Birdsong
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Look at the cover - you can see what it's about. The Horror Of War, of course, with 'war' here meaning World War One.
Stephen's story runs from 1910 until 1918; Elizabeth's story takes place in 1978 - 1979. Her story is basically the tale of how she finds out his story, so it's one of those books about Never Forgetting, and The Impossibility of Explaining The Horror Of War To People Who Weren't There, which is irony of course, because it's a book about The Horror Of War. Anyway, I'm sure people write essays about this book all the time, because it's got everything you'd need to write an essay:
1. Juxtaposition of life and death - obviously, loads of death, because it's set during a war, but also two pregnancies, described with what I thought was an interesting amount of biological detail about last menstrual periods and labour and antenatal clinics and so on (or maybe I've just been reading too many vague Victorian novels recently).
2. Texts within texts - Stephen writes notebooks and letters, lots of the other soldiers write letters which are written out in whole within the text, Elizabeth gets Stephen's notebooks decrypted (he writes them in his own code), she looks people up in books and tries to access their military records.
3. Never Forgetting - because it's set in 1978, some of the veterans are still alive. She finds two: one of them wants to forget, and the other had sort of forgotten everything and nothing, being a confused soul who's been in a rest home for the shell shocked since the 1920s. She's also acutely aware, being nearly 40 and having no children, that the remembering will stop with her, unless she can carry it on somehow. And you, we, however you address the reader, can't forget either - there's even a Jewish German soldier who goes on about how much he loves the Fatherland. In case you forget at any point that he's Jewish, he mentions bar mitzvahs and wears a star of David. He is actually the only German soldier described in any detail at all. Because, Never Forget, even things that haven't happened yet. (I thought this was the only bit that was a bit clumsy and pointed actually, in what was otherwise a really good book.)
4. Birdsong - symbolism of. And in case you get stuck, the author's added a helpful foreword, in which he says that his intention was to highlight nature's indifference to the suffering of mankind.
5. Not necessary but it helps - it's really good. I know I sound a bit scathing and cynical about it so far, like it's kind of a Horror Of War By Numbers sort of book, but honestly it's brilliant. I cried and cried (though I cry easily, so that's not worth much), I read it in two days because it's really gripping, and the last fifty pages of Stephen's story are like watching a horror film. Or maybe even being stuck in a horrible nightmare. I had to stop reading every few pages and take a break because it was all a bit too Horror Of War and I was starting to feel sick.
Ok but here's the thing, the thing I kept tripping over. Doesn't make it a bad book at all, but makes the experience of reading it a bit weird. It's all about how you can't know unless you were there, right? And the characters say that explicitly, again and again and again. Here's one random example, but there are dozens more:
'No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand. [...] We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.' (p.422)
But... that's just not the case, is it? I did my English GCSE (exam that basically everybody has to do when they're 16; well, you don't have to, but you can't go on to higher education or get a decent job if you don't) in 1991, and we studied masses of WW1 poetry. I checked this morning, and the 16 year olds of the now are still studying it. And all of us in between. I'd bet that most people under the age of fifty can't recite much poetry aloud; but that if they can, it'll be WW1 poetry, because that's what we've studied the most.
Stephen might have sealed away what he'd seen in the silence of his heart, but Wilfred Owen chatted away like nobody's business, and what's more, we listened. We might not understand, because We Weren't There, etc etc, but they did their best, those poets, to make sure we got a vivid idea of the thing:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,---
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Author Owen, Wilfred (1893-1918)
Title Dulce et Decorum Est
Well, obviously I didn't pace behind the wagon, but I don't tell the old Lie to my children either. So meeting Elizabeth, an educated woman, who in 1978, seems to have no knowledge whatsoever of the war, nothing, seems peculiar.
The foreword from the author explained it to me: he wrote it in the 80s and it was finally published in 1993. He says that his own history teacher at school was unwilling to talk about the Great War, and he implies that this reluctance was common at the time. He describes going round deserted battlefields and war memorials in northern France when he was researching the book; whereas now schoolchildren are often taken on trips to see the 'crosses, row on row' (see how it comes tripping off the pen, all this half-remembered Horror Of War), so that's all changed. Maybe Birdsong was part of the change. It's interesting to me that they seem to spend at least as much time teaching it as literature as they do history. I'm sure plenty of people in WW2 wrote poetry too, but they don't seem to teach that, according to my very brief glance at the English curriculum. That war's gruesomeness is all covered in the History curriculum. Maybe WW2's poetry is just not as good? Anyway, learning the poetry of it along with the facts gives a particularly vivid and gruesome flavour to the thing.
Elizabeth eventually visits the war memorial at Albert, where the names of those lost at the Somme are inscribed on that massive Lutyens arch - 72,194 names, and that's just the British and the South Africans, and it's just the lost, not those killed. 60,000 British men died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme - described in Birdsong in horrible, vivid detail. Altogether, 500,000 Germans died here, along with 420,000 French and 200,000 British troops, just during the Battle of the Somme. It's deserted when she turns up in 1978 apart from a janitor. It's probably got coachloads of visitors there today.
What can you say about so many names, more than a million men at just one place? Well, if you're the sort of person who can write books, you write Birdsong.
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