Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War (Vintage International)

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a mainstream movie like manipulation of the reader to underline the little regard for life that war has, where key supporting characters' deaths are almost just footnotes, but a footnote with a sniper's bullet or machine gun fire. Think of the words on that memorial, Wraysford. Think of those stinking towns and foul bloody villages whose names will be turned into some bogus glory by fat-arsed historians who have sat in London. We were there. As our punishment for God knows what, we were there, and our men died in each of those disgusting places. I hate their names. I hate the sound of them and the thought of them, which is why I will not bring myself to remind you. There are lines you must ponder. Why does one fight in a war? Who do we fight for? Do you fight for your land, your family, your friends....or for those comrades who have fought and died next to you? You are in the trenches and in tunnels, in the middle of bombardments. You are in a tunnel and you may be suffocated and buried alive. This book is about fear. This book is about the warfare of WW1. MacCallum-Stewart, Esther (1 January 2007). " "If they ask us why we died": Children's Literature and the First World War, 1970–2005". The Lion and the Unicorn. 31 (2): 176–188. doi: 10.1353/uni.2007.0022. ISSN 1080-6563. S2CID 145779652. 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."

RSPB Guide to Birdsong by Adrian Thomas - Bird reference books RSPB Guide to Birdsong by Adrian Thomas - Bird reference books

At a certain point, I was just as fed up with the war as the soldiers in the story. Elizabeth’s episodes were cleverly inserted by the author to provide me for the breaks like Stephen had during the war.a b c Nikkhah, Roya (23 May 2010). "Sebastian Faulks novel Birdsong to be made into West End play". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 9 October 2016 . Retrieved 30 August 2016. i don't understand why it has so much critical acclaim, i don't understand why i'm studying it at A Level, and i don't understand why it's one of the nation's favourite novels. i don't understand.

Birdsong: from the winner of the 2022 Carnegie Medal : Katya

The battlefield scenes are so descriptive and cleverly written and at times make harrowing reading but the author makes sure you are in that trench and you are witnessing the vivid descriptions of carnage and brutalities of War. I learned so much from this book and I really enjoyed the story of the tunnellers, the descriptions of how both sides dug tunnels underground and lay mines under enemy lines was something that I had not been aware of and did some research on since.Like many people who chose to take English Literature as an A-Level, I was told that I should read this for my War Literature Module. I’ve had bad experience with course books, experiences that started in high school and stretched right up until I graduated university. So I was sceptical to say the least. 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] Francoise: “I was sent to Jeanne from Germany, where I had been living, because my real mother had died. She died of flu.”