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Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
Jul. 29th, 2009 11:28 amMy friend Suzannah, who shares my love of a good WWI novel, loaned me Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, and I read it while I was at Stony Lake. Faulks spends most of the book following the actions of Stephen Wraysford, first when he comes to Amiens, France as a young man working for a British textile factory and has an intense affair with a married woman, and later, once war breaks out, in the trenches as a British officer. Stephen's story is occasionally broken by leaps forward into the 1970s, when Stephen's granddaughter decides to conduct research into his war experience.
Wraysford is an intriguing character--even before serving in the trenches, he is somewhat strange, a person who is slightly distant from those around him--but the book as a whole is somewhat uneven. The first section, concerning Stephen's love affair with a married Frenchwoman, is highly dramatic, almost soap-operatic. Some of this is fun and/or gripping, but once the affair ends, we are thrown forward several years and find ourselves in the midst of the war, where the affair is only a distant memory and doesn't seem to have much bearing on Stephen's emotional state. But that's okay, because the war is what Faulks is good at. He's really good at it. It's hard to know how to praise writing when the subject is so horrific; most of the adjectives seem inappropriate. Faulks is excellent at the grinding daily misery of the trenches, especially in the strange scenes that take place in Stephen's officer's dugout at night between Stephen and his friend Michael Weir. These scenes are haunting, but the most powerful piece in the book is Faulks's depiction of the first day of the Somme. It's an amazing piece of writing, powerful and lingering.
Unfortunately, my interest in the Faulks's narrative decreased every time he left the actual field of battle. I cared very little about Stephen's granddaughter and her attempts to find out about the war. I found her ignorance so complete as to be difficult to believe. How could a woman in her late 30s have so little notion of events that are so significant not just to her country but to her own family? I was unsympathetic to her, and found her story line to be little more than a distraction from the parts of the book I would rather have paid attention to.
I appreciated Faulks's book for the way in which it gave me a very full sense of the war, especially the length and scale of the war, but it is nowhere near to approaching the Regeneration trilogy at the top of my list of WWI literature.
Wraysford is an intriguing character--even before serving in the trenches, he is somewhat strange, a person who is slightly distant from those around him--but the book as a whole is somewhat uneven. The first section, concerning Stephen's love affair with a married Frenchwoman, is highly dramatic, almost soap-operatic. Some of this is fun and/or gripping, but once the affair ends, we are thrown forward several years and find ourselves in the midst of the war, where the affair is only a distant memory and doesn't seem to have much bearing on Stephen's emotional state. But that's okay, because the war is what Faulks is good at. He's really good at it. It's hard to know how to praise writing when the subject is so horrific; most of the adjectives seem inappropriate. Faulks is excellent at the grinding daily misery of the trenches, especially in the strange scenes that take place in Stephen's officer's dugout at night between Stephen and his friend Michael Weir. These scenes are haunting, but the most powerful piece in the book is Faulks's depiction of the first day of the Somme. It's an amazing piece of writing, powerful and lingering.
Unfortunately, my interest in the Faulks's narrative decreased every time he left the actual field of battle. I cared very little about Stephen's granddaughter and her attempts to find out about the war. I found her ignorance so complete as to be difficult to believe. How could a woman in her late 30s have so little notion of events that are so significant not just to her country but to her own family? I was unsympathetic to her, and found her story line to be little more than a distraction from the parts of the book I would rather have paid attention to.
I appreciated Faulks's book for the way in which it gave me a very full sense of the war, especially the length and scale of the war, but it is nowhere near to approaching the Regeneration trilogy at the top of my list of WWI literature.
