War I, which lasted from July 1914 to November 1918. The conflict was between the Allies (including France, Great Britain, and Russia) and the Central Powers (including Germany and Austria-Hungary). Trench warfare, a defining feature of World War I, was crucial to the fighting that took place on the Western Front in France and Belgium. Importantly, the novel focuses not only on the events of World War I but also on the first half of the Irish revolutionary period. In the early 1900s, all of Ireland belonged to the United Kingdom, but Ireland’s relationship to England was a major point of contention. Irish unionists were loyal to the British crown and militantly opposed Home Rule, the idea of Ireland’s self-governance. Meanwhile, Irish nationalists wanted freedom from British sovereignty and supported Home Rule. Rising tensions regarding Ireland’s independence erupted in Dublin in 1916 with the Easter Rising, an armed rebellion against British rule. The Easter Rising was a failed uprising, but it led to a surge in republicanism, a movement that sought to establish an Irish Republic completely independent from Britain.

Sebastian Barry’s first novel, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, is similar to A Long Long Way. Both novels contain lyrical prose, examine Irish history, and explore themes of family and divided loyalties. Like Willie Dunne, Eneas McNulty gets caught up in the violent political conflicts of early-20th-century Ireland and is accused of being a traitor to his own country. Another work of historical fiction that deals with the beginning of the Irish revolutionary period is 1916: A Novel of the Irish Rebellion by Morgan Llywelyn. The young protagonist Ned Halloran attends school in Dublin, meets patriotic rebels who long for Ireland’s independence, and becomes involved in the fateful Easter Rising of 1916. Additionally, the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque also shares similarities with A Long Long Way in its depiction of World War I. Although Remarque’s writing doesn’t deal with Irish history, it portrays the suffering that soldiers in the trenches of the Western Front faced, just as A Long Long Way does. Both war narratives illustrate the many horrors of war, emphasizing young soldiers’ disillusionment, grief, and despair.