Book Club Guide

Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks · 1993 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The First World War as almost unrepresentable — and the effort to represent it
Love before the war and what it leaves behind
The moral weight of survival

About this book

In 1910, Stephen Wraysford falls in love with the wife of his host in Amiens; six years later he is in the trenches of the Somme, and the tunnellers who dig beneath the battlefield carry a barely suppressed world of feeling. Faulks's novel interweaves the love story of 1910 with the war of 1914-18 and a 1978 frame narrative, creating one of the most beloved British war novels.

Published in 1993, Birdsong has sold over three million copies in the UK and is one of the most widely read novels about the First World War. Faulks did extensive research including walking the Somme battlefields and reading soldiers' diaries.

Discussion questions

The novel moves between 1910 (the pre-war affair), 1916-18 (the trenches) and 1978 (Elizabeth researching her family). How do these three time periods speak to each other — and what does the modern section add?
The tunnel sequences are among the most physically intense passages in contemporary British fiction. How does Faulks create their particular horror — and what do they say about the war that the surface fighting cannot?
Stephen Wraysford is not a sympathetic character in the conventional sense. How does Faulks nonetheless make his survival morally significant?
The novel includes a love story that precedes the war. How does Faulks use the relationship between Stephen and Isabelle to establish what is being destroyed in the trenches?
Birdsong is enormously popular in schools and with general readers but received mixed literary reviews. What do you think it offers that more experimental war writing cannot?