Birdsong

Twenty year old Stephen Wraysford arrives in France in 1910. As an orphan Stephen grew up in care but has an education provided by his well meaning guardian and now he’s been sent by the textile company he works for in England to observe the new manufacturing process used in a factory in Amiens, owned by Rene Azaire. Behind the large, bourgeois home of the Azaire’s, where Stephen is going to stay, the river Somme breaks into small picturesque canals where fisherman sit and blackbirds sing overhead. In his pockets he has a leather notebook, his rail ticket and a knife.

Stephen’s passionate, life changing affair with Isabelle, Madame Azaire, is the focus of this first part, and when he writes about her in his journal written in a private code, ‘pulse’ is the word he uses for her. This is a section that glitters with life, the sounds and the newness, even the demonstrations at the factory for more pay are lives being lived with hope for social progression.

To be honest, I found Stephen and Isabelle’s affaire a bit troubling. Stephen is only 20 yet so confident in his sexual prowess and Isabelle is always available and compliant, as are all the women in the book. I see that Birdsong is a set text in schools and I felt quite uneasy at these stereotypes being taught to a class of 17 year olds. But what it does tell us about Stephen is that caution is not a part of his personality, and that will help him greatly in the next time period which is 1916.

Because of his education Stephen rises up the ranks in the army, providing a link between the infantry and the officers. This is a book that’s full of recurring themes, motifs and imagery and Stephen finds himself back beside the river Somme with its trenches, mud, rats, letters and food parcels, lice infested uniforms and camaraderie. He leads his men over the top and joins the ‘sewer rats’ digging tunnels forty-five feet underground. It’s the men that are at the centre of the story and the lives and families they’ve left behind, their bravery and disbelief are described in detail that’s both exciting and gruesome.

What I found really surprising though were the sections set in 1978. Elizabeth Benson’s story begins in the tunnel of the London Underground as she travels home from a business trip to Germany. ‘the train of the Central Line fitted its tube like a bullet in the barrel of a rifle.’ There’s a newspaper article about the 60th anniversary of the 1918 Armistice which encourages her to ask her French mother about her grandfather, a man she knows nothing about. While searching in her mothers attic she finds the blue notebooks written in code. . .

Elizabeth’s story works really well in the structure of the novel and helps to bring everything to a satisfying conclusion, but what I found incredible was the attitude to the first world war in the 1970’s, which is basically one of disinterest. Sebastian Faulks says in his introduction to my 2014 copy that even when he began his research for Birdsong in 1988 there were only ‘occasional lectures at the Imperial War Museum. . . battlefield tours in which a handful of surviving veterans took part. . . the audience for these things was what we now call ‘niche”. And I realised that when I was at school in the ’70’s we didn’t do anything about the 1st World War. It seems almost unbelievable now when we’re saturated with novels, memoirs and films about or from this time. Why is that? In his excellent introduction Faulks wonders about a sense of panic and/or guilt at the end of the century; that we had relegated the war to an imperialistic time out of keeping with social democracy and so not recognised or admitted the enormity of the sacrifice. He says about writing Birdsong:

‘. . . whatever its literary and thematic aims. . . and with whatever clumsiness, an attempt to offer a belated gesture of love and understanding to the men who were hurled into that catastrophic war.’