Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

I mentioned that I'd bought this a few weeks ago in a mini haul, and started reading it earlier this week. BBC made a mini drama series adapted from the book earlier this year and I was absolutely gutted to have missed it! I've looked for the adaptation online since but never found it, so seeing the book in a charity shop was a great find for me. I didn't know much about the story before I started reading, so I started out blind but from the outset you definitely know Birdsong is a story of love, pain and war.

Part 1 is set in Amiens, Paris in 1910, (romantic already, non?) 20-something year old Stephen Wraysford is staying with the family of factory owner, Azaire. He has been sent from a fabrics factory where he works in England to find out more about the suppliers, one of which is Azaire. While staying at the house Stephen begins to feel drawn to Azaire's wife Isabelle, who is much younger than her husband. After spending a short amount of time alone, Stephen is beginning to feel more than curiosity towards Isabelle and delays returning home to London to be in her company. The two start a hasty affair culminating in them leaving Azaire's house and going away to St-Remy in Paris to start a life together.
Circumstances change and in Part 2 we are in the year 1916, where the world is rife with warfare. We meet a new character, Jack Firebrace, a pre war minor and now a tunneller for the British armed forces. Jack's captain, Weir is a good friend of infantry captain Stephen Wraysford, who has found himself in battle since part 1. Stephen is a rather lost soul, though a strong soldier. Throughout the rest of the novel we see the unbelievable plight of war and the effect it had on not only the soldiers who's lives were ended, but those who fought alongside them and survived.
Later in the novel we are introduced to a new character, Elizabeth. Elizabeth's parts of the novel take place in the 1970's where she is looking to find out information about her grandfather, who fought in the war, and we see a stark contrast between past and present, as a younger generation struggles to understand the horrors of what had befallen their pre-predecessors'.

I absolutely loved this novel. There is a quote on the back of my copy written by Andrew James of The Sunday Express which reads: "This book is so powerful that as I finished it, I turned to the front to start again" And I'll admit I was tempted. This is one of those books that really hits you and at times you have to stop reading and go back a few paragraphs to absorb what's written; because nothing is just said to fill up the pages, every word seems so full of meaning, but you never get the feeling that the author is forcing sympathy, he is very matter of fact with his writing choices which are both powerful and respectful, and leave you with a strong sense of contemplation.

"He found the word Jesus in his mouth. He said it again and again beneath his breath. It was part prayer, part profanity. Jesus, Jesus...This was the worst; nothing had been like this."

The BBC drama stars Eddie Redmayne
 and Clemence Posey.

It's 2012 now and this war was ended almost 94 years ago, meaning that all of the men who fought in the war written about in Birdsong are now gone. All that is left are these accounts, some written from memory and some from imagination but the message is still clear; we must not forget. Some of the events written about in this novel are very hard to read, including the Battle Of The Somme as a military example and Elizabeth's visit to a soldier as a post war example. The man Elizabeth visits has had a leg amputated due to a shelling, and has been living in a care home since the war, his mind is gone along with his awareness and has had no visitors since his sister died some twenty years previous. These parts were almost harder for me to read then the parts of ravaging warfare because we see in this novel all of these men dying and observing death, dreaming of home, only to get there finally and find themselves forgotten - unwanted reminders of a best forgotten time. 

We seem to treat those in later stages of life to us now as inconveniences  and I cannot understand why. These are people who have lived through times harder than we can ever imagine. Yes, the soldiers who fought in this war themselves are now gone, but what about their children and grandchildren? Those who grew up amidst the chaos of war? Who perhaps fought themselves some twenty years later in the second World War? What about the women who adapted to work and loss while bringing up families in terrible conditions? Those people are still with us and we ignore them, we push them away and put them into care homes so that they don't hinder our lives, we have lost respect for generations who payed in blood and life to ensure freedom for our countries and our thanks are to push them aside. The ending of this novel however leaves us with hope that these lost lives are remembered in some way and that the stories of family and novels such as this one will continue to tell future generations of the past.

It's a horribly reflective way to feel but these are the emotions I'm left with after reading this novel. It is a beautifully written memoir on the generations we will never know and I think it's a book I'll turn back to many times. 

Faulks, who writes this tale beautifully has written two other novels which have connecting characters to Birdsong; The Girl At The Lion d'Or and Charlotte Grey, which I'll definitely be picking up. 

The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides

The Virgin Suicides has been a long contemplated book for me. I saw the film years ago, when I was in my early teens and I never really got it. I mean, I understand the premise and all, I know it's a mystery and a detective novel and a coming of age all in one, but I never really joined in on the big cult "wow-ness" of this book. I think it's because at first it seemed (the story, as I hadn't read the book) like something second rate, made to shock people. 5 Sisters kill them selves for no reason better than "You've never been a teenage girl", well, how very "I don't like Mondays" of you...

However, for the past few years I have found myself adding the book to various online shopping baskets...and then not buying it, but there's no rule so important with adaptations than "It's probably not as good as the book!" So I took the plunge, and figured I was going to close the final page with a huge eye roll or a great sense of contemplation, but I'm still not so sure. I don't think I've ever had such a mixed reaction to a book before, usually because I tend to buy books I've read reviews of, or from authors I've read before, but with this one I feel so (excuse the lack of a better word here) ...meh. I don't feel particularly enlightened or thoughtful like I usually do upon finishing a novel, I do feel contemplative, thought over my thoughts rather than the story.

The book centres around the 5 Lisbon sisters, who we know from the start all end up killing themselves. We read from a group of unnamed men, who knew the girls when they were their age and have never been able to forget them, or figure out the mystery surrounding their deaths. The writing is like that of a court transcription, with the boys presenting exhibits, and interviews they have conducted over the years in trying to put together the mystery of the suicides.

“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together. ” 

I don't think it's the author I have an issues with here - he keeps the story very well placed in it's detective-coming of age genre, and I do completely adore the setting -  I love the seventies, and the writing makes the time feel really authentic; rather it's the story. I have this little tick that has always irritated me; people trying to make themselves "relevant" by writing/creating these little esoteric pieces of work that they think are incredibly arty but in reality are just cheap rip-off's of once great work, for example, how many books have you read that claim to be the "modern" Catcher In The Rye? And focus on a boy who is alone and thinks a lot and reads Albert Camus and is therefore different and intelligent and oh so worthwhile? They seem to believe that this character, the placement of a Joy Division record, or a reference to Clockwork Orange (because gosh, you must be a big misunderstood smartie-pants if you empathise with droog's) means that they have written something great, but it takes so much more than that!

“What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.”

And we come to the crux of this review, here's my final thought; The Virgin Suicides is lacking, lacking in something that could have made it great? I'm not sure, but definitely in something that could have made it something thought provoking, rather than what I take it as; an easy read on a difficult subject with absolutely no depth. In this case the film was definitely better, and that's only because of Sofia Coppola's directing, and the wicked soundtrack. Sorry Lux lovers, I'm calling it.