Birdsong is a 1993 war novel by English author Sebastian Faulks. Faulks’ fourth novel, it tells of a man called Stephen Wraysford at different stages of his life both before and during World War I. Birdsong is part of a trilogy of novels by Sebastian Faulks which includes The Girl at the Lion d’Or and Charlotte Gray which are all linked through location, history and several minor characters.
The novel came 13th in a 2003 BBC survey called the Big Read which aimed to find Britain’s favourite book. It has also been adapted three times under the same title — for radio (1997), the stage (2010) and television (2012).
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Reception
Birdsong has been said to be Sebastian Faulks’ best work of fiction — it received an ‘also mentioned’ credit in The Observer’s 2005 poll of critics and writers to find the Best British book of the last 25 years (1980 –2005). Birdsong has been one of the most consistently selling books of the last decade, continuously in the top 5,000 sales figures.
His literary retelling of the events and attitudes towards the Battle of the Somme and life in the trenches is highly acclaimed and is often likened to the work of writers such as Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway, providing a modern contrast to World War I literature.
Plot
While most of the novel concentrates on Stephen’s life in France before and during the war, the novel also focuses on the life of Stephen’s granddaughter, Elizabeth, and her attempts to find out more about her grandfather’s experiences in World War I. The story is split into seven sections which cover three different time periods.
Birdsong has an episodic structure which moves between three different periods of time before, during and after the war. This is similar in many ways to the structure he would adopt in his later novel The Long White Winter.
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