Birdsong

Just finished reading this harrowing tale from Sebastian Faulks and though flawed I thought it was excellent.
Wilfred Owen and co have clearly had a big effect on Faulks' writing - theres no wishy-washy romanticised version of life in the trenches; Falks, even more that Owen, conveys the message the the war was an abberation against nature, an evil thing beyond words that scoops out the soldiers' humanity and leaves them scarred. The sheer relentless tragic conditions where a man expects to die at any moment can, I feel, only really be brought out by prose; the typically brief nature of poetry can't adequately convey the grinding misery.

If anything, the sections with the Granddaughter Elizabeth were even more dispiriting - is the bleak existance of her life really worth the sacrifice of so many men? At least Stephen experienced passion; there seems to be none to be found in 1978 England.

Steven's friendship with Weir was the most compelling in the novel, and Weir the most beliveable character and his death upset me more than any others. His death, with no pomp and circumstance - as is the case with the death of most of the minor characters - makes it all the more tragic.

What else? The Isabelle story petered out oddly, and Jeanne (how is that pronounced? Gene? Jane?) was never developed enough for it to seem likely that she could be in a relationship with Stephen, given how empty he was by the end. The image of thousands of injured English soldiers rising like the dead on the slopes near Amiens was an incredibly powerful image, as was most of that scene in fact. Also, allow being in a tunnel. Especially if your name is Stephen.

Aallssoo, during the whole book Stephen did not kill one German until he set off the explosive right at the end, but that was accidental, in fact the only one he did kill was a mortally wounded man in a shared shell-hole who wanted to go quickly. Furthermore, none of the other characters kill any Germans either. Weird. Maybe Faulks wanted to keep the German presence defined only by their shells, which I suppose makes the war seem futile, though I'm grasping at straws here. Gray even said Stephen was a terriffic fighter. Odd