He emptied his pockets of items he no longer needed: railway tickets, a blue leather notebook and a knife with a single, scrupulously sharpened, blade. He placed half a dozen cigarettes in a metal case which he tucked inside his jacket. Stephen washed perfunctorily and tried to ﬂatten his black hair in the small looking glass. It was a spring evening with a late sun in the sky beyond the cathedral and the sounds of blackbirds from either side of the house. Stephen Wraysford arrives at René Azaire’s house, where he meets Isabelle for the first time over dinner with Bérard and Madame Bérard With the anniversary of the Great War looming, the message never seemed more vital. A film adaptation is said to be in the works, starring Nicholas Hoult.įaulks contrasts the ordinary present with the horrors of the past Stephen calls it the “long perspective of forgiveness”.

Birdsong has been one of the most consistently bestselling works of recent decades and it has been adapted for the stage and for television. Ruth Rendell said it “soared to heights far above most First World War novels”, and the public seemed to agree. Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and to Hemingway.

These narratives are intertwined with a final strand, set in the 1970s, where Stephen’s granddaughter Elizabeth attempts to make sense of what has come before. Faulks channels the quiet desperation and stinking claustrophobia of the trenches and the men, among them the former miner Jack Firebrace, on the First Day on the Somme. Stephen is a lieutenant, alone and brooding. Then we are in 1916, on the battlefields of France. She and Stephen begin an all-consuming love affair. He stays with a man named René Azaire, who becomes his mentor, and he falls in love with his young and neglected wife, Isabelle. The book opens in 1910, when Englishman Stephen Wraysford is sent to Amiens, France, to learn about cloth manufacturing. Published in 1993, Birdsong formed part of a loose trilogy of “French” novels by Faulks, the others being The Girl at the Lion d’Or (1989) and Charlotte Gray (1999). There are no shortages of works on the First World War but Birdsong - written by an author who had not experienced the war - proved to be one of the great novels on the subject for a generation.

In the hands of novelists, war is not simply history but a real and living thing. As the anniversary of the Great War nears, the message of Sebastian Faulks’s epic tale has never seemed more relevant

Birdsong by sebastian faulks