Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

"Birdsong , I would almost say, is a quite straightforward depiction of war. It gets the job done. When I was trying to write a scene set at the Battle of the Somme, I remembered reading Birdsong when I was around twenty, and weeping at the hairdressers—which was quite uncomfortable, they were like: ‘Can you stop crying quite so much?’ So I looked back, re-read the Somme scene. And it was so perfectly written. You could not have changed a single word. Then I actually felt this sense of relief. I thought, oh well, if someone wants to read a perfect depiction of the Somme, then it exists already and I don’t have to worry about my depiction. I’m just adding to the depictions, there’s already a great one. So I felt freed by that. But then I also structured my depiction of the Somme significantly differently, because I thought: that’s been done perfectly, there’s no need to do it again. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I read an interesting interview with Sebastian Faulks where he said he is impatient with characters in books where the author clearly loves the character and wants you to as well. And so just everyone in the fictional world loves the character. He said, he’s always very careful to make sure that quite a few people in the book don’t like the character he likes. So the protagonist is a character—who I find very likeable, because he’s a little bit of a modern sub-in, he sees the world a little as we would—who everyone within the book thinks is a bit of an odd fish. They just don’t connect with him, you know, and that makes him feel very three-dimensional. It also begins with this idyllic Edwardian romance, then breaks that up completely. It’s about the mining in the war, in these tunnels deep underground. It’s terrifying. Very vivid. I mean—have you read it? That’s something I like about Regeneration and Birdsong. I don’t think either of them are what you might dismissively call ‘worthy’. There are books that you slowly read to be a better person, you know. But both of these books are just cracking reads. You just tear through them. And they are incredible works of literature and art. I love when those two things combine."