A long way home film reviews12/10/2023 ![]() Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Beck, at Le Jardin-Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone-food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. In the guise of a period piece, Carey's novel raises issues of culture and race that carry a thoroughly contemporary charge. Irene is skeptical over the prospect of “two hundred lunatics circumnavigating the continent of Australia, more than ten thousand miles over outback roads so rough they might crack your chassis clean in half.” But off they go! And off goes the novel in some surprising directions at which the setup barely hints, as it illuminates a country very different from the “monocultural” one upon which the government insists, discovers that racial identity may not be as simple as black and white, and upends the relationships between the married couple and their neighbor and the very notion of who is the novel’s protagonist and who is the sidekick. In order to launch his dealership, Titch places a big gamble on entering the Redex Trial, with Irene as driver (though she’ll never be given credit, as a woman in the 1950s) and Willie as navigator. Willie is as reflective and remorseful as Irene is impulsive and resilient even though the chapters never identify who is speaking, the difference in voice and perspective is evident. The second narrator is their taller neighbor, Willie Bachhuber, a teacher (or “a chalk-and-talker” in the novel’s parlance) and a minor celebrity as a game-show whiz. She is a demon driver, as she’ll show during the grueling Redex Trial, a contest of automobiles circling the continent that is intended to demonstrate their endurance rather than sheer speed. He is the best car salesman in their part of Australia. The first is Irene Bobs, a tiny woman married to the equally diminutive Titch, though the accomplishments of both will loom large as the novel progresses. ![]() Chapters alternate through much of the novel between two narrators. The comic spirit slyly suggests Shakespeare, an inquiry into identity and the farcical human existence. The antic tone of this 14th novel by Australian-born Carey ( Amnesia, 2015, etc.) belies its serious ambition. This picaresque comedy goes thematically deeper as it heads into the Outback.
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