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Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

September 1997

Synopsis

"Set before and during the Great War, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman who journeys to France on business in 1910 and becomes so entangled in a passionate clandestine love affair that he never returns home. Rootless and heartbroken when war breaks out in 1914, he joins the army and is given command of a brigade of miners, whose macabre assignment is to tunnel beneath German lines and set off bombs under the enemy trenches - thereby creating a pitch-dark subterranean battlefield even more ghastly than the air and trench warfare above them. As have many lost young men, Stephen finds a place and an intense camaraderie in this tortuous world, and through his eyes Faulks reveals not only the unspeakable carnage but the unexpected love and loyalty that took place in the fields of France a mere two generations ago." (Publisher)

Reviews

"Worthy in every way of its honors and success….The accounts of combat, ringing with credibility and authenticity, are among the finest that I have ever read." (George Garrett - Los Angeles Times Book Review)
"While the account of daily life in the trenches in Mr. Faulks's novel will be familiar to anyone who has read either {Wilfred} Owen or 'The Face of Battle,' by the historian John Keegan, it has scarcely ever been presented in such unrelenting and dispassionate detail. . . . It is as if Mr. Faulks had bled his own prose white, draining it of emotion in order to capture the endless enervating slog of war. But he also has two other stories to tell, and that's where 'Birdsong' runs into problems. . . . The present-day scenes in 'Birdsong' are so lackluster that they seem a kind of injustice; I can scarcely believe they're the work of the same writer who in this book's best pages draws on Owen . . . to provide a genuinely cathartic description of the war's last days." (Michael Gorra - The New York Times Book Review)

Book Club Rating and Comments

If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.

Other Books by Sebastian Faulks

'Charlotte Gray'
'A Fool's Alphabet'
'The Girl at the Lion D'Or'