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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780679776819
ISBN number: 0679776818
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 496
Printing Date: June 02, 1997
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: June 02, 1997
Sale Popularity Level: 53744
Studio: Vintage
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient. Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come.
Amazon.com Review:
Readers who are entranced by the sweeping Anglo sagas of Masterpiece Theatre will devour Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks's historical drama. A bestseller in England, there's even a little high-toned erotica thrown into the mix to convince the doubtful. The book's hero, a 20-year-old Englishman named Stephen Wraysford, finds his true love on a trip to Amiens in 1910. Unfortunately, she's already married, the wife of a wealthy textile baron. Wrayford convinces her to leave a life of passionless comfort to be at his side, but things do not turn out according to plan. Wraysford is haunted by this doomed affair and carries it with him into the trenches of World War I. Birdsong derives most of its power from its descriptions of mud and blood, and Wraysford's endeavor to retain a scrap of humanity while surrounded by it. There is a simultaneous description of his present-day granddaughter's quest to read his diaries, which is designed to give some sense of perspective; this device is only somewhat successful. Nevertheless, Birdsong is an unflinching war story that is bookended by romances and a rewarding read.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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This is one of the few books I have ever abandoned midway through. I managed to slog through 235 pages until Part Three and then ran out of steam.
Throughout those pages, I felt no connection to any of the characters, I found much of the dialogue either wooden or unbelievable, and while the writing is certainly competent, I found the whole thing really, really dull.
Anyway, I'll put it aside for now and hopefully have the energy to come back to it another time. After reading so many positive reviews, I really feel like I'm missing something.
Rated by buyers -
The novel is bifurcated. While most of the action takes place slightly before and during World War I, peppered throughout are chapters that take place in 'contemporary' London.
The war chapters are *brilliantly* written, truly moving and powerful. I can't recommend those enough. The modern chapters are tedious. Whatever the author was trying to do with the parellel stories, he failed.
(The protagonist of the London chapters turns out to be a descendant of characters from the war-time story. Bo-ring.)
I urge you to read this book, ignoring the London chapters. The historical fiction can be read without wasting your time on the modern story. I've never read anything that made battle seem so real. The characters are well-realized, the story affecting.
Rated by buyers -
I can envision, from the start here, two types of readers dismissing this work out of hand, those who are squeamish about graphic depictions of sex and those who are squeamish about graphic depictions of war. For the very first sort, you really needn't worry yourself overmuch after the very first fifty pages or so; for the second sort, though, you'd best find reading material elsewhere. Are we clear?
Well then, here's my take on the book: Faulks is at the top of his form in the WWI passages, which are harrowing and well-wrought, not just in their description of the physical realities of life and death in the trenches: heads being sliced in half by shells, rats crawling out of abdomens, lice eggs bursting to life along the seams of freshly-washed shirts; but, more to the point, in the psychology of pointlessness and futility that infests the soldiers' minds, in particular, our anti-hero here, Stephen Wraysford.
I agree with the other reviewers here, who, almost to a one, find fault with the erotic romance with Isabelle at the beginning and the almost silly scenes from in late 1970s revolving around Stephen's grand-daughter. The very first section reminded me too much of something out of D.H. Lawrence. Indeed, there are even sections which are nearly transcriptions of Lawrence's half-cocked theory of "blood-consciousness." Thankfully, for the novel, the war intervenes. The 1970s sections, which I should like to see cut almost in their entirety, are formulaic and quaint to the point of inanity.
So why, assuming you don't fall into the two aforementioned categories, should you read this book? Because, more than any book that I can recall reading about the "Great War," Birdsong brings home what it was like in that war. In America and Britain, we mourn, rightfully so, the few thousand that have fallen in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But this war was filled with battles in which 50,000 men were killed in a single day, from sunrise to sunset. It staggers the mind. What purpose can an individual life have under such circumstances? Stephen puts it well to newcomer Ellis, describing his friend Weir's condition:
Stephen said very gently, "I don't think it's fear in that sense. He's not afraid of gas or shells or being buried. He's frightened that it doesn't make sense, that there is no purpose. He's afraid that he has somehow strayed into the wrong life." P.297
Despite my misgivings about parts of the book, the work confronts the reader with purposelessness, meaninglessness and individual expendability as no "existentialist" work comes close to doing, shakes the reader and demands to know: "Why?!?!"
Rated by buyers 
-
The scenes with Stephen are extremely well written. Increadibly intense account of personal suffering of soldiers in World War I. Tender, realistic love story. This is first-class writing. Unfortunately, later scenes with granddaughter Elizabeth are very weak. But since the rest of the book more than compensates for it I still give it five stars.
Ayca Yesim
Rated by buyers -
Faulks masterfully brings you onto the battlefield of World War I through the eyes of a main character who has formal ties but no personal loyalties. An Englishman named Stephen Wraysford, he is orphaned as a child and financially sponsored into adulthood. You meet him as a young man who has, through no fault of his own, grown up with no emotional attachments. He falls in love, but the woman belongs to someone else. You begin to sense Wrayford's story as an emotional wasteland, and then abruptly World War I intrudes. Within a few short pages, the war becomes the emotional wasteland and you begin to live the story as an acquaintance of Wraysford, who is a consummate observer. Wraysford becomes invisible in the framework of the story so that you can see through his eyes with no distractions--no glimpse of his hopes or dreams to distinguish him from the others who are fighting and dying alongside of him. Instead, like him, you are living in the moment devoid of attachment to a particular character but occupying frame by frame an amazingly vivid landscape. One memorable scene of many: a description of nightfall on the battlefield; how when the sound of the artillery fades, you can hear the collective misery of the wounded that it was covering...how dying men invariably call out for their mothers, not their wives...how the endeavor of the wounded to crawl back to their trenches in semi-darkness resembles "a resurrection in a cemetery a thousand miles long." The fact that Wraysford seems to bring no prejudices to his observations makes them even more compelling. Instead of mourning a single character you will feel the enormity of waste and destruction that impacted a whole generation. Instead of a simple three-letter word, from now on "war" will be the word that paints a thousand pictures, and in this book Sebastian Faulks has painted a masterpiece. After you read this book, you won't be waiting for the movie, instead you'll feel like you've already "seen" it.
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