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Summary: Try Charlotte Grey instead
Review: Faulks' book "Charlotte Grey" (Not yet released in US, I think) was a much easier read, with more action and characters that are more easily understood. Birdsong is hard to follow, and the characters seem stiff and uninteresting.
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Summary: We can never fully empathise
Review: When reading Birdsong I was attracted by the characters' struggles but at once repelled by the vivid description. I read on with sympathy and pity but at the same time never fully appreciating or understanding the horror. The calmness of many of the soldiers warmed my heart whilst causing me to recoil at their apparent composure in the face of such suffering. A feeling I do not understand. Only those who have endured such affliction may comment fully on this novel and the power of the imagery and emotions conveyed.
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Summary: birdsong
Review: A very good book, well written, touchy and realistic
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Summary: A moving and powerful story
Review: Sebastian Faulks has done an excellent job in writing Birdsong. I have never read anything so beautifully written. Parts of this book are so tragic and heartfelt that it pulls you from your surroundings and take you to another time. Birdsong takes a hard look at life in WWI, but also interweaves tales of different lives and different times for a powerful combination. This is a must read book.
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Summary: don't believe the hype
Review: Except for a few brief sections, I found this book at its best, awkward and inept, and at its worst cheap and exploitative. The prose is pedestrian, the perspective meandering. Faulks seems never to have heard the dictum "show, don't tell" and instead adopts the omniscient point of view of the great nineteenth-century realist novel. I'm a huge fan of the nineteenth-century novel, but unlike Dickens or Eliot, Faulks never convinces the reader that he has enough insight into his characters -- or into human feeling more generally -- to justify his claims of omniscience. Not that his characters can bear much insight; their construction as characters is all too obvious: does anyone really believe in Stephen, Isabelle, Jeanne? The novel is a hodgepodge of various genre cliches: it can read like a torrid romance (the erotic scenes between Isabelle and Stephen), like an academic mystery (Elizabeth's investigations of her grandfather's role in the war), and most commonly like a technological thriller (all the silly tunneling stuff). But what really damns the book in my mind is the cheap obviousness of its message: war may be terrible and life may seem meaningless, but it will all be all right because people can have babies and create new life. One chapter of Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy has more wisdom and art in it than the whole five hundred pages of Birdsong.
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Summary: Where was the editor.
Review: This is a book that doesn't know what to do with it's self, or rather Sebastian Faulks doesn't. When writing of relationships or the effects of characters actions on others outside of the immediate conflict zone, Faulks is staid and immature and only the glowing reviews of this book got me through the first 90 pages. They are truly diabolical. However, once you are done with this scene setting drivel, then you are treated to a magnificent tale which is full of the tension and fears of the trenches of the first world war. The claustrophobic scenes with the tunnelers were to my mind so vivid that they caused me to use my asthma inhaler and the closeness one feels for the characters is acute. I was truly moved for their plights and read on deep into the night. The trenches come to life as somewhere where men lived and died with the same day to day emotions aswould be found if working in an office. The sight and the prospect of death are the stuff of everyday life and the loss of feeling for self and others apparent. These pages begin to explain how people charged over the top in broad daylight, how live with themselves when they had taken someone elses life. The same sort of toss, universal meanings and unrequited love affairs that destroyed the first 90 pages appear at intervals throughout the rest of the book, but one tends to scan over these, and only when reviewing this book is it obvious to myself how poorly writtens these parts were. In summary, if only Faulks had been bettered advised by his editor and had listened to that advice. He does not write well on large universal emotions, he proves it in his other books, but when he settles down to write about a single person in the confines of their immediate surroundings, then he is an outstanding author.
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Summary: Do Not Compare
Review: The setting of this story was World War I, although at the start of the story, the author did not give us a clue as to what was to follow. It started with the wild romance between Stephen, and his French married lover Isabelle. The death of the romance spelt the start of the war and we were brought face to face with its horrors. War and its horror and destruction, followed by the disillusionment of those who fought in it, was a tried and tested plot. However, don't try to compare this with other war novels such as Gone with the Wind or Regeneration. This book is beautiful in its own way. Read it to feel it.
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Summary: Mr Faulks, this is a blinder!
Review: 'Birdsong' is a wonderful journey through the mind. At first it is steamily erotic, and then it is truly horrific. The sense of suffering in many parts of the book is very real in places. The characters that Faulks has created gradually grow in the readers mind, causing the bessotted reader to feel real compassion with the characters concerned. I strongly recommend this title. Although his 'sequal' to this (Charlotte Gray) is an outstanding piece of literature, it cannot quite live up to the high standards left by this materpiece. Faulks' ability to take key events from both world wars and entwine them into modern understanding and clarity is sometimes almost unmatched in places.
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Summary: History is better
Review: Being an avid reader of WWI history, I read the reviews of being the 'best book I have every read' and bought a copy. Yes it is quite a good book, but does not come close to actual history detailed in for instance, the Lyn MacDonald historical books, which contain first hand accounts of the horror and everyday existence of the soldiers in that war. BirdSong was a good introduction to anyone not familar to the history, but cutting to a future period with the supposition that the future made up for the past is laughable. WWI changed British society for ever and left hugh holes in the lives of millions of families.
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Summary: "Too Late For a Quick Re-Write??"
Review: Sebastion Faulks tried a little too hard with this novel. He tried to employ certain devices to create a masterpece of great emotional and psychological depth and scope - the long romantic/erotic intro, the present day interludes from the trenches. Too bad they don't work. He should have realised that. It should have been pointed out to him by his Editor or Publisher (maybe it was). The man must be sick of hearing this - so many reviews about how brilliant the book could have been - maybe he's thinkng: "Is it too late to do a quick re-write?" The fact remains, THE BOOK IS GOOD. The intro isn't what you expect but it is readable and worth it. The war chapters give a depth of empathy which I have not experienced since "All Quite on the Western Front". For those of you who, like me, are always searching for the REALITY of this human tragedy, - the Human Reality - then parts of this book will bring you close. They will make you cry tears, tears that deserve to be shed, for the individuals that experienced this ..(what words suffice). Over 20,000 human beings died on 01/07/1916. But can a writer bring you close enough to identify with even one of them so that you can feel the pain within yourself. Faulks has made a very notable effort at a very worthy subject. The book will always be cursed to contain more that is necessary. But what is brilliant is still there within it.
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