This is an essential novel (Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks)

Name: MartynColebrook

Hello doyoo user, You have to be logged in to use these functions... Login or register Close window

Send message to member

Product:	Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Date:	23.03.02 (579 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Eye for ambience is superb

Disadvantages: None

Birdsong is an immense novel, capturing the futility of war and the horrors of life on the battlefields of the First World War. In addition to this there is an intriguing love story of 20 year old Stephen Wraysford who begins an affair with the wife of a prestigious French textile baron whilst in France on a business trip. Seeing that she is trapped in a passionless, amotional marriage, he persuades her to return to England, but the onset of war and her pregnancy (which she keeps secret) doom the relationship and Wraysford is sent to the killing grounds of the Somme, where the carnage and unspeakable atrocities haunt him interminably. Faulks parallels this with Wraysford's daughter searching for memories of her Grandfather but the genuine interest is in the conflict, where such evocative images and unimaginable violence will test the resolve of even the hardiest of readers.

Often the argument levelled at this type of work is that it may be too lengthy but Birdsong doesn't have a word out of place. Faulks has an eye for detail and a sense for the perfect adjective in order to pen such a brutal masterpiece with such finesse. This is his fourth novel and, having finished this, my appetite has been suitably whetted to try and read some more of his work. Personally I think that the quotation on the inside cover says more than any critic could truly attribute to this wonderful novel:

'When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen in unsurpassable.'

Summary: