Birdsong, A Novel by Sebastian Faulks

I recently read the novel Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks.  This is the second of his novels I have read in the near past (A Week In December was the other) and I am finding him to be a candid, honest, novelist with a unique voice, moving style, and a diverse narrative range.

Birdsong is centered on a young English orphan, Stephan Wraysford, in 1910.  The novel begins with him moving into the home of a wealthy textile plant owner in France, at the behest of the English company he works for, to learn the foreign aspects of the textile trade.  While in this house he engages in a passionate affair with the his hosts much younger wife that results in them leaving together and settling in another region of France.  From there the novel moves forward into World War I in which Wraysford is a Captain in the English army fighting in the trenches of France in "no man's land".  He has been left by Isabelle, years before, and faces a bleak life of death and darkness and mud and lice.  From the trenches of World War I the book flashes forward to the late 70's where Stephen's granddaughter is living out her own affair and delving into the history of her family.

The novel poses a question in two parts:  what is worth fighting for?  what is worth dying for?  Stephen and Isabelle engage in a passionate and dramatic affair, they fight for their freedom from her abusive husband and she becomes pregnant.  She runs away from Stephen without disclosing her pregnancy afraid of his passion and youth and energy and the social constraints that she has so obviously flaunted.  Her greatest dream was a child of her own, her deepest fear was a life of love and passion.  Subsequently the trenches become a very real experience for Stephen and then a metaphor for his life without Isabelle, the woman he would always love.  Faulks' real gift of the novel comes at this point, as soldier's die in the trenches and receive tragic letters from home and try and relate to the world that isn't under the scrutiny of German artillery, he begins to answer the questions posed by the novel.  The soldiers in the trenches fight for their lives because lives are worth fighting for.  And, in the end, their lives are worth dying for as well.

Birdsong is beautifully crafted.  Faulks' writes poetically and passionately about love and sex and war and friendship and the power of a legacy worth fighting for.