Sebastian
Faulks’ powerful novel, set in France before and during First World War,
received he acclaim and achieved both literary and popular international
success when it was published in 1993. It was deemed extraordinary for a writer
as young as Faulks to treat both the period and the subject with such
understanding, depth, scholarship and sensitivity.
In 1910,
Stephen Wraysford arrives in Amiens as a guest of Monsieur Azaire and his
family. He is there to study the French textile business, but he and his host’s
wife, Isabelle, fall passionately in love and begin an extraordinarily sensual
and highly charged love affair, set against the stifling social mores of the
time.
He returns
six years later to Picardy, where as a young British officerhe faces a profound
horror of trench warfare and the matchless ferocity of the battles of the
marne, verdun and the Somme. The wartime narrative centres on Wraysford, his
friend Michael Weir, and a former miner Jack Firebrace, employed to blast the
hellish labyrinth of tunnels in which mines are laid. Threaded through the
narrative is the near present-day story of waysford’s granddaughter, Elizabeth,
who has discovered his coded diaries and is attempting to understand both her
grandfather and the effects of the terrible and mindless war that shaped
Europe.
Exquisitely written, devastatingly moving and disturbing, Birdsong is one of the best contemporary
literary novels of the 20th century. Faulks explores the personal and
the public human experiences of love, death and redemption for both men and
women and the boundless endurance of the human spirit, amid the carnage and
meaninglessness of war.
