Bird+Song

Discussion:
We had a well attended meeting at Bonnie's house, and Herb Perry gave us a beautiful introduction, including reminiscences of his father's time in WWI, and a photo of him from that era.

We all seemed to enjoy the book, but had some difficulty in processing the jump from a Madame Bovary-esque beginning, the affair with the older woman, to the days in the trenches and underground, a kind of //War and Peace// juxtaposition. The introduction of the grand-daughter late in the novel was also hard for some to take, and it may have detracted from the unity of the work. Nonetheless, it was a gripping read, and some found it almost too intense to read the passages of men marching slowly to their slaughter.

Reviews, etc.
From Janet Shaban

Review by Michael Gorra, who teaches English at Smith College, and is the author of "The English Novel at Mid-Century." IT seemed that out of battle I escaped / Down some profound dull tunnel." These are the opening lines of Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting," the eeriest of the poems in which he imagined the wounded land of the Great War's Western Front. Yet even in that tunnel, where "no blood reached. . . / And no guns thumped," the poem's speaker cannot escape the struggle. For there he finds a groaning company of "encumbered sleepers," one of whom springs up and begins to speak himself, to tell a story of "the truth untold, / The pity of war, the pity war distilled." In a draft Owen had that second voice describing himself as a "German conscript, and your friend." But the final version simply calls him "the enemy you killed," the enemy who invites the poem's speaker to "sleep now": to sleep now that he has himself been killed and joined his erstwhile adversary in the "sullen hall" of "Hell." "Strange Meeting" conventionally gets read as a metaphor, but it's the achievement of the ambitious if broken-backed fourth novel by the British writer Sebastian Faulks to make us take it literally. All the best parts of "Birdsong" are set not so much in the trenches as beneath them -- in the network of tunnels with which both the British and the Germans laced the no man's land between their lines. Packed with explosives and then blown, these tunnels, like most of the tactics in World War I, consumed a great many lives to little purpose. For both sides were often digging in the same direction, producing an underground game of cat and mouse, in which they would try to locate and booby-trap each other's work before their own was discovered. So long as Mr. Faulks keeps his head down, as it were, "Birdsong" seems to me superb. His prose is spare and precise: "Jack Firebrace lay 45 feet underground with several hundred thousand tons of France above his face. . . . Jack kept sticking the spade into the earth ahead of him, hacking it out as though he hated it." His idea of using the scenes in the tunnels -- "fireballs of earth and chalk" -- is something new in the annals of this much-covered combat, even more original than the trilogy that Pat Barker recently concluded with "The Ghost Road," which won the Booker Prize in London. For in her treatment of shell shock Ms. Barker has had a rich documentary and literary tradition to draw on. And while the account of daily life in the trenches in Mr. Faulks's novel will be familiar to anyone who has read either Owen or "The Face of Battle," by the historian John Keegan, it has scarcely ever been presented in such unrelenting and dispassionate detail: "Weir climbed onto the fire step to let a ration party go past and a sniper's bullet entered his head above the eye, causing trails of his brain to loop out onto the sandbags of the parados behind him." It is as if Mr. Faulks had bled his own prose white, draining it of emotion in order to capture the endless enervating slog of war. But he also has two other stories to tell, and that's where "Birdsong" runs into problems. The first involves a young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, who in 1910 goes to the French city of Amiens in order to learn the textile business; there he begins an affair with a millowner's wife, Isabelle Azaire, and runs away with her to Provence. This story takes up the novel's opening hundred pages, and though the two lovers never quite convince as people of 1910, they do seem plausible as characters willing to stake everything on passion. Their sex scenes, while always decorous in language, are some of the most satisfyingly graphic this side of Nicholson Baker. Wraysford later becomes an infantry officer and is, with the tunneler Jack Firebrace, one of the two main characters of the novel's war sections, but his affair with Isabelle has little bearing on the war narrative proper. Mr. Faulks, however, needs that affair to establish his third narrative. This is set in 1978-79 and concerns a 38-year-old businesswoman named Elizabeth, who, we quickly realize, is Wraysford's granddaughter. For no special reason she decides that she wants to learn something about her grandfather, and then conveniently discovers a stack of his diaries in the attic. They're written in code and so, while she's waiting for a friend to crack it, she decides to visit some battlefields. This is evidently a new experience for her, though she does know all about "Albert Speer's buildings for the Third Reich." On her way through Belgium Elizabeth wonders if history would "be there for her to see, or would it all have been tidied away," and when she comes upon a war memorial she's shocked at the scale of the carnage to which it attests: "Nobody told me. . . . My God, nobody told me." That seems to me so extraordinarily obtuse for someone presented as both intelligent and well educated that I stopped believing in this character, or indeed in any of the scenes Mr. Faulks sets in our own era. When the diaries are finally translated, they tell -- no surprise -- the story we've just been reading. Oh, and Elizabeth has a child in the book's last pages, which she and her boyfriend somehow manage to deliver on their own. In such passages, "Birdsong" seems to want to be the kind of post-modern novel (like A. S. Byatt's "Possession") in which the reader feels a frisson at the way in which the distinction between past and present seems suspended. Revisiting both the literary canon and English history itself has, of course, been one of the dominant currents in contemporary British culture; indeed, the English are like crackheads when it comes to their own past. But the most important of the novels to have done that -- books like Ms. Byatt's or Graham Swift's "Waterland" -- have been revisionary, and have encouraged a kind of skepticism about the whole enterprise and possibility of recovering that past. "Birdsong" is very different. Mr. Faulks does not, of course, try to present trench warfare as a meaningful endeavor. But he does try to say something else, something consoling: the past can be recovered, its code can be broken; it can be used to add meaning to contemporary life. Its limitations can be overcome and its promises fulfilled because we know it can heal. In other hands that message could be powerful, and I suspect that it has in any case contributed to the novel's considerable popular and critical success in England. But for me Mr. Faulks's elaborate structure merely demonstrates how quickly innovation can be reduced to a formula. The present-day scenes in "Birdsong" are so lackluster that they seem a kind of injustice; I can scarcely believe they're the work of the same writer who in this book's best pages draws on Owen's great poem to provide a genuinely cathartic description of the war's last days.
 * TUNNEL VISION**
 * //Birdsong//** By Sebastian Faulks. 402 pp. New York: Random House. $25.