Birdsong (novel) Birdsong (novel) Birdsong is a 1993 war novel and family saga by the English author Sebastian Faulks. It is Faulks' fourth novel. The plot follows two main characters living at different times: the first is Stephen Wraysford, a British soldier on the front line in Amiens during the First World War, and the second is his granddaughter, Elizabeth Benson, whose 1970s plotline follows her attempts to recover an understanding of Stephen's experience of the war. Faulks developed the novel to bring more public awareness to the experience of war remembered by WWI veterans. Most critics found this effort successful, commenting
Birdsong (novel) split structure provides one of the most sophisticated elements of the novel. De Groot writes that Benson's investigation of personal history allows Faulks to examine the difference between the two perspectives on the memory, highlighting the "unknowability of the horror of war" and of history more generally. Like other novels documenting WWI, the shock and trauma of death is embedded throughout the book's depiction of the war. John Mullen, reviewing the book for "The Guardian", described the depictions of the Battle of the Somme particularly brutal. According to scholar Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż, Faulks treats the war as a way to "test