The way that the characters and the atmosphere are built by Sebastian Faulks is just amazing! The reader is taken in to that atmosphere, and shares the feelings of the main character, Stephen. You cannot fail to be totally captivated. However, the crowning achievement of Birdsong is its unflinching depiction of war. The earsplitting cacophony of the artillery, the claustrophobia of the tunnels, the never-ending mud, the smell of sweat and shit, the horror of seeing a head explode in front of your eyes. The heartbreaking letters sent home from the Somme, its writers knowing that they were almost certainly going to die in the coming hours. The bodies in pieces, pale and rotting in no man's land. The senseless brutality of it all, summed up by a roll call after the battle, ringing with unanswered names: "Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers' shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference."

Wessely, Simon (2006). "Twentieth-Century Theories on Combat Motivation and Breakdown". Journal of Contemporary History. 41 (2): 269–286. doi: 10.1177/0022009406062067. JSTOR 30036386. S2CID 145704176.The love scenes are there to alert you to what the body can feel, and to exhibit Stephen's peculiar sensuality. He notices the veins beneath a woman's skin, the flush of flesh. Later, he will not be able to help noticing exactly what bullets and shells do to flesh all around him. The flesh in every way is frail. For some time Faulks's working title was Flesh and Blood (a phrase that recurs through the novel). In fact, Stephen finds the terrible things done to men's flesh easier to recall than their faces or characters. "He recalled individual limbs, severed from their bodies, and the shape of particular wounds; he could picture the sudden intimacy of revealed internal organs, but he could not say to whom the flesh belonged." Birdsong is a book about the horror of war, particularly trench warfare. During WW1, due to advances in technology and armory, the face of war was changed forever. Tanks, submachine guns, advanced chemical warfare, and wireless communications were used for the first time. Thousands of men died in trenches for each mile of ground gained. Faulks seeks to remind the modern world what war is like and how the trauma it creates echo through the next generations. Birdsong analysis: the theme of war a b c d e Gorra, Michael (11 February 1996). "Tunnel Vision". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 13 September 2016 . Retrieved 29 August 2016.

In my younger, braver years, I'd already read a fair amount on the subject in Delderfield's many novels, and my heart couldn't take another volley of shrapnel, blood, guts and gore! This is a book that will stay with me for a long time as it has all the elements of a 5 star read for me. Its got the passion, the history and a great plot. It has the ability to make the reader exclaim out loud and to remember a time when precious lives were lost in the name of war. Elizabeth Benson – Granddaughter of Stephen Wraysford. Elizabeth has a job in company which manufactures garments. She wants to find out more about World War I and her grandfather's actions. She does this by phoning elderly servicemen, visiting war memorials and translating Stephen's diary. The second section rejoins Stephen, when he is a lieutenant in the British Army at the start of the war. Through his eyes, Faulks tells the reader about the first day on the Somme in July 1916 and the Battle of Messines near Ypres in the following year. In 2012 it was adapted as a two-part television drama for the BBC. [20] The production starred Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Wraysford and Clémence Poésy as Isabelle Azaire, and was directed by Philip Martin, based on a screenplay by Abi Morgan. The historian Edward Madigan favourably compared the television adaptation to Steven Spielberg's War Horse as a successful evocation of the experience of the World War I trenches. [20]This ‘review’ might sound like a huge cliché, and for that I apologise. What I don’t apologise for is the sentiments behind it because I mean every word. Consistently one of the greatest critiques of the novel concerns its 1970s plot-line. [17] For example, Gorra found that the addition of a parallel narrative "[ran] into problems"—especially concerning Elizabeth Benson, whom he "stopped believing in [as a] character". [9] Unlike other reviewers, the critic Sarah Belo did not question the historical investigation plot, but the depiction of Elizabeth's experience as a 1970s woman in England. [17] On the other hand, almost all of the reviewers describe the novel's war sections as excellently written; for example, the review in the Los Angeles Times called the sections "so powerful as to be almost unbearable". [17]