The indescribable beauty of Birdsong.
A number of years ago, we were stuck in Hong Kong airport because an airplane had crashed during a monsoon, closing the airport for several days. The upside was that we discovered Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks, probably the most powerful and beautiful novel written in the last 50 years.
Faulks writes of the grim horrors of the trench warfare of WWI and a love story that you will never forget. Quentin Crewe, writing in the Daily Mail, describes the triumph of Birdsong as follows:
“The author has captured the essence, both good and evil, of the 20th century at its beginning and end. I have read it and re-read it and can think of no other novel for many, many years that has so moved me or stimulated in me so much reflection on the human spirit.”
Birdsong begins shortly before the beginning of WWI in the city of Amiens, located in France on the river Somme. Stephen Wraysford is staying with the Azaire family. He is visiting from Manchester, England because Stephen’s British employer is a major customer of the Azaire cloth factory.
Shortly after Stephen’s arrival in Amiens, when he has retired to his bedroom after dinner, he hears a strange sound, possibly the agony of a woman’s voice. He feels an uncontrollable urge to respond. Taking off his shoes, he creeps softly down the stairs. As he approaches his hosts’ bedroom, he hears a sound like sobbing, interrupted by the clap of brief impact.
“He heard a woman’s voice, cool and low, though made intense by desperation. She was pleading, and the words, though indistinct because of the way she kept her voice down, were made audible in places by the urgency of the feeling behind them. Stephen could distinguish the word ‘Rene’ and later ‘I implore you’, and then ‘children’. The voice, which he recognized even on this slight evidence as Madam Azaire’s, was cut short by the thudding sound he’d heard before. It turned to a gasp which, because of its sudden move into a higher register, was clearly one of pain.”
Stephen is deeply touched by the suffering of this young woman. Due to a life with no love, Isabelle’s pain opens Stephen’s heart and he quickly falls in love with her.
The explanation for Isabelle’s abuse by her husband becomes clear a few weeks later after Isabelle breaks down and confides in Stephen. Isabelle was not able to become pregnant and Azaire began to blame himself, even though he had two children with another woman.
“Eventually his feelings of frustration affected the frequency with which he was able to perform. He began also to see that there was an absence of feeling in his wife, though the prospect of examining it and finding a remedy was so appalling that he could not bring himself to face it.”
Both Stephen and Isabelle were living a life without love, suppressing their needs and their deepest feelings. They quickly responded to the need in each other and so began a wild, passionate love affair.
Very quickly this love affair explodes into an uncontrollable passion. She leaves her husband and they move to another town in France and begin living together. She becomes pregnant, but doesn’t tell Stephen. One day, while Stephen is at work, she leaves without explanation.
The war begins with all its horrors and disappointments. Tragedies beyond description. Untold suffering. Endless years of violence and killings. But, somehow, from all this, Stephen acquires a passionate affinity for life itself.
“Stephen felt himself overtaken by a climactic surge of feeling. It frightened him because he thought it would have some physical issue, in spasm or bleeding or death. Then he saw that what he felt was not an assault but a passionate affinity. It was for the rough field running down to the trees and for the path going back into the village where he could see the tower of the church: these and the forgiving distance of the sky were not separate, but part of one creation, and he too, still by any sane judgment a young man, by the repeated tiny pulsing of his blood, was one with them…
“He wanted to stretch out his arms and enfold in them the fields, the sky, the elms with their sounding birds; he wanted to hold them with the unending forgiveness of a father to his prodigal, errant but beloved son. Isabelle and the cruel dead of the war; his lost mother, his friend Weir: nothing was immoral or beyond redemption, all could be brought together, understood in the long perspective of forgiveness. As he clung to the wood, he wanted also to be forgiven for all he had done; he longed for the unity of the world’s creation to melt his sins and anger, because his soul was joined to it. His body shook with the passion of the love that had found him, from which he had been exiled in the blood and the flesh of long killing.”
Three years after the war began, Stephen unexpectedly meets Isabelle’s sister. She arranges for the two former lovers to meet. It was revealed that Isabelle initially returned to her parents, who persuaded her to have a reconciliation with her husband.
“Yes, Stephen, I went back, not willingly, but because I had no choice, and it made me very unhappy. I regretted it the moment I stepped back inside the house…But, I was saved by the war.”
Stephen finds that Isabelle’s face was disfigured by a “long indentation that ran from the corner of her ear, along the jaw, whose natural line seemed broken, then down her neck and disappeared beneath the high collar of her dress”. Stephen could see that the flesh had been folded outward.
“The altered line of the jaw, however, gave an impression of the great impact that must have struck her…
“‘I was injured by a shell’.”
Isabelle is unable to tell Stephen about their daughter and nowhere in the book is the reader told why. Isabelle even swears her sister to secrecy.
Isabelle notices that Stephen has changed almost beyond recognition. The suffering and experience of war have taken their toll. “His eyes had always been dark, but now they seemed shrunk. There was no light in them. His voice, which had once reverberated with meanings and nuances, with temper and emotions held in check, was now alternately toneless or barking. He seemed a man removed from a new existence and he was dug in and fortified by his lack of natural feeling or response…She would shed tears for him when he was gone.
“Isabelle was aware that beneath Stephen’s expressionless manner there was some powerful urge or desire.
“He said, ‘Isabelle, I’m glad of all these things you’ve told me. I don’t wish to see you again now…
“Isabelle felt unforeseen tears welling up in her eyes. Surely he would not leave on this note of downcast generosity. She had not wanted to see him so broken.
“He leaned forward across the table. He said with a slight catch in his voice, ‘May I touch you?’…
“Slowly with a little tremor in her own grip, she guided [his hand] across her face and laid it on her jaw, just below the ear. She felt his fingertips gently run down the cleft in her chin.”
Later, when Stephen is back in the trenches, he and a companion, Jack, are trapped in a tunnel. The situation is so bleak, they are certain of their own death. It is only at this moment that Stephen can reveal his true feelings for Isabelle.
“I met a woman. She was the wife of the man who owned the big house. I fell in love with her and I believe she loved me too. I found something with her that I didn’t know existed. Maybe I was just relieved, overwhelmed by the feeling that someone could love me. But I don’t think it was only that. I had visions, I had dreams…It isn’t that I love her, though I do, I will always love her. It isn’t that I miss her, or am jealous of her German lover. There was something in what happened between us that made me able to hear other things in the world. It was as though I went through a door and beyond it there were sounds and signals from some further existence. They are impossible to understand, but since I’ve heard them, I can’t deny them. Even here.”
Eventually, Stephen and Jack are rescued, although Jack has died of his wounds. As Stephen crawls forward, spitting dirt from his mouth and shouting, he sees a lantern in the tunnel ahead of him. He looks up and discovers that his rescuer is dressed in the German feldgrau, the color of his worst nightmares.
Stephen staggers to his feet and reaches for his pistol, but there is no revolver there. He looks into the face of his enemy and raises his fists in a boxing stance.
“At some deep level, far below anything his exhausted mind could reach, the conflicts of his soul dragged through him like waves grating on the packed shingle of a beach. The sound of his life calling to him on a distant road; the faces of the men who had been slaughtered; his scolding hatred of the enemy…The flesh and love of Isabelle…
“Far beyond thought, the resolution came to him and he found his arms, still raised, begin to spread and open.
“[The German soldier] looked at this wild-eyed figure, half demented, his brother’s killer. For no reason he could tell, he found that he had opened his own arms in turn, and the two men fell upon each other’s shoulders, weeping at the bitter strangeness of their human lives.”