Finally ... after putting this novel aside countless times, each time thinking that I was done with it, I completed it. Overall, I think that Faulks spread himself too thin and, as a result, missed the mark entirely. Faulks was desperately trying to engage a female audience in a war novel but he ended up dumbing down a potentially good story and disappointing all readers.

The description of life in the trenches was exceptional. The daily fatigue of a soldier is palpable and the conditions atrocious. The trench soldiers truly lacked any understanding of the 'why' about each episode of battle but they did what was asked of them without hesitation. Knowing that they were going to their undeniable death, over the top of the trench, directly into enemy machine gun fire, was unbelievable and so well told. I was flipping through those pages on the edge of my seat. The scenes within the sappers' tunnels were so eye-opening. I really felt the claustrophobia of those poor men trapped underground with no light, water or means of escape.

But then, there would be some gratuitous and unnecessary sex scenes that grossed me out entirely. Faulks confusion between lust, love and romance was painfully evident. There were too many swollen 'members' and I almost convulsed at his referral to a woman's vulva as a 'gash' (how romantic). His attempt to bring the 1970s storyline into his WW1 novel also felt distracting, as this modern woman was more concerned with the scraps of attention that her pathetic, married boyfriend doled out than the history that she essentially had someone else uncover for her.

It is my only Faulks read and I doubt that I will go back for more.

Another touching foray by Sebastian Faulks into life before and during WWI. Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. His life goes through a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives to the unprecedented experience of the war itself. His depiction of Stephen Wraysford's life during the war is very realistic, gut-wrenchingly so.

The story is a poignant one, and Samuel West does a great job of the narration.

2020 review: A book in seven parts; the first being set in 1910 in France, where a wild affair between a young Stephen Wraysford and his host's wife(!) Isabelle, devastates the families involved, as well as setting the foundations of the book. It then alternates between the lengthy Wraysford 's First World War experiences and the very short sections of his granddaughter seeking to find out his war and post war story.

Hey! I was just setting out the book composition, this is a review of sorts, don't ya know! Alongside the fictionalised first-hand descriptions of the harsh reality of trench warfare, there's also depictions of:
- a war managed by privileged upper class numbskulls
- the tremendous shock of man's inhumane mechanised warfare
- a mainstream movie like manipulation of the reader to underline the little regard for life that war has, where key supporting characters' deaths are almost just footnotes, but a footnote with a sniper's bullet or machine gun fire.
And it all works! I get it, war is bloody awful; but hey this is a thought provoking way of putting that message across. Like a great mainstream movie, this was perfectly pitched, and in the end all the stories match up, and there's a sense you've just been on a great journey.

I was kind of torn, when I first finished this book, I was like... Hell yeah, bring on the Five Stars, but I have to accept that even though the granddaughter's chapters set in the late 1970s are important for the additional story they tell, I just feel that the book would have been better without them. This was also a book that took me nearly 5 months to read, because the intro in Amiens was a bit of a drag for me, young man lusting over hot wife, know what I mean? Overall still a must-read, and a wonderful piece of British fiction, so it's a 9 out of 12, Four Star read.

3.5/5

This isn't the work I had been expecting to read after it sat on my shelves for thirteen years: in a word, it went far better than I would have assumed. Its double edged sword lies in how it rides the fine line between poignancy and sentiment harder than anything I've read in a long time. This made for the sort of read where I was flying high for the first fifty pages, pleasantly coasting on the afterglow for the next 200, increasingly oscillating up and down the pathos scale during patches of the later 300, and hanging on a tad vacuously for the last few chapters. There was also the fact that anything involving the 'World Wars' told from a white perspective necessitates a great deal of doublethink, let you get sucked into the morass of the noble status quo and find the juggernaut shadow of 'Rule Brittania' compromising everything from the tv shows you enjoy to the political prepositions you blithely glaze over. As such, if this had cut out a few sections here and there, especially around the two-thirds point, it would have made for a stronger narrative that didn't blow out all its closure muscles a good 50-100 pages before the final denoument actually happened. Still, this work slots alongside Sacred Hunger in my mind palace, wherein a white dude actually brings some writing chops to matters beyond the white dude ken and ends up writing a cracking good (helped in no small measure by generous handfuls of devastation) story in the old fashioned way of main character, main theme, main resolution. I've made no promises, digital shelving or otherwise, to read any more of Faulks, but if I see another of his works at a used book store, I can't say I wouldn't be tempted to have some more of his sensuous prose and fine sensibility on hand for when I most need it.