Immediacy of War
In Amiens, 1910, Stephen Wraysford encounters Madame Azaire and Gregoire for the first time. Stephen is twenty. He knows about textiles and finance. Azaire is forty. Azaire has a factory in town and has another not far away. Cloth is produced in Manchester for two thirds of the price it is manufactured in Amiens. Stephen is in Amiens to visit the factories.
Isabelle Azaire married to be free of her parent's house in Rouen. After a series of emotional confrontations, Stephen and Isabelle Azaire go away to a spa town in the south of France. After a time, Isabelle leaves Stephen.
The story shifts to 1916. Lieutenant Wraysford is to decide the fate of a tuneller who fell asleep while on duty. Wraysford and his company commander decline to punish the man. Conditions in World War I are so bad that Stephen feels it is an exploration on how far men can be degraded. The fighting is so intense that Stephen feels the new reality is being condemned to live.
Part Three moves to 1978, England. A grandchild, Elizabeth, has the notebooks of Stephen Wraysford. They are in code. Part Four returns the reader to the war, 1917, France, and Part Five is England, 1978 and 1979. Part Six is September 1918. Part Seven is England, 1979.
The means of telling the story is intricate. The reader is made to care about the characters. The braided chronology is adroit. This is historical fiction at its best.
It's as if the author is writing from personal experience
The way that the characters and the atmosphere are built by Sebastian Faulks is just amazing! The reader is taken in to that atmosphere, and shares the feelings of the main character, Stephen. You cannot fail to be totally captivated.
Anyone who has served for any significant period in the Armed Forces will instantly relate to the use of black humour to cover the awful reality and horror. Faulks also manages to reflect on how every aspect of life continues, perhaps in the background, as the war goes on. There is a strong and emotive love story. There is a very powerful understanding of the futility of war and its effects on everyone involved, regardless of national allegiance. One of the most poignant parts of the book, for me, is the description of the feelings of the sappers as they tunnel deep below the battlefield, knowing that their counterparts are experiencing the same hopes and fears, only feet away through the awful mud and darkness. Death is never more than a split second away.
Having had the privilege of sitting with Somme veterans, listening to their vivid memories of the trenches and the contacts, and those friends who lost their lives, I can say, with great confidence, that Birdsong takes us as close as we could to being there as is possible.
It is a shame that it is not possible to award six stars to any book reviewed on Amazon, for Birdsong would surely deserve such an award. This one definitely makes it into my lifetime favourite five.
I would have no hesitation in recommending Birdsong to absolutely anyone, but most especially to any politician who is thinking about sending young people to their deaths in war.
Footnote: I was surprised that "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann featured in Sebastian Faulks's top one hundred books. It sits right at the opposite end of the gripping to boring spectrum of reading to this magnificent work: Birdsong.
Wonderful
This is without doubt my favourite book of all time.
I cannot recommend it highly enough!
SEBASTIAN FAULKS' BIRDSONG REVIEWED BY JOHN CHUCKMAN
This is a difficult book to review, the reason being is that it has so many contradictory qualities. It has some good writing combined with material that is sentimental and even purplish.
It has some strong images, and it has a series of preposterous incidents. It is packed with improbabilities.
The author starts with a mini-version of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," oddly hybridized with Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover." While there is some nice writing here, it strikes me as self-consciously so, and the story lacks any freshness.
There are ridiculous improbabilities in this part of the book. Why would an English firm considering a business venture with a French firm send this young man, the protagonist, Stephen, to size up the opportunity? He isn't even educated in business. He is very young. And he proves emotionally unstable.
And why would the French proprietor - M. Azaire, husband of the beautiful woman, Isabelle, who becomes Stephen's lover - have Stephen spending time at lunches and other business of the floor workers in his plant? It's a genuinely silly idea.
The sentimentality begins shortly after Stephen and Isabelle become lovers, and, in cheap romantic fashion, Isabelle suddenly disappears with their young child, returning to her family.
When you get into the Great War, supposedly the real stuff of the book, you will wonder why you've had about ninety pages of rehashed Madame Bovary. You will find out towards the end, but it is a very unsatisfying idea of neatness and completeness that drives things.
Here and there in the war business, there are a few strong images and interesting stuff about the tunnel systems that were extensively used in the Great War.
But the author even manages to make the front sentimental and clichéd. Egad, there's even the proverbial friend who has never been with a woman and who is given the surprise present of a prostitute one night.
There's lots of hard drinking and calculatedly gruesome incidents - pure Hollywood. And the author has nothing fresh to say about the war we haven't all seen in movies or read in other books.
The end-of-war portion was clearly written with the hope of selling the book for movie rights. The idea of two men trapped in a huge tunnel far underground is gruesomely interesting, but the author draws it out to impossibly long time with an impossibly heroic series of efforts. People typically die after 3 or 4 days without water, but Stephen hangs in there for God knows how long.
Yes, he licks a bit of brackish water in a corner in his Herculean labors, but that just wouldn't do it.
His rescue would have been a good surprise - he is rescued by Germans digging in their own lines - had it been handled well. But we get an awkward effort by a couple of Germans, one of whom, we have explained at some length and repetition, happens to be Jewish. Why? Why is the author suddenly focusing on a man's religion? An intended irony about a good Jewish soldier in the German army? Whatever the intention, it simply does not work.
The ending is silly, the author bringing us what he regards as full circle.
I really do believe Faulks thought he was writing a racier, more action-filled "Gone with the Wind" for World War I in hope of a big movie contract.
I read this book wanting to like it, thinking from things I read that it might be another of those memorable books about people caught in the gears of war, but I found it impossibly flawed.
Disappointing, but well written in parts
Faulks is not a bad writer. The passages describing World War I are good, such as the descriptions of the soldiers tunneling under the battle lines, and the attack on essentially intact German forces by soldiers who were told that the defenses had already been smashed. But the love story reads like an adolescent fantasy. When the protagonist's lover's stepdaughter comes on way strong, it was so bad it was funny. Then the runaway couple, she the wife of a wealthy mill magnate and he a youthful foreigner, elope to ... a minuscule town in the middle of nowhere? And stay there for a year? Then she's disappointed each month when she doesn't get pregnant, and when she does (how can you spoil a book this bad -- but here goes) she leaves him. No note, nothing, and she keeps the pregnancy to herself. She just goes home, eventually back to her sadistic husband. The lovestruck protagonist stays put for another year until he decides maybe she's not coming back. If the reader isn't already feeling ripped off enough, her decision is never explained. Nor is anything explained about him. He's supposed to be a skilled accountant or something, but once they elope, he becomes a working stiff and goes out drinking with the guys while she stews rabbits in their room. The story is really silly. When BBC takes a survey on what books are the very best, quite a few of the responders must be horny schoolboys.
(199 reviews)
