Reading Order
Birdsong Reading Order
Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong (1993) is a standalone novel following Stephen Wraysford — his love affair with Isabelle Azaire in Amiens in 1910, his experience in the trenches of the Western Front from 1916 through the Armistice, and his granddaughter Elizabeth's attempt to understand his story from 1978. One of the most celebrated British novels about World War I and one of the best-selling literary novels of the 1990s.
Where to start
Birdsong
Complete Birdsong Book List
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Birdsong
Sebastian Faulks·1993·The complete novel. Entirely standalone. - Buy
Charlotte Gray
OptionalSebastian Faulks·1998·A young Scottish woman goes to occupied France in 1942 to find her lover and becomes involved in the Resistance — Faulks's next historical novel after Birdsong; shares its preoccupation with the French landscape as a site of European historical catastrophe and its interest in an outsider's encounter with French civilian life during wartime. - Buy
A Week in December
OptionalSebastian Faulks·2009·Seven characters in contemporary London over a week in December 2007 — Faulks's social satire of the financial crisis years; shows his range beyond historical fiction, though shares Birdsong's interest in what English civilization is and what it is capable of destroying.
Birdsong — Frequently Asked Questions
Should I read the Birdsong sequences in order? The novel jumps in time.
Birdsong is organized in three main chronological sections that alternate between 1910 Amiens (the love affair between Stephen and Isabelle), 1916–1918 France (Stephen on the Western Front), and 1978 England (Elizabeth trying to understand her grandfather's story). Within these sections the novel is chronological, but the reader must move back and forth between pre-war and wartime France and postwar England. The 1978 sections are the weakest of the three — Elizabeth has struck many readers as underdeveloped in comparison with the rich historical material — but they provide the perspective of retrospect that makes the wartime sections more affecting: we know from the beginning that Stephen survived, and the question is what survival meant and cost. The tunneling sequences beneath the Somme are widely considered among the most powerful passages in the novel and in British war fiction generally.
Is Birdsong historically accurate in its portrayal of the Western Front?
Faulks researched the Western Front extensively for Birdsong, and the novel's portrayal of trench conditions, the Battle of the Somme, and particularly the tunneling operations beneath the German lines is broadly consistent with historical accounts. He drew on diaries, memoirs, and official histories, as well as interviews with veterans and visits to the battlefields. The tunneling sequences — in which Jack Firebrace and his colleagues dig beneath German lines to lay mines — are based on the real experience of Royal Engineers tunneling companies who operated on the Somme, one of the less well-known aspects of World War I. The Battle of the Somme sequences, beginning with the catastrophic first day of July 1, 1916, in which nearly sixty thousand British soldiers were killed or wounded, are the novel's most historically grounded passages.
What does Birdsong say about memory and the obligation to remember?
One of Birdsong's central arguments is about the obligation of the living to the dead — specifically, whether the scale of suffering in World War I has been adequately acknowledged by subsequent generations. The 1978 sections make this argument most explicitly: Elizabeth's research into her grandfather's experience is the novel's frame for the reader's own encounter with the material, and her initial ignorance about what the war involved — her discovery that she doesn't know what she doesn't know — stands in for the reader's own position. Faulks has said in interviews that one of his purposes in writing Birdsong was to ensure that the experience of the men who fought in World War I was not forgotten — that the specific texture of what they endured was communicated to a generation that had no direct connection to it. The novel's epigraph, a quotation from a soldier's letter, announces this purpose directly.
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