If you enjoy dramatic historical sagas, you'll love Birdsong, a love story set around the time of The Great War.

It book tells the story of Stephen Wraysford and the events that shape his life. Starting in pre-war France and moving on in time, it deals with Stephen's experiences in love and war.


The Plot

In 1910 a young 20 year-old Englishman is sent to the Picardian city of Amiens in France as a student of the textile industry. While there he embarks on an affair with his host's younger wife. His passion is so all-consuming that it changes his life forever. He convinces her to leave her husband to be at his side, but things don't quite work out.

A few years later, he once more finds himself in Picardy, only this time it's as a soldier in the trenches of WWI. The affair, and his love, are never far from his mind and even the slaughter around him can't quite extinguish his feelings. Wraysford at times is a cold, morose character who is nevertheless possessed with very strong will-to-survive. He endures the horrendous slaughterhouses of the Marne and the Somme, lives for weeks at a time in the verminous trenches, and stumbles around the tunnels which miners have dug in order to pack with explosives and obliterate the enemy - all the time witness to the constant attrition of his companions. Somehow or other, through the hellish nightmare, he manages to retain some semblance of human dignity.


Fast forward to 1978 and Wraysford's granddaughter discovers Stephen's promise to a dying man and decides she must keep it.

The events of the WWI are linked to modern life with the quest of Stephen's Granddaughter, Elizabeth, to trace her past and seek out what happened to her Grandfather. This she does when she discovers the journals that her Grandfather wrote during the war.



Not the Plot

The novel is structured so that it moves back and forward in time and reminds the reader that what happens now is a direct result of what went before.

Faulks brings the conflicting passions of love and war vividly alive, leaving the reader drowning in graphic images that are both horrific and unforgettable.

Birdsong derives most of its power from its descriptions of gunge and gore, and the hero's struggle to hold on to his dignity, and sanity, while surrounded by it, and submerged in it. Birdsong is an excellent novel which skillfully takes the reader through what is essentially a love story with gentle understanding. This is in stark contrast to the incredibly detailed and intense account of the horrors of war. This may seem verbose, when compared to the rest, but it is essential to the feel of the book. Who can imagine being asked to walk at slow pace into almost certain death.

This is a graphic and detailed novel. Faulks describes in detail the events that these soldiers lived through on a daily basis. Despite the disturbing nature of some of these scenes, the novel is beautifully and cleverly written.
It is a poignant and moving novel and one which brings home the realities and the true atrocities that the soldiers of the First World War suffered.

The whole then, is a modern story about a historical event which is completely believable and real.



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The following passage describes what it was like working in the tunnels that crisscrossed No-man's land:

"Hunt went slowly into the tunnel and Stephen followed. Hunt's boots were in front of him and he could hear Byrne crawling behind him. If there was a problem he would be stuck. He squeezed his eyes shut and swore silently to give himself courage.
The roof of the tunnel was a foot above his head. He kept repeating to himself the vilest words in the most terrible combinations he could think of; he shaped obscenities against the world, its flesh, and its imaginary creator."

Excerpt from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. Copyright © 1994.
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Birdsong is not a light read, but it presents a world that shaped the lives of a generation of people, and its presentation is vivid and eloquent.


©proxam2002



Recommended: Yes