Birdsong was published by Hutchinson in 1993. It became — slowly, through word of mouth rather than critical fanfare — one of the bestselling British novels of the 1990s and the most widely read fictional treatment of World War I since Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. It has sold over three million copies in the UK alone and was voted the nation’s thirteenth favourite novel in the BBC’s Big Read poll of 2003.
The novel operates in three time periods: 1910 (Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman in Amiens, begins a passionate affair with Isabelle Azaire, the wife of his host); 1916–1918 (Stephen, now an officer, endures the Somme, Messines, and the final months of the war, with particular attention to the tunneling companies who dug beneath no-man’s land); and 1978 (Elizabeth Benson, Stephen’s granddaughter, discovers his encrypted diaries and attempts to decode his experience).
The tunneling sequences are the novel’s most original contribution: Faulks renders the claustrophobic terror of working underground — the constant threat of collapse, of enemy counter-mining, of being buried alive — with a physical intensity that readers consistently cite as among the most harrowing passages in modern fiction. The men who did this work (often former coal miners) are given a dignity and specificity that military history rarely grants them.
The pre-war love affair — explicit, consuming, destructive to everyone around it — serves both as contrast (the intensity of desire against the intensity of destruction) and as explanation (Stephen’s emotional numbness in the trenches is the consequence of an emotional excess that burned everything out of him). The present-day sections, though less admired by critics, provide the narrative’s moral argument: that the suffering of 1914–1918 has been forgotten, that the scale of what was endured has passed beyond living memory, and that recovering it (however imperfectly) is an ethical obligation.
Collecting Birdsong
First edition (Hutchinson, London, 1993): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Signed first edition: $200–$500
- Without jacket: $20–$40
- First Vintage paperback: $3–$8
A modern classic with continuously strong demand. The 2012 BBC television adaptation (starring Eddie Redmayne) provided an additional boost to first edition values.