Since I've been off Facebook I've had plenty of time to think about how I approach doing things. Having time to reflect is always a benefit in this world that favors and encourages knee-jerk responses. As such, it's been kicking around in my brain that I need to readjust my approach to the 100BYSRBYD. I've spent a lot of time making each bit a synopsis and, while interesting in some ways, that doesn't really help many people. I'll be making the shift to reviewing the book overall rather than recounting the individual events. There's more to say about a book than simply what happens, and if I synopsisize (not a word apparently) it then why should you read it yourself? Reading is kind of what this is all about. So...to continue...
"Birdsong" by Sebastian Faulks is a hell of a book. And by "hell" I mean both that it is a great book and that so much of it seems to take place in the closest humanity can get to hell on this side of the veil.
In the previous entry I posted about the opening love affair that occurs. I haven't looked but I'm sure I mentioned my general contempt for all books that glorify affairs as these wonderfully romantic things that are somehow virtuous rather than devastatingly destructive and wholly selfish events. The book surprised me by ending its first part with her leaving Stephen to return to her proper husband once she realized she was pregnant. And then...the war.
Oh, the war. World War I, to be precise. Faulks clearly dug deep in his research to find some of the most amazing, gripping, and detailed accounts that he could then immortalize her. "Catch-22" serves to mock war and all its facets as horrible and pointless and so does "Birdsong". The key difference between the two is that "Catch-22" tries to do so by pointing out how clever it is. "22" is the party equivalent of the guy with a can beer in his hand, laughing at his own jokes which he follows up with, "amiright?". "Birdsong", on the other hand, is the vet in the corner staring out of the window trying to ignore the blowhard and remembering it all too well as he walks his his tortured way through PTSD. He's not going to say anything unless you ask and even then it's all still too fresh.
Faulks makes you feel the mortar fire, the desperation, the claustrophobia of the tunnels beneath the trenches, the anxiety, the loss of normalcy and as many aspects of that life as it was that he possibly can.
And why? Why does this book exist? For that matter, why is it on the 100BYSRBYD?
The why is represented in the character of Elizabeth whose life is vastly different that Stephen's. She exists 50(ish) years later in the 1970s, a modern woman in a modern time who juggles her career, friends, and the monthly visits of her married boyfriend. Everyone tells her that he's never going to leave his wife, and he strings her along with, "I'm just waiting for the right time...". After an inciting incident which I won't reveal her...cause spoilers...she starts to try and forge a connection with her past and she begins to look into her grandfather's involvement in World War I. She begins to sift through his things to try and glean what happened.
The world is so far removed from that time that her research creates a series of realizations, not least of which is the selfishness of her generation and the selflessness of her grandfather's. This smacked me in between the eyes particularly when Elizabeth travels through France and takes a handful of back roads to come to a war memorial forgotten by the rest of the world. It's a tall structure literally in the middle of a farmer's field. It's a massive structure built of bricks each bearing the name of every man who died there.
"I didn't know. They never told us." Is her reaction as she weeps, devastated on the sight at her ignorance and the ignorance of the world at large. I'd bet all the money I currently have that you could easily swap Faulks and Elizabeth at that part of the novel.
And that is the point of the novel; there is a massive gulf of what we don't know. Everything we are taught in World War I was names, dates, important battles, casualty numbers and how it caused World War II. Honestly, I learned more about World War I watching, "Black Adder" than I did in school.
"Birdsong" serves to give the reader context for what occurred, and good Lord does it.
There is a scene in which one of Stephen's fellow soldiers is sent back home on leave. He has massive difficulty functioning. He remembers the city, his parents, his childhood home, all of the modern conveniences, but none of it seems realistic to him. Months in the trenches has changed everything for him. Everyone expects him to enjoy himself but the only thing he can think is of all the atrocities he's experienced at the front and how no one could understand. He tries to unburden himself to his father, tries to express his thoughts and feelings, but in stereotypical English fashion his father tells him it's best not to discuss it. With everything pent up inside and no way to get it out we realize it is the very moment the character becomes an alcoholic.
As I closed the book after turning the last page the ending felt a little hollow. It was hopeful and a 60 year promise was fulfilled so everyone should feel happy...Yay! It felt tacked on, as if Faulks' agent wouldn't let it end where Faulks wanted it to. The "good damage" was done in me regardless. I've spent a few hours now thinking about that gulf of what we don't know, what we can't possibly know. The ancient Greeks referred to the effect of knowledge as a light, a lamp shining on everything else we encounter.
It is so easy to believe that we know enough, that we are done, that we don't need to seek out more knowledge and understanding, but I disagree. The more we seek, the more we read, the more we try to understand, the more we try to know the brighter that light becomes and the more we see by it. If we give in to our own desire for ignorance the more likely it is that we will die in darkness.
Faulks challenges us to chase after the knowledge we are uncomfortable with. There is a scene where Elizabeth goes to a veterans hospital to meet a man in his 80s who may have known her grandfather. I nearly cried in that part for many reasons, but chief of those was because the man hadn't had a visitor in 40 years. He'd been sat at the same window for 40 years believing no one cared, no one wanted to hear, no one literally knew that he existed. I can't help but wonder how many... Well, I won't finish that thought.
I don't just recommend that you read this book; I implore you to read it. It will broaden your understanding and add just a bit more light to your lamp.
Pax,
W
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