Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War | Sebastian Faulks

Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War | Sebastian Faulks | transforms "war" from a short word to a thousand pictures

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Birdsong: A Novel ...

	Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War Sebastian Faulks Vintage, 1997 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 187 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient. Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come.

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Movie please

I loved this book. The best WW1 account I've ever read. Notably, although I read it primarily for this reason, I enjoyed the first part, centering on the romance, so much that I didn't want to leave that bit. Having said that, once in the trenches it was impelling in a different way. What an amazing movie it would be if produced by the right person. Does any one know Spielberg personally? Send it to him for his birthday.

transforms "war" from a short word to a thousand pictures

Faulks masterfully brings you onto the battlefield of World War I through the eyes of a main character who has formal ties but no personal loyalties. An Englishman named Stephen Wraysford, he is orphaned as a child and financially sponsored into adulthood. You meet him as a young man who has, through no fault of his own, grown up with no emotional attachments. He falls in love, but the woman belongs to someone else. You begin to sense Wrayford's story as an emotional wasteland, and then abruptly World War I intrudes. Within a few short pages, the war becomes the emotional wasteland and you begin to live the story as an acquaintance of Wraysford, who is a consummate observer. Wraysford becomes invisible in the framework of the story so that you can see through his eyes with no distractions--no glimpse of his hopes or dreams to distinguish him from the others who are fighting and dying alongside of him. Instead, like him, you are living in the moment devoid of attachment to a particular character but occupying frame by frame an amazingly vivid landscape. One memorable scene of many: a description of nightfall on the battlefield; how when the sound of the artillery fades, you can hear the collective misery of the wounded that it was covering...how dying men invariably call out for their mothers, not their wives...how the attempt of the wounded to crawl back to their trenches in semi-darkness resembles "a resurrection in a cemetery a thousand miles long." The fact that Wraysford seems to bring no prejudices to his observations makes them even more compelling. Instead of mourning a single character you will feel the enormity of waste and destruction that impacted a whole generation. Instead of a simple three-letter word, from now on "war" will be the word that paints a thousand pictures, and in this book Sebastian Faulks has painted a masterpiece. After you read this book, you won't be waiting for the movie, instead you'll feel like you've already "seen" it.

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One of the best novels I've read

The scenes with Stephen are extremely well written. Increadibly intense account of personal suffering of soldiers in World War I. Tender, realistic love story. This is first-class writing. Unfortunately, later scenes with granddaughter Elizabeth are very weak. But since the rest of the book more than compensates for it I still give it five stars.
Ayca Yesim

Why?

I can envision, from the start here, two types of readers dismissing this work out of hand, those who are squeamish about graphic depictions of sex and those who are squeamish about graphic depictions of war. For the first sort, you really needn't worry yourself overmuch after the first fifty pages or so; for the second sort, though, you'd best find reading material elsewhere. Are we clear?

Well then, here's my take on the book: Faulks is at the top of his form in the WWI passages, which are harrowing and well-wrought, not just in their description of the physical realities of life and death in the trenches: heads being sliced in half by shells, rats crawling out of abdomens, lice eggs bursting to life along the seams of freshly-washed shirts; but, more to the point, in the psychology of pointlessness and futility that infests the soldiers' minds, in particular, our anti-hero here, Stephen Wraysford.

I agree with the other reviewers here, who, almost to a one, find fault with the erotic romance with Isabelle at the beginning and the almost silly scenes from in late 1970s revolving around Stephen's grand-daughter. The first section reminded me too much of something out of D.H. Lawrence. Indeed, there are even sections which are nearly transcriptions of Lawrence's half-cocked theory of "blood-consciousness." Thankfully, for the novel, the war intervenes. The 1970s sections, which I should like to see cut almost in their entirety, are formulaic and quaint to the point of inanity.

So why, assuming you don't fall into the two aforementioned categories, should you read this book? Because, more than any book that I can recall reading about the "Great War," Birdsong brings home what it was like in that war. In America and Britain, we mourn, rightfully so, the few thousand that have fallen in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But this war was filled with battles in which 50,000 men were killed in a single day, from sunrise to sunset. It staggers the mind. What purpose can an individual life have under such circumstances? Stephen puts it well to newcomer Ellis, describing his friend Weir's condition:

Stephen said very gently, "I don't think it's fear in that sense. He's not afraid of gas or shells or being buried. He's frightened that it doesn't make sense, that there is no purpose. He's afraid that he has somehow strayed into the wrong life." P.297

Despite my misgivings about parts of the book, the work confronts the reader with purposelessness, meaninglessness and individual expendability as no "existentialist" work comes close to doing, shakes the reader and demands to know: "Why?!?!"

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One Story Too Many...

In 1993's "Birdsong", author Sebastian Faulks crafts a multi-generational drama around the undoubted horror of trench warfare on the Western Front in the First World War. The novel is beautifully written, even haunting, if overambitious in the arc of its narrative.

In the first part of the story, young Englishman Stephen Wraysford arrives in Amiens, France, in 1910 to work with a local clothing manufacturer named Azaire. He stays at Azaire's home, and shortly begins a passionate affair with Azaire's young and abused wife, Isabelle. Stephen and Isabelle will elope, but when Isabelle learns she is pregnant, she abandons Stephen without explanation.

The story fast-forwards to 1916 and the First World War. Stephen Wrayford is a brand new subaltern, just promoted from the ranks and leading a British infantry platoon on the Western Front. One of his responsibilities is to assist an engineering company digging tunnels under the German lines. The leader of the engineering company, one Captain Weir, will become Stephen's best friend during the horror of the fighting. One of the enlisted engineers, Jack Firebrace, will be with Stephen at several points of mortal peril during the war and the two men will bond over their shared experience. As the war winds on, and Stephen struggles to find reasons to survive, he unexpectedly meets Isabelle's sister Jeanne. From Jeanne, he will learn Isabelle's story, and from her, he will also learn to draw strength.

The third portion of the narrative concerns a woman in her late 30's named Elizabeth, working as an executive at a small clothing design company in 1978 London. Elizabeth is single, childless, and carrying on an extended affair with a British diplomat. Her story overlaps with Stephen's, as we wonder whether he will survive the war while she deals with a surprise pregnancy and a sudden interest in the First World War. At the climax of the novel, Stephen is trapped in a collapsed tunnel beneath the lines while, two generations away, Elizabeth prematurely begins to give birth in a seaside cottage.

Faulks is a wonderful writer. His prose is exceptional, especially the portions of the novel concerning the Western Front, which are graphic in their telling and haunting in their insight. The initial portion of the novel serves to introduce us to Stephen Wrayford as a person, so that the changes driven by the war will be more visible to us. The connections between the first and second parts, as Stephen accidently encounters Jeanne, are important to Stephen's survival but less compelling as a continuation of the love story. The looping of Stephen's and Elizabeth's stories together is frankly awkward and strains to be plausible. The novel might have been better served by a shorter narrative.

"Birdsong" is highly recommended as a well-written, dramatic, and moving story of the First World War. It is somewhat less convincing as a multi-generational love story.

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