It is 1910, and Stephen Wraysford is visiting a small town in France on business. He stays with a local textile entrepreneur and his family, the Azaires’. During his stay he falls in love with Madam Azaire, and she reciprocates the feeling. They elope, but through guilt, fear and an unexpected pregnancy Madam Azaire runs away to her sister’s and Stephen is left with a proverbial broken heart. His life dramatically changes when war is declared and he enlists to join the British Army and fights on the front line in Flanders.

You can probably guess what most of the 500 pages of this novel describe throughout, as it is essentially a ‘war novel’. Most is certainly not intended for the faint-hearted, as Faulks graphically describes life in the trenches that is now so notorious of this particular war.

The additional characters that Faulks creates are exceptionally broad and an integral part of the development of the story. One of these, Jack Firebrace is a tunneller and Faulks dedicates a few chapters to Jack’s thoughts and life in the trenches. Again a character that offers a different perspective to the narrative than that of Stephen Wraysford, Jack has left behind a wife and sick child in London. It quickly becomes apparent that the person that others perceive him as and his own personality are of conflicting versions of the same man. An extrovert in public; always the one to provide entertainment for the others. The private reality is his fear of not seeing his son again, his loss of faith in humanity and his devotion to the men who surround him. In a heartfelt moment whilst he watches in horror as the soldiers go ‘over the top’ during a futile and pointless offensive all he can say is “Boys, boys…Oh my poor boys”. It is the contrast between Stephen and Jack that Faulks uses to demonstrate just how indifferent Stephen and the others are to what they have to do and what Jack sees as the futility of their occupation.

Firstly, her mother knew her father but Elizabeth doesn’t ask her about him, and Faulks doesn’t really give a credible explanation of why this is. Instead Elizabeth goes about translating Stephen’s old notebooks that he wrote in a secret language, and tries to find out about his army career in contacting the Army and finding any men who served with him. However, despite this the parts in the novel devoted to Elizabeth’s discoveries are somewhat short and hurried and it isn’t until halfway through the novel that she is introduced as a part of the story at all. By this time, I was left in no uncertainty that this was going to be less off a detective exercise for the reader and more of a focus of Elizabeth’s shortcomings in her life.

And in comparison to ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’?

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ however was written by a survivor of the war, Erich Maria Remarque, albeit not published until 1963. As I said previously, ‘Birdsong’ reminded me of this novel and I had to read it again to see the similarities, apart from the fact that ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ is written from a German point of view. In fact, once I’d finished it, I felt that Faulks’ novel did resemble what I had read by Remarque, however simplistic you’d regard his novel to be. But Faulks’ has elaborated in his own style to create more rounded characters and a plot that would make a more original piece. I don’t mean this as criticism but merely something I noticed.