Birdsong (novel) on how the novel, like many other WWI novels, thematically focuses on the way in which the experience of trauma shapes individual psyches. Similarly, because of the parallel narratives WWI and 1970s Britain, the novel explores metahistorical questions about how to document and recover narratives about the past. Because of its genre, themes and writing style, the novel has been favourably compared to a number of other war novels, like Ian McEwan's "Atonement" and those in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy. "Birdsong" is part of a loose trilogy of novels by Sebastian Faulks, alongside "The Girl at the Lion d'Or" and
Birdsong (novel) omniscient narrator who occasionally describes the events from a broad perspective, the novel tends to shadow a handful of characters closely, principally Stephen Wraysford, Isaebelle Azair, Micheal Weir, Jack Firebrace and Elizabeth Benson. Pat Wheeler, a scholar of literature, describes the narrative style as "both naturalistic and realistic and very much in the manner of the nineteenth century writers [Faulks] cites as literary influences"—Wheeler notes Émile Zola, Charles Dickens and George Gissing among these. Wheeler emphasizes that the naturalistic tendencies of the narrative allow treatment of the war setting without an idealization of the "human" parts of the narrative. Consistently,