Wilson, Ross J. (22 April 2016). Cultural Heritage of the Great War in Britain. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. p.183. ISBN 978-1-317-15646-8. Archived from the original on 5 August 2021 . Retrieved 31 August 2016.

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks: Sebastian Faulks

I believe there are novels that affect you long after you have closed the book and I do believe that this is one of them. It was fated for me to read this book (at least I believe it to be so) since as I walked into the library, this book was propped up on the shelf seeming to send a message saying take me home. I listened and am ever so grateful I did take this powerful book home and to heart. If I am fighting on behalf of anyone, I think it is for those who have died. Not for the living at home. For the dead, over here."My grandfather (age sixteen) fought in the Argonne forrest and was gassed in WW 1. He was in the trenches and as I read I pictured him there among the rats, the mud, the awfulness of war. Perhaps this connection made the book not just another book about a war, but one that held memories for me of a beloved man who was just a kid fighting a onerous war. When I was young, I had important intergenerational relationships with my grandparents. It’s startling to think how old they appeared to me as a child when they were my current age. And when I do the math, beloved elderly mentors I met in grad programs were not as old as they seemed earlier.

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Mullan, John (13 July 2012). "Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 23 September 2016 . Retrieved 30 August 2016. And I know people who are reading this will be like… woah spoilers, but that’s the thing. If you know anything about the war, whether it’s due to an interest in history, you’ve read books, you’ve listened to your grandparent’s talking about it… you know that this actually happened. During these episodes, Stephen feels lonely and writes to Isabelle, feeling that there is no one else to whom he can express his feelings. He writes about his fears that he will die, and confesses that he has only ever loved her. Stephen, our protagonist was the ultimate soldier, not because he wanted to be, but because his humaneness made him so. He endeavored to remain, while carrying on a torrid affair with a married woman, aloof and separate all his feelings that he had buried so long. He was an orphan in more than the physical sense as he tries to understand himself and the turmoil of emotions, and the heinousness of war. Reading this book and knowing the conditions under which these young men lived and died was a nightmare come true. Is it any wonder that these boys, at least the ones who managed to get through the war as Stephen did, were left indelibly marked by tragedy, grief, and the smell of death. Oftentimes, it got to the point in my reading where I felt I just could not go on, and yet I could not stop. I was in a extremely small way like the soldiers forced to look at things deadly unpleasant and vile. Consistently one of the greatest critiques of the novel concerns its 1970s plot-line. [17] For example, Gorra found that the addition of a parallel narrative "[ran] into problems"—especially concerning Elizabeth Benson, whom he "stopped believing in [as a] character". [9] Unlike other reviewers, the critic Sarah Belo did not question the historical investigation plot, but the depiction of Elizabeth's experience as a 1970s woman in England. [17] On the other hand, almost all of the reviewers describe the novel's war sections as excellently written; for example, the review in the Los Angeles Times called the sections "so powerful as to be almost unbearable". [17]It is a shame that it is not possible to award six stars to any book that I review, for Birdsong would surely deserve such an award. This one definitely makes it into my lifetime favourite five. And the fourth was the one of the last scenes with Stephen in the mines. With the aid of Faulks’ writing, I could feel the hammering of Stephen’s heart, his desperation, his hope fading, his desire to live and the grime beneath my finger nails. The romance is one of the reasons Birdsong works so well. The passion in Stephen and Isabelle's relationship is so electric - the snatched, illicit moments of their affair, the excitement of their elopement, the possibilities that lay ahead. And of course, its demise is devastating. All of Stephen's army colleagues have somebody they want to return home to, a face they desperately want to see again that gives them a reason to survive. He tells himself that he doesn't have anyone like this, that he never did. But deep down, he knows that's not true. Wessely, Simon (2006). "Twentieth-Century Theories on Combat Motivation and Breakdown". Journal of Contemporary History. 41 (2): 269–286. doi: 10.1177/0022009406062067. JSTOR 30036386. S2CID 145704176.