The Most Incredible, Wildly-Effecting, Memorable, and Structurally-Flawed Book I've Ever Read

I've just finished Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks. My god, can this man write. There are parts of this book which will be seared into my consciousness for all time. And I'm not easily "wowed". Really.

I'm not sure how to say it more plainly. I highly recommend you read this book. You. Whoever you are.

I will try to explain without revealing too much of the plot, and in my view, with any book, this mean virtually none of the plot at all...I'll see what I can do.

Most of the book revolves around Stephen Wraysford, and nearly two-thirds of the book deals with Stephen Wraysford as a British solider during WWI. This two thirds is the absolute gem of the book. Language, imagery, and details that if you’d thought and imagined for hours about life in and around the front during this war...you'd never come up with. Unless you served at the front line of a war, or very near it, and as much as we've all seen Saving Private Ryan, as much as we tend to wear this information age with pride, and feel informed about all sorts of unthinkables, trench warfare being perhaps the least of them… you will be blown away. Um, no pun...

But this isn't a book about the horrors of war. Nor is it a book about human triumph, quite. It's a book about humanity: extraordinary, vile, and ordinary. It’s filled with the kind of details which bind a well-paced plot, variously drawn characters and requisite series of obstacles into a world which strips away the reader’s armchair, the Starbucks coffee growing cold upon the table, the very identity of the reader herself. The kind of details which take an ordinarily good book and make it great.

Read a small excerpt.

But wait, structurally-flawed you say?

Yes, I do. The first 130 pages, while not horrendous by any yardstick, are lengthy and mediocre enough to let me several time consider abandoning the novel. By page 132, I was hooked. The beginning is a protracted telling of Stephen’s young love, combined with an ample and un-subtle nod to the social and political strife preceding labor unions. Okay – these experiences help us to understand Stephen as we later meet him in the war. Still I say, 130 pages flounder when 65 would have done nicely. But this alone is minor and would not be enough for me to brand such a work as “structurally flawed”.

The bigger flaw is this.

It is the leap, the jarring and unrewarding plunge from the riveting life-or-death world of 1916 (and right off one of the most affecting scenes in the book) smack into 1978 where we meet Elizabeth – a young single woman with the single-woman problems akin to selecting a chic wine for dinner, and choosing between the men who’d like to date her. I, the once fastened reader, believe we have jetted into a new era, that Stephen and the war are gone for good, and I am ready to put down the novel yet again.

But I push through, finding that within 35 pages I have been introduced to thirteen new characters including Elizabeth who we find, after learning about her love life, her fashion sense, and her choice of food at parties, is on the trail of learning about her grandfather Stephen Wraysford.

Then right back to the war.

We revisit Elizabeth again for the final few pages of the book after we’ve seen Stephen “real-time” through most of what he has to offer, plot-wise. But Elizabeth grandly uncovers for us a secret we readers knew about all along.

This book is structurally flawed because Elizabeth shouldn’t be there. The tying of past and present together by way of a present character who strives to find themselves by digging into an ancestor’s life…well, it’s been done. And it’s being done more and more often. There are some very good books written with that structure, in fact. But the core of Birdsong is so eloquent, so startlingly fresh, that it doesn’t need this. In fact, even if the writing in these sections didn’t noticeably suffer, the technique itself is, in my opinion, beneath such an otherwise rare and beautiful book.