Birdsong, written by Sebastian Faulks, is an epic novel of World War I courage and turmoil.

IN 1910, Stephen Wraysford, a junior executive in a textile firm, is sent by his company to northern France. Whilst in France he falls for Isabelle Azaire, a young and attractive matron who abandons her abusive husband, a wealthy textile baron, who sticks by Stephen long enough to conceive a child. Wrayford convinces her to leave a life of passionless comfort to be at his side, but things do not turn out according to plan. Wraysford is haunted by this doomed affair and carries it with him into the trenches of World War I.

Six years on, Stephen is back in France, as a British officer fighting in the trenches. Facing death and embittered by isolation of war, he steels himself against thoughts of love. But despite rampant disease, harrowing enemy tunnel explosions and desperate attacks on highly fortified German positions, he manages to survive, and to meet with Isabelle again. The emotions roiled up by this meeting, however, threaten to ruin him as a soldier. Everything about this masterly written novel is outsized, from its epic, if occasionally broken-down, narrative, to its gruesome and utterly convincing descriptions of battlefield horrors. Birdsong is enlivened with considerable historical detail related through accomplished prose. Sebastian Faulk’s narrative flows with a pleasingly appropriate recklessness that brings his characters to forceful and dynamic life.

Birdsong derives much of its incredible power from its descriptions of mud and blood, and Stephen Wrayford’s attempt to retain sanity and a scrap of humanity while surrounded by the Nazi onslaught. What becomes highly enthusing as the story progresses is the simultaneous description of his present-day granddaughter’s quest to read his diaries, though incomplete and difficult to read, is designed to give some sense of perspective and proportion. Birdsong is an unflinching, articulate fictional war story that rewards the reader with beautifully flowing use of the English language. Faulks deserves every accolade that has been heaped on him to date.

THE writing is impressive throughout. The writer’s prose is always exact and elegant and, on occasions, rises to real lyricism, without (cleverly) ever sounding forced. What makes Faulk’s style come to life is the authentic nature of the dialogue, a discourse that is well placed without the irritating linguistic anachronisms that so often blight historical novels set from the recent past. The experience of trench warfare, for instance, is made so vivid and clear that sometimes the reader may well be tempted to put Birdsong aside. But, it’s worth going on if such thoughts cross the mind because events are seen through the eyes of very well developed characters. The author is able to connect the central character, Stephen, with the reader in an extraordinarily adept way; one feels emotionally involved. A link exists with the modern era, through Wrayford’s granddaughter, who goes to great lengths in finding out more about her grandfather, whom she never knew, and who is stridently seeking to establish her own identity more definitively in the process. This establishes a sense of continuity with the past.

THE book starts before the war in Amiens, in 1910, when Wraysford has an intense love affair with a married woman that comes to an unsatisfactory end. Sexual passion is, no-doubt, a notoriously difficult subject to portray in a novel, but Faulks manages it with good demeanour and disposition.

The prose then shifts in time to 1916, when we encounter Stephen, already an officer promoted from the ranks, becomes trapped in the travails of the troglodytic netherworld of the Great War’s western front. The horrors of such experiences are depicted objectively; the facts are allowed to speak for themselves on countless occasions, and are all the more telling for that. But in Stephen Wraysford’s military character and being – despite the bestial filth of trenches, narrow underground tunnels, and random death – an ember of self-preservation resists annihilation. Faulks does exceptionally well in describing with clarity, and bracingly dramatises survival against all the odds.

Though fictional, Faulks has, undoubtedly, done his homework. The reader is left to feel that his descriptions of events are based on clearly documented facts and research. Some of the central scenes in the novel are set in a relatively unfamiliar context: that of the mining tunnels, for instance, that both sides constructed between their respective trench networks. The Allies and the Germans both dug these mines and countermines – sometimes, as Faulks illustrates, one side would succeed in detonating explosions that destroyed the enemy tunnels, killing the sappers or burying them alive. To describe the technicalities of this in fiction is no easy task, but Faulks manages it well by allowing his reader to see it through the eyes of one of the sappers.

From conveying the heart-rending anxieties of leading men over the top, Faulks moves to soften Wraysford’s increasingly cold fatalism with memories of his torrid pre-war liaison and love affair with Isabelle, a Frenchwoman. The affair ruined her life but produced a child whose daughter furnishes a vehicle for flash-forwards to the 1970s, when that granddaughter becomes curious about who Wraysford was. As typical of the “lost generation” of Britain, the Wraysford antihero realistically conveys what a waste, in terms of lives and psyches, the trench experience was.

DESPITE the masterfulness offered by Faulk’s, the book isn’t an unqualified success. There are distinctive aspects of Stephen’s character that are not wholly or satisfactorily resolved. This claim is laid bare when we consider that Wraysford didn’t know his parents. He was brought up, first by his grandparents, then in an institution, before being taken away by a man he didn’t know who became his legal guardian, but for whom he doesn’t care for. Here the novel becomes unclear. Stephen Wraysford’s level of education is left vague, though it appears higher than might otherwise be expected from his background. His religious views are also left somewhat nebulous and indefinable; he occasionally prays when under stress and, once, before an assault, he receives Holy Communion. For the most part, however, the reader may well come to the view that the central figure is an agnostic. On leave in England he has an experience of nature mysticism that has no connection with Christianity.

BIRDSONG ends on an affirmative note, when Elizabeth, Stephen’s granddaughter, gives birth to a baby whom she names after a boy, the son of one of the sappers, who died near Stephen after an attempt to extricate themselves from an underground tunnel enemy explosion. This could easily have been interpreted as being sentimental or over-symbolic but, whilst highly charged and very emotive, paid off because the theme fitted in with Elizabeth’s determination to discover her family history.

Sebastian Faulk’ Birdsong is an impressive and well-crafted achievement. The story, one that is based on the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, will likely stay in your mind long after you close the book.