Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

A Book To Sing Songs About

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks is not a book I fell instantly in love with. Nor did it have me captivated from the very first page. I am ashamed to say that, though I had heard of it, I had no idea what it was about, and that I turned the first few pages encouraged only by curiosity and my new years resolution to commit myself to reading more. I did not find it particularly interesting at first. In fact, I was instantly put off when I realised the first chapter was set in France in 1910. I am used to fluffy novels by modern authors, in which a strong, inspirational and average looking woman learns life’s lessons in exaggerated circumstances.

I am glad that I had no idea that this book was about the war, as I am almost certain I would not have read it. I am embarrassed to say that, whilst I am grateful for everything that was done to defend our country, I have no real interest in imagining the horror or reading about the pain. Not because I thought it would hurt me, but because, I believed, it would be dull and unnecessarily dramatically written. It is a set of circumstance which happened many, many years before I was born, that I was forced to learn about in order to pass exams throughout several stages of my education, and an event which is stereotypically rambled on about by the older generation. It has never occurred to me to stop and think about it properly. To admire the men who gave their lives for us as actual individuals instead of merely a group of soldiers.

Never have I ever had my opinion shifted so violently. Faulks did not just bewitched me with his simple but spectacular tale until the very last page, but he also dragged me from my ignorance regarding literacy and the boringness of the war. This is a tale of young men who gave their lives away, loved each other and lost their friends. It is about heartache, bravery and an almost incomprehensible passion for the freedom of people they have never met.

Never have I thought so deeply about what it must have been like to have been a young man on the front line. But when I discovered in part two that the main protagonist Stephen, who I had already been forced to fall in love with in part one of the novel, was fighting in France in the first world war, I succumbed to imagining what it must have felt to be a man like him.

I am not a man. Nor have I ever fought in a war. Still, as Stephen slept in trenches and watched his friends die, Faulks made sure I stood right there by his side. And when he climbed a ladder over the top of the trench into no mans land and marched toward the enemy lines I felt as though I was walking right beside him.

“To his left Stephen saw men trying to emerge from the trench but being smashed by bullets before they could stand. The gaps in the wire became jammed with bodies.”

Through this novel, I suddenly became aware that men as young as my brother and as old as my father once willingly walked into a hail of bullets and gave their lives just so that we could survive. Its over spoken an cliched, but once I was given the chance to actually stop and think about it, I felt overwhelmingly proud of them and incredibly sad.

“Of 800 men in the battalion who had gone over the parapet, 155 answered their names.”

I believe utterly that Sebatian Faulks anticipated my response. And so ingeniously he gave us the character Elizabeth, Stephens granddaughter and inhabitant of the 1970’s. When she is introduced, she knows less than we do about her grandfather, and, though I was slightly agitated to have been dragged away from 1916 and the action, I was excited for her to discover what he had been like.

I thought then about an image my grandmother has in her bedroom of her father in military uniform. He died before I was born and, like Elizabeth in the beginning, I view him merely as a piece of history. He is not a man, or a dad or a brother. I would never have known the difference between him being the person he was or someone else. He has impacted little on my life, and only ever been a passing thought or a brief mention in a conversation. When I read Birdsong it made me sit and wonder. What might he have seen? Who was this man and what had he known? And interestingly - What will my own great grandchildren think about me? Will they know of me? If they do will they be proud? It is frightening to think that I might be responsible for a whole line of people who, in the end, know nothing about me and care very little.

I decided to ask my Grandmother about her dad. Agitated by the fact that I did not even know his name, I did not want to draw attention to the fact that I had never thought to ask her about him, so I started by asking her if he had fought in the war. It turns out he had. His name is Harry, he was born in 1911 and he was in the navy. Through Birdsong, I found myself thinking about a history which happened not very long ago and was a reality for as close as three generations ago. It stimulated my curiosity and made me want to learn.

I do not believe I have the imagination or the writing ability to communicate clearly enough what a beautiful string of words Birdsong is. I was disappointed to reach the end, partly because I did not want it to end, and partly because the end was slightly rushed. I wanted to know in as much detail of the rest of his life how Stephen’s ended. I wanted to know further the intricacies of his mind and how he lived out his life.

Ultimately, this novel is a story of raw, brave and unabashed love. So detailed, truthful and descriptive is this text that I felt intrusive and embarrassed on several occasions whilst reading it. I blushed so profusely on one particular train journey that I never dared read it again on public transport. That is not to say I wouldn’t have liked to. If it had been up to me I would never had put it down.