Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

As a boy, I read “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque, the First World War seen from the German perspective and “Goodbye to all that”, the autobiography of the poet Robert Graves, who fought through the horrors of the Great War. Neither of these, however, compares with the intense immediacy of “Birdsong” by a man for whom the First World War is as much distant history as it is for me. Perhaps, on this account, he is able to write in graphic, vivid detail of the pre-war love experience of Stephen Wraysford, a young industrialist on secondment in Amiens, and then of his descent into the inferno which was the Somme and later Passchendaele. Some of the scenes describing the perilous work of the tunnellers under enemy lines came as close as what Dante, Shakespeare or Milton might have imagined Hell itself to be.

If you like history and love humanity, you must read this book.

This review is by Mr Gray, Principal at SMC.

Copies of this book are available in the SMC Library.