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) and "War and Remembrance." Gorra described the novel as even more original than Barker's "The Ghost Road" and the rest of her Regeneration Trilogy. Kate Saunders, reviewing "Birdsong" for "The Sunday Times", praised the novel and described it as "without the political cynicism that colours more modern treatments of this catastrophe". Reviewers have also compared the novel to other literary works; for example, for one critic, the lead up to the Somme was as persuasive as the "scene in "Henry V" before the Battle of Agincourt", while the novelist Suzanne Ruta writes that Faulks creates characters with a similar depth