If you read my Wednesday Reads post two weeks ago about high expectations, you'll know that 'Birdsong' is my favourite book. Whenever you tell someone what your favourite anything is they always want to know why. What, for you, makes that one thing better than all the other things of the same category. Why are jelly tots your favourite sweet? Why is history your favourite subject? Why is sleep your favourite activity? Often, it's hard to explain why something is your favourite thing, and to be honest explaining why Birdsong is my favourite book is difficult, but I thought today I'd give it ago, even if only to make it a bit more clear to myself.
I studied Birdsong at A2 English Literature, I compared it with Bronte's Wuthering Heights in terms of how much the central characters were portrayed as victims of doomed love. I literally tore the book apart. I only needed to focus on certain parts but I was convinced that Stephen showed signs of being a victim of doomed love throughout the novel and so analysed the whole story. I knew the book inside out, cover to cover, I could almost tell you what chapter you'd find certain things in and in some cases it was narrowed down to pages. After I'd studied it so viciously I decided to read it purely for pleasure and so got myself a clean copy, free of pencilled in scribbled notes across every page. To my surprise I enjoyed reading it for pleasure as much as I did deep analysis.
Birdsong, for any of you who don't know, is the story of a young Englishman, Stephen, who we initially meet living in France with a French. During his stay with this family Stephen begins a very passionate affair with the lady of the household, Isabelle. Eventually they run away to the countryside together where they appear to be making a happy life together, before one day Stephen returns to home to find Isabelle gone. Skip forward a few years and we're with Stephen and his comrades in the French trenches of WW1. The story goes from passionate, dramatic love story to passionate, dramatic war story. Check number one for being my favourite book.
The way Faulks intertwines, so seamlessly, such seemingly opposite stories is brilliant. Emotions run high for the reader throughout both the love story and the war story and heart strings are pulled and torn, for different but equally thought provoking reasons. Due to this, your're never left feeling low or waiting for something to happen. Faulks keeps the story lifted and exciting and despite how heart wrenching it becomes, due to subject matter, the whole thing makes you want to keep reading. Cliche but true.
The characters created by Faulks are so rich it's hard to forget they're not based on real people with real lives. Each one is so detailed that I become so attached to them every time I'm brave enough for a re-read. Obviously, Stephen and Isabelle, as main characters in my favourite novel, hold big places in my heart. But equally, Jack Firebrace, an equally as central character with his own story to tell becomes a big part of everything quite unexpectedly. For me Jack is the real hero of the novel. he has so much more understanding that Stephen and through him the wisdom and the moral and the saving grace of the horrific things that are happening come forth.
It is true that all good things must come to an end, unfortunately with Birdsong it's not the end of the novel. The end of the good comes with the completely, in my eyes, unnecessary 1970's elements. Intermittently through the earlier set parts of the novel, Faulks feels it proper to disturb your pleasurable read with the story of Stephen's granddaughter, seeking out her family history and essentially playing the role of Stephen's redemption. All she serves, for me, is tying up loose ends and I find the 1970's parts disturb the story and make it disjointed. Perhaps that's the point but for me it's pointless. However, I manage to see past all this for this novel and that rarely happens. Usually something that so hugely annoys me in a book would ruin it for me, but in this case I am happy to just ignore it. If you're going to pick the book up read them because you should cause Faulks obviously put them there for a reason, but don't worry if you don't like them, you're certainly not alone in that.
I have so much more to say on this but if I said everything the post could be a book in itself. Generally, I feel Faulks' beautiful descriptions, wonderfully crafted characters and seamless story interweaving is what grabs me, holds me, and makes me fall in love with the novel all over again every time. It's always the book I'd recommend to someone if they asked, so I'm going to recommend it to all of you. If it's the only book you read all year it won't be a wasted year.
Birdsong: A Love-Hate relationship, but let's be honest mainly love.
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