Love is Enduring... Wider Reading 9: Birdsong

Birdsong is the story of Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman who arrives in Amiens, France in 1910. After a passionate love affair with his married landlady that goes terribly wrong, he leaves only to return four years later to fight in the Great War. Over the course of the novel he suffers a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experiences of the war itself. Entwined with his story are numerous heartrending tales of others affected by the fever sweeping Europe: from Michael Weir, his best friend, Jack Firebrace, whose tender heart becomes his undoing, Jeanne, a woman of endless kindness and patience, to the 1970s and the story of Elizabeth, who discovers her grandfather's tale through his letters, diaries, and the stories of those who were close to him. Set before and during World War One, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale.

The novel defies modern convention by exclusively employing the omniscient narrator to tell its harrowing story. Penetrating into the deepest thoughts, pasts and even, in some cases, futures of every single character, it seems unnervingly invasive, but becomes an all-encompassing narratorial rubric to complement perfectly the difficult subject matter. Birdong is indeed difficult; it is a World War One novel with an explicit focus on trench warfare - that most horrifying and unimaginable of all wartime terrors. While the public consciousness may have a vague notion of the sheer horror, a true understanding remains forever ungraspable to the individual.

Birdsong has a tripartite plot structure, beginning with a long pre-war love story. Faulks’ intentions in doing this are obvious and multiple: put simply, this section serves to humanize the characters we are soon to see committing horrific acts of brutal killing and to drive home to the reader what’s at stake. There’s also more than a little dramatic irony. The reader knows what is coming, and is powerless to warn the characters. Stylistically this is also the most colourful part of the book. The writing here is metaphor-heavy, plentiful with adjectives and parenthetic digressions. The second section offers the ‘meat’ of the novel. A jump-cut to mid-war trench life carries with it a drastic change in Faulks’ linguistic register. The synaesthesia of sex is replaced with that of war: now there’s blood, iron, mud and agony. There’re no more metaphors, few adjectives, many more concrete nouns and a focus on active verbs. The contrast with the first part of the book is abrasive and sudden – here there is no artificiality of language. The third and weakest part of the novel is another jump-cut, but this time to a modern-day setting. The characters and events that occupy this part of the novel seem extremely dull and muted, creating a sharp contrast to the horror, and excitement and bravery, of war.

Birdsong - Quotations