This is one of the most haunting novels I have ever read about World War 1. The title comes from the the practice of coal miners bringing a "canary in the coal mine" to test for bad air. In WW 1 hundreds of British coal miners were drafted into the British Army to help build tunnels under the trenches in France. The main character leaves Britain and enters the War after a failed affair....the descriptions of trench warfare, tunnel making, nerve gas, human carnage and the waste of war is a powerful antiwar statement. Years later, when the main character's grandaughter tries to find out more about his life and visits "VA type" hospitals she is stunned to see veterans whose minds and bodies have been destroyed by gas and wound infections...a dark chapter in humanity and the first of Faulk's books on war. Extremely well-written and researched...as powerful as "All Quiet on The Western front" Outstanding.

This is a masterful novel with lasting resonance for me about the impacts of war and resilience of human spirit. I think its achievement be at a level of "All Quiet on the Western Front". The narrative covers the life of an English man in France before the World War 1, his four years as a soldier, and a search by his granddaughter 60 years for knowledge of his life.

It's hard for the reader to care about Stephen Wraysford in the first section. He is aloof and unemotional, with no family or religion, and he has little ambition in his work as a liaison between a textile company in England and in rural Amiens, the area of the Battle of the Somme. But a passionate love affair with a married woman begins to awaken his humanity. Faulks finds in him a suitable vehicle to portray a kind of man who could survive and do well as a soldier in the face of the devastations and vacuum of purpose in this war. He becomes a lieutenant assigned to support the efforts of a tunneling crew tasked with digging under the German lines and setting off explosions. The contrasts between the horrors of trench warfare and the alternative hell underground, make for powerful reading despite the unemotional tone of its rendering.

A war like this should make our civilization become more human somehow in response; Stephen seems to represent a miraculous example of that on an individual level. Over time Stephen comes to care about the men he fights with and develops a form of love with two in particular, a captain of a sapper platoon and a middle aged "tunnel rat". In a foreward to the 2004 edition, Faulks notes: "Michael Weir and Jack Firebrace provided harmonic lines in counterpoint to Stephen's: innocence when he is worldly, scared where he is cold, despondent while he remains questing." Firebrace is driven to return to his family, whereas Weir, Stephen figures: "tries to believe his survival is worth something to fight for. Something to die for, you might almost say. 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."

As Stephen struggles with his nihilism, a near death experience shakes him up. His comes to let loose of the pain of his lost love from before the war: "He told himself that the feeling that they had for each other still existed, but that it existed in a different time."; he is able to nurture a relationship with the woman's sister, which motivates his will to survive.

Decades later, his granddaughter Elizabeth unearths some of Stephen's story, rendering a perspective from a "normal" life. Faulks explains in his preface how he used her in order that: "he past and the present, the public and private, be shown to be vitally interdependent gestures of love and redemption towards the past".

Excellent book. There was never a boring page. This is a kind of novel that you would like to slow down in your reading as every word is used properly to make the whole story right. Thank you to Tata J for sharing this novel to me. This is one of my favorite novels. What I particularly learned from this was the life of WWI soldiers in trenches.

ETA to add link to segment aired on NPR 1/23/14 on digitized British World War I diaries. See below.

Someone should have warned me. Someone should have known I am acutely claustrophobic and that opening the door to this book would be inviting in the specter of a panic attack. Picture me curled on the sofa or huddled beneath the covers, my breath shallow, my heart racing, my throat closing as soldiers worm their way through tunnels beneath the trenches. Feel the numbing of my extremities, the draining of blood from my face, the hot rush of acid in my belly, the rise of bile in my throat as those tunnel walls begin to cave and threaten to trap those young men in a tomb made of French dirt. Even now my hands shake with the memory of some of this novel's most horrific scenes. For I couldn't stop reading, I couldn't look away, even through my tears and hyperventilation, I read on.

So, consider yourself warned. This book contains the stuff of nightmares. And it's not just the dreadful tunnels, it is the unrelenting, unfathomable misery of the World War I battlefields. What is it about this war? All war is hideous, but there is something about this war-the number of casualties, the waves and waves of young men released onto the battlefields as cannon fodder, the squalor of the trenches, the chemicals-it was a war that obliterated a generation. Many of those who survived became empty shells, having left their hope and their souls and in some cases, their minds, to the battlefields of the Somme, Passchendaele, Verdun, Ypres.

Birdsong owns the war, it lives and breathes in those trenches. Your skin will crawl with lice, you will feel the slip and muck of blood and brains underneath your boots; hell, you'll feel your toes crumbling with trenchfoot inside your rotting boots. You will cry out in horror as a soldier whose name you've just learned, whose two or three paragraphs will have you aching for his girl and his parents back in Surrey, dissolves in a cloud of flesh and bone beside you. Yes, you have been warned. This is not an easy read.

But Birdsong is more than a black, white, red reel of warfare. It begins as a love story between an odd and doomed French woman, Isabelle Azaire and a very young and impassioned Englishman, Stephen Wraysford. Their adulterous affair in Isabelle's home in Amiens six years before the war opens Birdsong. Part One, the first one hundred-odd pages-is an unsettling combination of tedium and floridity as Stephen and Isabelle tear off their clothes and Edwardian sensibilities under the noses of Isabelle's husband and two stepchildren. The affair ends but their story carries on, surfacing many years later as the war tears into homes, flesh and families. It is Stephen whom we follow throughout the story, he who carries us onto the battlefield, into the trenches and down those dreadful tunnels.

Halfway through the story we jump to 1978, where Elizabeth Benson has taken a sudden interest in her grandfather, Stephen Wraysford and the fate of the men who died in or limped home from the trenches of World War I. Here the narrative stumbles a bit. Elizabeth, now in her late 30s, seems entirely unaware of the horrors of The Great War. This rang utterly false. "No one told me," she says upon seeing the battlefields and monuments of the Somme. I think a British citizen of her generation would have been well aware of the magnitude of that war. But Faulks gives Elizabeth a strong voice and her own personal dilemmas that bring the existential quest for meaning and truth full circle. We don't stay in late 70s London for long, but we dip in and out until the novel's end as Elizabeth's story becomes woven into her grandfather's.

Sebastian Faulk's writing is sumptuous and pitch perfect, capturing the essence of each of the three eras he writes--the tumescent melodrama that unfolds in Amiens in 1910, the desperation, emptiness and incongruous vividness of the war years, and the practical, surging energy and wealth of late 70s London. This is a great novel, an engrossing but devastating read. Just look up every so often and take deep, slow breaths. You'll need them.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/20...

Stopped reading this 200 pages in. I understand its greatness, but it's just too slow for my taste. A lot happens in the story, but it's described in a way that makes it seem like nothing is happening at all. There's very little action going on, even though a good chunk of this book revolves around WWI and the trenches. It's hard to care for the characters because they all have annoying qualities and silly reasons for why they make any of their decisions. It's just not a book I can invest much in (and considering it's 500 pages, I have no desire to invest all this time in it either).

"Очите ѝ се впиха в щръкналата му плът."

Заслужавам повече.

Приплъзване на реалности. Когато една реалност е заплашителна, може - с цената на висок риск за душата и разума - да се прескочи в друга. Най-страшното е, когато броят на достъпните реалности се изчерпи, както става със Стивън и много други момчета, озовали се в скотобойната на първата световна война.

Поне в началната си третина романът изобщо не може да реши какъв да бъде. Любовен ли, военен ли, изследване на нравите ли… Този конфликт не се разреши докрай, но посоката се избистря и минава право през ада на войната като най-сигурен лек за всеки фанатик/ милитарист/ националист/ авантюрист. Упоменаванията на Амиен, Сома и Ипър са точно това - упоменавания. За заетите в месомелачката те не значат много, докато за един шилинг на ден (заплатата в британската армия) реалността, човечността и животът се приплъзват някак встрани. Остават празнотата и безмислените, но ритмични малки ритуали като единствена защита.

Военната част е най-силната, с образите на Стивън, Уиър и Джак. Интимната част - любовната история с Изабел - е ненужно разтеглена в началото, и е дразнеща с неумелия образ на Изабел и с изобилието от безмислици в поведението и. Авторът все едно не е срещал жива жена, и се е задоволил да остави твърде много от Изабел да тъне в мистика. Има и трета времева линия почти в съвременността, която е ненужна, но поне е съвсем кратка и не е твърде натрапчива. Така че заради военната част, която наистина е ядрото, и заради силния финал, все пак закръглям звездичките нагоре.

3,5⭐️

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks is a moving, passionate, shocking, thought provoking and heartbreaking novel. A novel that manages to create a passionate and erotic love story combined with the horrors of war.<b>

Set before and during the Great War, Birdsong tells the story of Stephen, starting in pre-war France and taking us right through the war and through a terrible period of history.
Faulks delivers a moving and shocking account of Stephen and his love affair and the trials and hardships of trench life and it seems as though at times you are seeing this all through the characters eyes.

This is a powerful novel, and certainly not for the faint hearted. I read this for my local book club and I can imagine when we meet in February this book is going to make for great discussion.

The battlefield scenes are so descriptive and cleverly written and at times make harrowing reading but the author makes sure you are in that trench and you are witnessing the vivid descriptions of carnage and brutalities of War.

I loved the characters and they are so well developed that I found they not only had faces but voices and I had such a connection with each and every one of them.

I learned so much from this book and I really enjoyed the story of the tunnellers, the descriptions of how both sides dug tunnels underground and lay mines under enemy lines was something that I had not been aware of and did some research on since.

This is a book that will stay with me for a long time as it has all the elements of a 5 star read for me. Its got the passion, the history and a great plot. It has the ability to make the reader exclaim out loud and to remember a time when precious lives were lost in the name of war.

I could go on and on but you just have to read it for yourself !

Birdsong is certainly unique, but it ultimately didn’t come together.

The book opens in 1910, and, Who-ee! is it steamy. Then, the book transitions to World War I. Personally, I haven’t seen any war books this steamy, and I was intrigued how the narrative would unfold.

But, sadly, I was disappointed. First, the author just dropped the steamy plotline. Second, the World War I bit had such wasted potential. The book explores the experience of men who tunneled during the war. This is beyond the traditional trench warfare—these men were digging deep underground to listen for any sign of enemy movement. Uh uh. You couldn’t pay me enough money to go into those dark death holes. No way. No thank you.

But the author didn’t know how to leverage these creepy, spooky, dangerous vibes. He needed to read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

And the book is slow. I mean S-L-O-W. When I tried to find an audiobook for this book, I kept running into an abridged version which looks like 60% of the book was cut.

That tells you everything you need to know right there. When 60% of the book is cut, it isn’t good.

The ending was just plain odd. Elizabeth seems to come out of a coma and suddenly realized that World War I happened despite being nearly 40 years old and living in Europe. Apparently, she missed all of the war monuments for decades. The very end of the book was so unbelievable that it was almost laughable.

Birdsong has some flickers of brilliance, but it is bogged down by the ever-so slow placing.

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a beautifully written story about the horrific, long-lasting effects of war on individual people and the importance of knowing one’s past in order to decide one’s future

This book is very intense
As I am nearing the end I am very curious to see how it all ends
I hated the main character Stephen in Part 1 but have enjoyed his tale ftom then on.
The WWI descriptions are awful and distressing and horrible... as they would hsve been... it is very real... you can almost feel the mud and yuck.
I quite liked the changes from past to present over the course of this novel, however I find having now finished (22/8) that it finished quite abruptly with quite a few loose ends.

Not until almost the end when my 5-star became a certainty, and not until shortly before that when my first tear came. Yes, it was intense, as any book about a major war out to be. the intensity in this book did not manifest itself only through the gruesomeness the wreckage, and the atrocity associated with the war, but the emotional struggles beneath the surface of ordinary human beings being pulled out of the reality of their otherwise ordinary, though not necessarily perfect lives.
It was Stephen’s story through and through; even with the extension to his granddaughter Elizabeth 60 years ago. Stephen made an entrance to the story as a compulsive and reckless young man barely out of boyhood. The war reshaped him, and at the end we discovered along with Stephen himself, the will to live and the compassion to others that he never had thought he possessed.
“Escaped from extermination, Stephen feared nothing any more. In the existence he had rejoined, so strange and so removed from what seemed natural, there was only violent death or life to choose between; finer distinctions, such as love, preference or kindness, were redundant.”
At a certain point, I was just as fed up with the war as the soldiers in the story. Elizabeth’s episodes were cleverly inserted by the author to provide me for the breaks like Stephen had during the war.
There were quite a number of memorable characters, Isabelle, Jeanne, Colonel Gray, JACK FIREBRACE, Captain Weir, Elizabeth’s boyfriend Robert… like Stephen, they are all conflicted characters in one way or another, yet felt so realistic and believable.
Elizabeth’s love story echoed her grandmother’s but with its own spirals— History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes .
This was my first book by the author, and my first novel with detailed coverage on WWI. I know there are two other books in the trilogy. After being so marveled by this one, not sure if I should pick them up.