There are two main characters in Sebastian Faulks' fourth novel, Birdsong, and they share a plot line that is separated by sixty years. The story follows the life of Stephen Wraysford, a British soldier on the front line in France during World War One, and his grand-daughter Elizabeth Benson , who spends her time during the 1970s trying to get to know her grandfather by tracing back his experiences during the conflict.
Faulks wrote the novel, the first in a trilogy that includes the same characters and settings, but not continuations of the same story line, because he felt that not enough effort was made in modern times to understand what World War One veterans had experienced at the time, and how these experiences still affected them decades after the conflict had ended. Like Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy the novel emphasizes the complete lack of understanding at the time of emotional and mental health issues stemming from participation at the front during the war; soldiers struggling with their trauma were seen to be malingering and trying to avoid going back to their units, and were more often than not told to pull themselves together and offered no help at all. Similarly, after the war, returning veterans were thrown back into life as normal, as it had been before, as if their four years in France had never happened.
Faulks did not like to use third person history for his research; he wanted to know how men who had fought in Amiens really felt, not how historians and scholars thought they felt, and so based his characters on veterans of World War One that he spoke to and interviewed for some considerable length of time. The result was a book that was extraordinarily well-received both by critics and by the book-buying public; in fact, there was not a book store during the latter part of 1993 that did not have an entire display devoted to Faulks' novel. It was an international success as well, and appeared on the "best books of the year" lists in not only Britain and America but across Europe as well.
Because of its popularity as a novel, Birdsong was adapted for stage, screen and radio. Its first adaptation came in 1997 when it appeared as a radio play, and this version made it onto the stage thirteen years later, where it was produced by theater impresario Trevor Nunn, whose previous productions had been more musically-based, and included Starlight Express and Les Miserables. In 2012 a two-part television adaptation was made by the BBC, starring Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Wraysford.
Birdsong remains Faulks' best known, and most successful, work, but he has also written novels with an entirely contemporary setting, including a James Bond continuation novel called Devil May Care, which was published in 2008 to commemorate what would have been the one hundredth birthday of Bond creator, Ian Fleming. He has also written continuation novels of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster series.
