Book Eight - Birdsong - Part Six

I awoke early this morning with a burning desire to watch “My Boy Jack,” a movie my friend Matt sent me last year. It’s about Rudyard Kipling’s son who fought in WWI. Obviously, I haven’t been able to get Birdsong off my mind.

John Kipling was missing and “presumed injured.” I know there are “missing” in every war, but I also know from reading Birdsong that many were listed as missing because the shells had blown their bodies to bits. They couldn’t tell the families with any certainty that their sons were dead because there wasn’t enough left of them to identify.

After hearing that his son was missing, Kipling immediately continued working with the War Propaganda Office where they decided how much of the facts to release to the British people. He carried on with his work because he had to. I mentioned in this post that in my experience, men seem less able to face death and dying than women. The women carry on with the work of caring because they have to.

But I was wrong, wasn’t I? Women do it on a one-to-one scale but in this movie Kipling did it for the entire British fighting force. He had to. There must be people to face the facts like that even when their own sons are “presumed injured.” It must be done.

And this is what I love about reading. It transports me to a different time and place and allows me to feel what others have felt. It educates me far beyond the scope of my little speck of existence on this vast planet.

The War Memorial Elizabeth visits near Albert, France is the Thiepval Memorial. The known dead have graves; the arches and columns list the names of those who were never found.

From The Great War 1914-1918: A Guide to WWI Battlefields and History of the First World War

greatwar.co.uk/somme/memorial-thiepval.htm

The next two images are from the Thiepval Memorial page of smg-authie.co.uk

webmatters.net/cwgc/thiepval_memorial.htm

 

Final quote (probably) from Birdsong, this from page 227 upon reading the roll call after an horrendous battle--

Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegram would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without the sound of fathers and their children, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers’ shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet-crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference.

Thank you, Sebastian.

Book Eight - Birdsong - Part Five



Sebastian Faulks
From his official site
sebastianfaulks.com

Wow. This is a powerful book and it profoundly affected me. Rather than A Novel Of Love And War, I would subtitle it A Novel Of Frailty And Resilience. There are so many stories in this book, so many lives affected by both choice and circumstance. But isn’t that what lives are, choice and circumstance? In this book there are tales of great human suffering, great human triumph and the effects of both.

Throughout the book there is birdsong in unforeseen places and at unexpected moments. It is a lovely little thread running through the book – a metaphor for both entrapment and freedom. I stumbled upon this picture--

From the National Library of Scotland’s digital library
digital.nls.uk/pageturner.cfm?id=74548998
“Canaries which have been rescued from amidst the ruins in shelled areas”

The explanation given at the time the photo was published says, “Well known for their fondness of animals, this image shows British soldiers checking up on the health of some canaries who were found in residential areas that had suffered heavy shelling.” Well, yeah, um, they're fond of animals and stuff but there’s also the fact that they used canaries underground to check for the presence of deadly gas. The birds felt the effects much more quickly than humans and served as a warning. Canaries saved lives. But I understand propaganda for the homefront.

I could quote many passages because so many passages touched me. But here are a few which are indicative of the spirit of the book.

From 1917, page 362--

There was no alternative but for men to go blind round each corner. The fate of the first two or three was a good indicator to those who followed. Stephen watched the men go on madly, stepping over the bodies of their friends, clearing one fire-bay at a time, jostling one another to be first to the traverse. They had dead brothers and friends on their minds; they were galvanized beyond fear. They were killing with pleasure. They were not normal.

We do this to them. We send them to war to be killing machines and when they come back we expect them to turn it off. Kill! Don’t kill! Why do we continue to do this when we know what it does to them and to the lives of everyone they touch? Twenty years after the end of WWI, what did we do? We began again. Men who had been turned into animals sent their sons for more of the same. One story near the end of the book included Levi, a German soldier who happened to be a Jewish doctor. Levi volunteered to fight for his homeland and he survived WWI. What do you suppose happened to him and his children during WWII?

From 1978 Elizabeth, pages 247-8--

She felt a little presumptuous. Having lived to the age of thirty-eight without giving more than a glance to the occasional war memorial or dull newsreel, she was not sure what she now expected to find. What did a “battlefield” look like? … Would history be there for her to see, or would it all have been tidied away? Was it fair to expect that sixty years after an event—on the whim of someone who had shown no previous interest—a country would dutifully reveal its past to her amateur inspection?

Elizabeth saw that battlefield and its memorial. And this, I think, is my job: to remember, to visit the battlefields, to be kind to veterans, to do what I can to preserve and honor their sacrifices. When I was on a plane last month there were several young men in telltale camouflage. After giving his standard lecture, the flight attendant said, “And as always, we want to thank our men and women in the military for their service.” We applauded in agreement. It was a small thing, but life is mostly made up of small things. The big things don’t come around very often, do they?

There is a town in England (or maybe it’s a village, I can never keep it straight) called Wootton Bassett. Each time a soldier is “repatriated,” (his dead body brought home) the route passes through this town. When this happens, the people of Wootton Bassett line up to pay their respects. They do this one small thing. One person in this small English town once stood in silence as a coffin passed and others followed. This is what it takes.

I have to believe in the power of good over evil. I have to believe that love can conquer hatred… even though the world offers scant evidence of this. If there is one overpowering lesson of this book it is that the human spirit can triumph where there is hope. I have to believe in this hope.

I must end with this passage. It was near the end of the war, page 403--

We are not contemptuous of gunfire, but we have lost the power to be afraid. Shells will fall on the reserve lines and we will not stop talking. There is still blood, though no one sees. A boy lay without legs where the men took their tea from the cooker. They stepped over him.

I have tried to resist the slide into this unreal world, but I lack the strength. I am tired. Now I am tired in my soul.

Many times I have lain down and I have longed for death. I feel unworthy. I feel guilty because I have survived. Death will not come and I am cast adrift in a perpetual present.

I do not know what I have done to live in this existence. I do not know what any of us did to tilt the world into this unnatural orbit. We came here only for a few months.

No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand.

When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them.

We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings.

We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.

Book Eight - Birdsong - Part Four

Since I didn’t set out to create a traditional book review blog, I’ve been writing about what I read as I read it. I may want to rethink that, as I fear I did Sebastian Faulks a great disservice in criticizing his narrator in the beginning of this book. Part One was set in 1910, Part Two in 1916, and in Part Three we skip to 1978. I believe I see where we are going. I’m getting great detail about a new character, Elizabeth, her life, her surroundings, her choices and her motivations. I suspect there is a reason Mr. Faulks didn’t provide that at the beginning for those two particular characters. I should have remembered how incredibly difficult it is for a writer to withhold information at the beginning of a novel! The best books always leave the reader with wonderful discoveries to make along the way, and we cannot make those discoveries if the beginning contains huge signposts.

I suspect there is a part of me that sees each novel as its own entity; I seem to forget the lessons past books have taught me. But I kind of like it that way. Each book is a new experience and I can live in a different world while I am in its pages. The experiences I have on a French battlefield in 1916 have little to do with the experiences of a 12 year old in an Irish manor house, or so it seems at the time. Reading is an activity set in the present, wherever the present happens to be.

As proof that Sebastian Faulks does indeed understand a woman’s perspective, I offer the following from page 235 of my Vintage International edition--

Lindsay had also been through a phase of inviting unattached men when Elizabeth went to visit. For two or three years the previously settled threesome would be augmented by a variety of single men, desperate, divorced, drunk, but more often merely content to be as they were.

Can I get an Amen from anyone who has endured serial set-ups from self-proclaimed well meaning friends who "only want to see you happy” as if there could be only one route to happiness and that is marriage and procreation? As Elizabeth says, “I think I need to know why.”

OK, so maybe I went a little Bridget Jones in that last paragraph. The point is that I’m really enjoying the character of Elizabeth. On the 60th anniversary of the 1918 armistice--

There were interviews with veterans and comments from various historians. Elizabeth read it with a feeling of despair: the topic seemed too large, too fraught, and too remote for her to take on at that moment. Yet something in it troubled her.

I get that, Elizabeth, I really do.

One of the book's locations: 

La Grand Place
Bethune
Circa 1916
From New Cumnock Parish Church in East Ayrshire
newcumnock-parishchurch.org.uk/ncwm%20website/Artefacts.htm

The Grand Place
Bethune
1918
From the National Library of Scotland’s digital library
digital.nls.uk/pageturner.cfm?id=74549160
“The French town of Bethune was considered an important strategic location for its rail and canal links. It was nearly captured by German forces after heavy bombardment in April 1918.”

Book Eight - Birdsong - Part Three

There are my men going mad under shells. We hear nothing from our commanding officer. I sit here, I talk to the men, I go on patrol and lie in the mud with machine guns grazing my neck. No one in England knows what this is like. If they could see the way these men live they would not believe their eyes. This is not a war, this is an exploration of how far men can be degraded.

The above is from page 145 of my Vintage International version. This book is about WWI. I have to admit I've never focused much on WWI. I've spent lots of time reading about WWII. I love the old movies and music and stories. I had to read All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque in high school and I remember being shocked by the description of men who kept running after their feet were blown off. That image has remained with me; it's similar to the image from the last scene of A Rose For Emily by Faulkner. (Ick.) But both scenes stayed with me because of the emotion they evoked.

Whenever I read a book about war my reaction is always one of gratitude. It is difficult to read the gory stuff, but war is gory. Reading the reality is a way to remember. It feels insufficient simply to dedicate one day of the year to honor these people who gave their lives so that we – generations of people they would never know – could be free. How did they do that? What possessed them? What kept them going?

This book is doing a good job of answering some of those questions. It provides just enough information about individuals to give a glimpse into why they enlisted and how they continued to fight. It also does a good job of describing the horrors of war, particularly the mustard gas used as a weapon in WWI. One scene set in a medical tent demonstrates how badly the wounded long to die, how difficult it is for the medical personnel to care for them, and how fervently their less seriously wounded comrades hope their wish comes true. Death is merely relief from misery. 

Books about war also remind me that whatever we may think we know about ourselves, our virtue, or our morality, all of that goes out of the window when we’re fighting for our lives. It’s easy to become smug in our nice little suburban or city homes and forget that even now our soldiers are in harm’s way. Why? There is always that lingering question. Yet where is the boundary? Where is it set and when should it move? Should we have let Hitler continue? Of course not. Does that mean anyone less evil than Hitler should be allowed to continue? Where is that line?

Book Eight - Birdsong - Part Two

I’m trying to keep an open mind about this book. I’m enjoying it, but like Anna Karenina this one includes a woman becoming involved in an extra-marital affair with scant explanation for why she does so. The explanation for why this man pursues the married woman is that he’s obsessed. Oh! That explains everything! Just say he’s obsessed, dude, since we all know exactly what that means. I could have done with more evidence of his internal struggle rather than simply being told he’s obsessed, but that’s just me. The same goes for the woman. She’s a buttoned-up proper French woman one moment and an adventurous lover the next, all ooh-la-la.* Seriously? Oh, there were a couple of “reasons” given but these characters haven’t been fully explained. Perhaps that is coming. At this point, however, I dislike the conclusions made by the narrator.

The subtitle of the book is A Novel Of Love And War and part one was all love; thus far part two is all war. I’m not sure whether it’ll go back and forth like that throughout the novel, but as a long-term strategy love and war don’t generally go together very well. I suspect this one is mostly about war, and war is a man’s world so I’m not sure when Miss Ooh-La-La will return. But I suspect she shall do so.

There are moments that are just right and these are the things I enjoy about this book. For example, here’s evidence that some things don’t change. Does this sound familiar? The beginning of the book is set in 1910--

I can’t bear these folk tunes you hear so much of these days… When I was a young man it was different. Of course, everything was different then… give me a proper melody that’s been written by one of our great composers any day. A song by Schubert or a nocturne by Chopin, something that will make the hairs of your head stand on end!

And here is another description that I particularly like; she happens to be the elderly relative of the man from the above quotation. “Her reputation as a person of patience and sanctity was based on her long widowhood and the large collection of missals, crucifixes, and mementos of pilgrimage she had collected in her bedroom…”

Also, there is a peanut butter stain on page 105 which I inadvertently left for the next owner of this book. Just thought I’d mention it.


*If you are unfamiliar with the ooh-la-la phenomenon you may want to check out Pepe LePew on You Tube. You won’t regret it.

Book Eight - Birdsong - Part One

I knew nothing about this book until I opened it. As I turned to the title page, I noticed that the last owner of this book left a little gift – two tiny leaves pressed into the spine. How lovely! Upon closer examination, I realized the little gift may not be leaves at all but some sort of droppings. I removed them with a Kleenex. Was someone trying to be ironic by leaving bird poop in Birdsong?

The author, Sebastian Faulks, also wrote Charlotte Gray. I haven’t read Charlotte Gray but I tried to watch the movie (gave it my 30 minute rule and didn’t finish it).

Here we go on another literary adventure! I love this time before I start reading a book... it is full of the promise of a great story and characters I love. Don’t disappoint me, Sebastian.