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“This is not a war, this is a test of how far man can be degraded”

Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong

My disclaimer: This is one of my favourite novels.

It’s one of the few novels I have read more than once. Generally, I don’t enjoy revisiting books or at least I get very little from doing so.

With ‘Birdsong’, I first read it when I was fifteen. Like most teenage boys, I was fascinated by war. Each time I’ve returned to ‘Birdsong’, I’ve found different parts resonating with me.

It is a story of human factors presented with all the clumsy ugliness, lust and beauty we have to experience as we grow: War, sex, relationships, youth, death and how trauma shapes our psyche.

Technically, the novel is listed as the second book of a trilogy including ‘Charlotte Gray’ and ‘The Girl at the Lion d’or’. It can and probably should be read as a standalone novel. Other than extremely loose familial links, there is very little that links the books together beyond being set in France across two world wars.

Opening in 1910, ‘Birdsong’ introduces Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman in Amiens of northern France a house guest of the Azaire family. Wraysford falls in love with the unhappily married Isabelle Azaire.

The relationship is doomed to fail and a broken Stephen is swept in to the First World War in 1914. With changing narrative perspectives, the novel moves in to the horror and meaningless theatre of warfare.

The author has a twisted gift of human imagery. He writes of the human body with technical indifference. There is beauty in how he shows our ugliness. Sinews, brains, intestines are vivid and sickening. The acts of sex are real and relay the true and impulsive urges of our bodies and minds.

Sebastian Faulk’s motivation for writing the novel in 1993 was his worry that the First World War was receding in our consciousness.

The introduction of mechanised slaughter, this is where it began. The Great War of 1914 – 1918 is history within touching distance. Nobody is alive to recall the horror of the trenches, yet every day in France and Belgium; munitions, barbed wire and bodies are still pulled from the ground by indifferent farmers.

Faulks commits pages and pages to characters written off in a single sentence, a loose bullet or artillery round. Sometimes we stray too close to the perception of war as action movies or video games; glorious music, instant respawns. He won’t let you, you have one life and infinite ways to die. No dignity, no glory.

As we see war in Europe once more, we see again in the mainstream; the degradation of man.

Books like this can teach us something. As yet it seems we haven’t learnt enough.