Birdsong

Product Information

Since its publication in 1993, Birdsong has become one of the most frequently borrowed books from British libraries, along with J. BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. His story is interleaved with that of Jack Firebrace, a former miner employed with the tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers in the British trenches to listen for the enemy and plant mines under the German trenches.

Sadly, Jack dies of his injuries, but Stephen is rescued by enemy German soldiers, whom he immediately embraces after six longs days beneath the soil. The deliberate hiding of Stephen's stories, remaining silent to his family after the war's end and encoding his journals, mirrors the actual loss of record and stories from veterans in post-war Britain.Scholars have noted that Birdsong is one of the best examples of a novel contending with the effects of PTSD after armed conflict, as Stephen definitely suffers from the psychological impact of the war.

On the damp grass were chestnut trees, lilacs, and willows, cultivated to give shade and quietness to their owners.Enlivened with considerable historical detail related through accomplished prose, his narrative flows with a pleasingly appropriate recklessness that brings his characters to dynamic life. Faulks uses both different narrators and different narrative perspectives (first, third and omniscient) on the death in the trenches to explore the trauma of death in numerous and challenging ways. Faulks wrote Birdsong in a study on the top floor of his brother Edward’s house in London between May 1992 and January 1993. The story and structure of Birdsong throws down the gauntlet for any dramatist adapting it under lockdown conditions; its adulterous romance and epic re-enactment of the Battle of the Somme requires necessary human contact, and at close quarters. Birdsong is a soft and sweet story of a young girl, Katherena, moving to a new place with her mother, and the friendship she grows with her elderly neighbor, Agnes.

Marching to the front on the day before the Somme offensive, Stephen Wraysford leads his company down a track across farmland and comes upon something odd: "two dozen men, naked to the waist, digging a hole thirty yards square at the side of the path". Similarly, because of the parallel narratives WWI and 1970s Britain, the novel explores metahistorical questions about how to document and recover narratives about the past. A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews also highlighted this theme, writing that "the war, here, is Faulks's real subject, his stories of destroyed lives, however wrenching, only throwing its horror into greater relief and making it the more unbearable". The accounts of combat, ringing with credibility and authenticity, are among the finest that I have ever read.All three novels take place in France and the United Kingdom, and each is chiefly concerned with the effects of war on society.