Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks. Book review

First published 1993. Edition reviewed, Vintage 2011, ISBN 978-0-099-52838-8. 503 pages.

Birdsong is set in Amiens, northern France, in 1910, on the battleground of the Somme in the First World War in 1916-1919, and in London in 1978-1979. All the main characters are fictional.

In 1910, Stephen Wraysford comes to Amiens to learn about the French textile industry. Staying with a local factory owner, he falls in love with his host’s unhappy wife Isabelle, and they begin an illicit love affair. Six years later, Stephen is a British infantry officer serving in the trenches, and strikes up an unlikely friendship with the men of a tunnelling unit working in his sector of the line. It is early summer in 1916, and the campaign that will become notorious in history as the Battle of the Somme is just about to start. Amid the unimaginable slaughter of industrial warfare, Stephen will find out if he has a reason to keep on living, or if his spirit has been crushed beyond all endurance.

The First World War left an indelible mark on Europe’s history. In England, even a small village will have its war memorial, with the roll-call of the dead from the First World War almost always exceeding that from the Second. Often the names come in heartbreaking clusters of identical surnames where brothers, sons or cousins all fell together, shattering families and communities. Travel through Northern France and the sheer scale of the military cemeteries, accentuated by their stark grandeur, is overwhelming. The Great War, as it was known, is a traumatic background in many a novel written in the decades following, even those that have nothing whatever to do with the war – aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey was traumatised from serving in the trenches, and the Dead Marshes of Lord of the Rings are another incarnation of the flooded shell-holes of the Western Front. And then there are the war poets, whose lines echo down the years to touch the soul.

So I approached Birdsong with some trepidation, hoping it would do justice to such a convulsive event. One reason why it has taken me so long to get around to reading it; I finally thought I should give it a try, since everyone else has. The war sections were the strongest aspect of the novel for me, especially the description of the first day of the Battle of the Somme and the account of the tunnellers, who fought their own private war deep beneath no-man’s land, attempting to drive mines and counter-mines under the opposing trenches. Occasional glimpses of civilian life back in England when the soldiers go home on leave make a powerful contrast with the appalling conditions at the front. Birdsong also gives a strong sense of the ghastly combination of terror and boredom in trench warfare. The book is well worth reading for the war sections alone.

I found the other two strands of the narrative - Stephen’s affair with Isabelle and his grand-daughter Elizabeth searching for information about the war and conducting her own love affair with a married man - less compelling. There are a great many references to ‘flesh and blood’ throughout the novel (it feels like every page), and perhaps these two strands are supposed to form some sort of symbolic parallel between sex (Stephen’s affair), death (the war scenes) and childbirth (Elizabeth’s baby). If so, it seems rather laboured, and may explain why neither of these two plotlines really came alive for me. Another reason may be the characterisation. Stephen is emotionally stunted, having never had anyone to love him as a child, and this gives him a cold, remote quality (even in the middle of a torrid sex scene). His relationship with Isabelle seems to be based on lust rather than love, and Isabelle’s side of the affair is not really explored. Stephen’s later relationship with Isabelle’s sister Jeanne, which is potentially much more interesting, is hardly touched on at all.

Elizabeth is a warmer character than Stephen, although still emotionally detached – she reflects at one point that she may have chosen a married man to fall in love with because she will not be expected to settle down with him and lose her independence. She is so far removed from the other two strands of the novel that it’s difficult to relate her to them, other than perhaps to provide some near-contemporary ‘relevance’ for readers to identify with. (As if readers cannot be expected to be interested in the experience of another time and place for its own sake?).

The writing style reinforces the impression of emotional detachment. It seems consciously ‘literary’, with lots of incidental detail and some nice turns of phrase. The sheer amount of detail makes the book very long; each detail may be telling in itself, but collectively I found they tended to act as a barrier. I always felt I was watching the characters, rather than being drawn into their experiences. This distant style is effective in the war scenes, where the events are moving in their own right. I found it less effective in the love scenes, where it made all the relationships seem distant. Possibly this is another reason why I found the two love narratives less compelling than the war sections.

Powerful description of the human cost of trench and tunnel warfare in the First World War, mixed with two rather less powerful love stories.

The Crimson Portrait, by Jody Shields. Book review

Back Bay Books, 2008. ISBN 978-0-316-06718-8. 296 pages

Disclaimer: Pages 151-182 were missing from my review copy. From having read the rest of the novel I don’t think these pages would have markedly altered my conclusions, but it’s always possible.

The Crimson Portrait is set in a military hospital for soldiers with facial injuries in England in 1915. Two of the characters, Dr Kazanjian and the American artist Anna Coleman, are historical figures. The other characters are fictional.

In spring 1915, Catherine, a rich young woman whose husband has been killed in World War I hands over her grand country estate for use as a military hospital. Lost in her grief for her husband, Catherine cannot believe he is really dead and becomes obsessed with the idea that he is trying to send her messages or that he is one of the patients whose bandaged faces she cannot see. She becomes fixated on a particular patient, Julian, who reminds her of her dead husband. When the artist Anna Coleman is commissioned to make masks for some of the patients who are disfigured beyond hope of repair, based on photographs taken before their injuries, Catherine seizes the opportunity to re-make Julian in the image of her lost husband.

The quotes on the back jacket call this novel “a top-drawer literary thriller”. Well, I agree that it’s literary. I cannot, however, say that I found it thrilling. It seems to be a novel that takes itself terribly seriously. The writing style is opaque, elliptical and full of portentous references to light, mirrors, broken glass, reflective pools of water and the like. A sense of hopelessness and despair pervades everything and everyone. This may well be an accurate reflection of the subject matter – a hospital trying to pioneer plastic surgery for men with appalling injuries is never going to be a barrel of laughs, though I might have expected rather more gallows humour – but it doesn’t exactly make for a light or even an absorbing read. Don’t pick this book if you’re looking for a diversion after a hard day at work.

The most interesting aspect of the novel for me was the background information on the techniques of early plastic surgery. Facial injuries are particularly difficult to repair, because (unlike the rest of the body) some of the muscles of the face are anchored only to each other, not to the bones. Severe facial trauma is no doubt as old as warfare, and could be repaired in some circumstances; for example, one of the skulls excavated from the mass grave at the site of the battle of Towton (1461) had a severe blade wound to his left lower jaw from some earlier violent encounter which, remarkably, had healed by the time of his death (scroll down to the photo at the bottom of the page in the link). However, the rebuilding of damaged muscle and skin is a comparatively recent technique that could only really be developed after aseptic surgery and efficient anaesthesia had been invented. I had an idea that a good deal of modern plastic surgery had been pioneered in the Second World War when burns and blast injuries were horribly common among aircrew, but evidently it has roots reaching back at least to the First World War. Techniques such as skin grafting and various ingenious devices for supporting damaged tissues are described in the novel in some detail, and made me want to go and find a book on the history of facial surgery to learn more.

The novel doesn’t have much in the way of a plot (or perhaps it was too subtle for me), and the portrayal of the characters seemed to be me to be shallow and lacking in emotional impact. Despite detailed descriptions of various characters’ innermost thoughts, feelings and philosophies, I never felt I really understood them as people. I took a particular dislike to Catherine, who seems to be so obsessed with her own misery that she will use and deceive other people in her attempt to get some of her old life back. I guess that’s the point, as it shows how someone can be completely unhinged by grief, but as the novel doesn’t show what Catherine was like before her husband died (except a slight hint of a none-too-bright debutante), she simply came over to me as self-centred. The surgeon Dr McCleary is a sympathetic and dedicated doctor overwhelmed by the enormity of his task, and the skilled anaesthetist Brownlow takes refuge from the strain in ether. Dr Kazanjian, a pioneering dental surgeon with a talent for improvisation, and the artist Anna Coleman are the most positive characters, able to find satisfaction in the practising of their craft. One aspect that I found especially disappointing was the absence of the patients’ point of view. What was it like for them? How did they bear the unbearable? What did Julian think of Catherine and her attentions? Overall, the novel seemed to me to be shallow to the point of dullness, which is a great pity given its potentially dramatic subject matter.

Disappointing meander through the misery of bereavement and the hideous waste of war, with some interesting material on the early development of plastic surgery.

Has anyone else read it?

The Last Raider, by Douglas Reeman. Book review

Hutchinson, 1963. ISBN 009-180-114-1

The Last Raider is set on board a German commerce raider, the Vulkan, in the last year of the First World War. All the major characters are fictional.

In 1918, as the First World War in the trenches of France and Flanders grinds destructively on with no end in sight, the Imperial German Navy decides to resurrect a now little-used form of naval warfare, the commerce raider, in an attempt to disrupt enemy shipping. Disguised as a neutral merchant ship, the Vulkan departs from Kiel dockyard with a scratch crew and her new captain, the famed “Tiger of the Seas” Felix von Steiger. Her mission is to intercept, capture and destroy enemy merchant ships, maintaining her neutral disguise until the victim has been lured within gunnery range and hauling up the German flag only at the moment of attack. It is a strategy perilously close to piracy, and one that will earn the Vulkan and her crew few friends. Alone on the high seas, with no support vessel and no friendly port within a thousand miles, the Vulkan’s dangerous and lonely mission will take a heavy toll on the ship, the crew and most especially the captain.

The commerce raider as described in the novel seems to me to be reminiscent of the Napoleonic system of prize-taking or the sixteenth-century privateers. I had no idea that it was still in use during the First World War. As described in the novel, the convoy system was beginning to come into use, which meant that isolated merchant ships were less common and thus the commerce raider’s task was becoming much more difficult and much more dangerous. At one point a character refers to the Vulkan as “a scavenger”, supplies are a constant problem, and several times the captain expresses dissatisfaction with the mission’s achievements. There is a strong sense that this is the last gasp of a dying breed, and that the commerce raider’s days are drawing to a close – which I guess reflects the novel’s title.

For me, the novel’s strength is its authentic atmosphere. Not only in the details that recreate the claustrophobic misery of life in a crowded warship, but also in a brooding feeling of bleakness and near-despair that reminds me of some of the First World War poets. It manages to convey a sense of the futility of war – particularly this war, which no-one can remember the reason for and which seems as if it can never end – combined with the absolute necessity for the men involved to do their duty. This in turn raises disturbing questions about honour, decency and integrity, which the contrasting characters have to confront in different ways. How does an honourable man keep his self-respect when he is engaged in a sort of state-approved and state-directed piracy? If a passenger ship is about to transmit a radio message that will bring enemy warships to destroy his ship, how can he balance his moral obligations to the civilian sailors and passengers aboard against his obligation to preserve the lives of his own crew?

The characters are clear individuals with their own hopes, fears, ambitions, hang-ups and principles, and the tensions between these contrasting people fill the novel with conflict on many levels. The disruptive presence of a captured British woman, a passenger from a torpedoed ship, serves to heighten the tensions further. The captain, von Steiger, is inevitably the central character, if only because his actions and decisions will determine the fate of all the rest and they know it. But he does not dominate the novel, and many of the secondary characters and the sub-plots associated with them take centre-stage from time to time.

The Vulkan’s journey takes her from the storm-lashed North Atlantic to the sunny Brazilian coast, and provides a wide variety of adventures and naval problems along the way, from an encounter with an iceberg north of Iceland to the practical difficulties of coaling at sea. The combat scenes range from ship battles to hand-to-hand fighting, and are brutal without being excessively graphic. No doubt reflecting its date of publication, I don’t think there’s a single expletive in the book.

The prose is clear and readable throughout. If there was much in the way of nautical jargon I never noticed it, so it must be sufficiently clear that a non-expert can understand what’s going on purely from context. Much of the dialogue seemed rather stilted and this took me a while to get used to – I wonder if it is intended to represent formal German or is just the author’s style?

Unfortunately there is no historical note, so I have no way of knowing how much of the novel is rooted in fact. Which is a little disappointing, because now I am mildly curious as to whether ships like the Vulkan existed, whether they were used by both sides, how important a role they played and whether 1918 was indeed their last gasp (as the novel seems to show) before they were replaced by the submarine warfare famous in World War II.

Action-packed naval adventure with an unusual setting and a splendid atmosphere of realism.

Has anyone else read it?