Birdsong

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ETA to add link to segment aired on NPR 1/23/14 on digitized British World War I diaries. See below.

MacCallum-Stewart, Esther (1 January 2007). " "If they ask us why we died": Children's Literature and the First World War, 1970–2005". The Lion and the Unicorn. 31 (2): 176–188. doi: 10.1353/uni.2007.0022. ISSN 1080-6563. S2CID 145779652. i don't understand why it has so much critical acclaim, i don't understand why i'm studying it at A Level, and i don't understand why it's one of the nation's favourite novels. i don't understand.

There are lines you must ponder. Why does one fight in a war? Who do we fight for? Do you fight for your land, your family, your friends....or for those comrades who have fought and died next to you? You are in the trenches and in tunnels, in the middle of bombardments. You are in a tunnel and you may be suffocated and buried alive. This book is about fear. This book is about the warfare of WW1. It is not just a matter of realism, it is also a manipulation of the reader's sympathies. At the front, anyone can die at any moment. In one battle, Stephen finds himself fighting desperately alongside a fellow officer called Ellis, and trying to talk him out of despair. Reinforcements arrive just in time, and Stephen retires with his men to their own trench. "Ellis had been killed by machine gun fire." We heard him speaking a few lines earlier, but his death is noted in passing. Caring about a character will not save him. One of the other characters into whose thoughts we are taken is Michael Weir, whom Stephen befriends. In one chapter we accompany Weir on home leave, and painfully witness his faltering attempts to describe his experiences to his father, who wants to hear nothing about his son's ordeal. The novel carefully acquaints you with this nervous, intelligent, fearful man, but then it kills him almost casually. As Weir walks towards him one day, Stephen notices that some parapet sandbags have become misplaced and is about to warn him. "Weir climbed on to the firestep 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 on to the sandbags of the parados behind him."

Like many people who chose to take English Literature as an A-Level, I was told that I should read this for my War Literature Module. I’ve had bad experience with course books, experiences that started in high school and stretched right up until I graduated university. So I was sceptical to say the least. This might be enough to sustain the hero, Stephen Wraysford, through the early part of the war, but it cannot last for long. As I said to begin with, nowadays we might believe ourselves accustomed to what life was like in the trenches but Stephen’s war takes us to another place as he is literally forced underground where he can escape the bombardment of shells and memory. They say you should be careful what you wish for and when I asked for a different perspective I wasn’t prepared for the claustrophobic world of the mining engineer. This, if anything, was the part of the book I found most difficult to deal with. I think I must have a fear of confined spaces – the morbid sense of being buried alive while still actually breathing still haunts me. In the past I have been known to read a book and then watch the film for comparison. I had recorded the TV version of BIRDSONG ready for just such an occasion – now I don’t think I could bear to watch it. The novel tells two stories separated by time, but featuring characters connected through family. The novel’s main story is about Stephen Wraysford, focusing on his experiences during World War I. A secondary story features Elizabeth Benson, Stephen’s granddaughter, who discovers her grandfather’s journals and begins to learn about his life through them. Alongside the main story, there is the narrative of Stephen's granddaughter, Elizabeth, who, whilst struggling with her already married boyfriend, Robert, unearths Stephen's journals from World War I and seeks to learns about his experiences at Marne, Verdun and the Somme. She discovers that Stephen's journals are encoded, but tries to decipher them.Faulks developed the novel to bring more public awareness to the experience of war remembered by WWI veterans. Most critics found this effort successful, commenting on how the novel, like many other WWI novels, thematically focuses on how the experience of trauma shapes individual psyches. [2] Similarly, because of the parallel narratives WWI and 1970s Britain, the novel explores metahistorical questions about how to document and recover narratives about the past. Because of its genre, themes and writing style, the novel has been favourably compared to a number of other war novels, such as Ian McEwan's Atonement and those in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy.