We reserve a special place in our heart for the books we discover in our teenage years and this is particularly true of ‘Birdsong’ by Sebastian Faulks. But then, it is a book impossible to forget.
It opens with a love affair, where romantic, sexual love is presented as the ‘peacetime equivalent of the war’ – in this case the First World War, which is about to be devastatingly brought to life in the following chapters.
From the outset, the novel’s tone is deliberately ‘operatic’ and ‘extreme’ – Faulks’s working title while writing the book was ‘How far can you go’. And to read ‘Birdsong’ is to be haunted by its characters and certain scenes – which I won’t elaborate, but will let you discover for yourselves.
I couple this novel here with a poem by the great First World War poet Issac Rosenberg: ‘Returning, We Hear the Larks’. Another work that touches on the themes of desire, war, and birdsong and has also always meant a lot to me:
