Birdsong

Birdsong

This is a defence of the right to hold the view that Birdsong is not the book that it is often claimed to be. Fortunately, atheistic hard-nosed literary debate is allowed to shoulder its way into this obsequious adoration and have a say. The real problem now is to discern what is meant by a great work of art, keeping in mind the two-way relationship between artist, work and reader.

Birdsong is essentially a Mills and Boon romance set in the First World War. This not a criticism of Mills and Boon because some of the books are extremely well written, crafted, to a well-loved formula, if you will excuse the pun. This is a compliment as 75% of all manuscripts received by Mills and Boon are rejected. Birdsong is a carefully crafted and constructed book.

So is ‘crafted’ meant as a criticism? Not necessarily, it is just that fiction written in the passion of ‘white heat’, for all its unbalanced quirkiness, has more credence. It is a type of writing that gives unsatisfactory glimpses of the fleeting shadows of human nature, while on other occasions it is like a shaft of brilliant white light in a mine that picks out that one small sparkling gem. ‘Crafted’ versus ‘white heat’ writing is an old argument. Of course the best works of art have both. The personification of this must be Shakespeare’s sonnets.

The tests for good fiction, great art, are well-worn and ambiguous. In a capitalist society can art be anything other than a commodity? What is the function of art? Can a great work of art really stand outside its time and culture; can it have autonomy? Often great works of art are referred to as being like a mirror held up to society.

Here is a list of considerations that are usually mentioned in one form or another in trying to arrive at a definition of great art:

• Good literature should make you consider the human condition
• It has enduring popularity
• It ‘stands the test of time’
• It is well written and has a good story
• It makes you realise a truth about yourself
• It makes you see a truth about the world
• It accurately reflects the world

To be fair all of the above could be said of Birdsong and it has undoubtedly been a commercial success. However, can it really be considered to be a great novel? Is it really that glittering gem? Is it really the equal of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, David Grossman’s See Under Love or Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader?

Birdsong is a love story and a portrayal of the futility of war. 

Here I drop any pretence of an evenhanded and balanced approach to give a personal view - which is that I really do not like Birdsong for a number of reasons. The use of the First World War as a backdrop for this thin love story is facile. It is easy, but dangerous, to borrow a theme to lend your own work gravitas. Poor writing often takes difficult themes to bolster its own credibility. In many respects it is lazy writing; the author feels that they have ready-made human dilemmas just waiting to be exploited. The difference between Birdsong on the one hand and The Reader, See Under Love and All Quiet on the Western Front on the other is that the authors of the latter novels have written about painful human dilemmas that just happen to have occurred in a time of war. Pride, insanity and betrayal are powerful personal and social issues in their own right. Love is also a real issue. But Birdsong is not Dr Zhivago, which again is more than just one love story. The more important and complex love story in Dr Zhivago is that of Russian people for their country.

The central theme of The Reader is the stubborn pride of an illiterate woman, drawn into an unequal relationship with a youth who has the beguiling gift of reading and a treasury of books. Her pride will be – as in many great tragedies – her downfall. This is pitiful but absorbing.

From the half-crazed ramblings of a seemingly senile and demented old man in See Under Love comes a holocaust survivor searching for the reason of his survival and for the existence of evil.

In All Quiet on the Western Front a generation of young men are betrayed by their elders’   jingoistic patriotism, each one eventually pitifully slaughtered. An awful poignancy is elicited in the perplexed anguish of the young men who finally realise that they are about to give up their lives in vain.

These are powerful and gripping tragedies written with force and passion. They are books that have pain and anger.

I was angry when I finished reading The Reader, See Under Love and All Quiet on the Western Front. I was angry at a stupid woman’s pride which trapped her in so many ways, angry at how a modern-day Lear had been created, angry at how young men were, and still are, manipulated off to war. I am angry at the simplistic cliché-ridden over- romanticised war of Birdsong.

This weak little book can prompt some of the questions that great literature does, but it is not great literature. And I get annoyed that people should are offended when their ‘love’ of this book is challenged.

As Noel Coward said - extraordinary how potent cheap music is.