Readers Place

Sebastian Faulks interview/review

Taken from Vintage Living Texts Margaret Reynolds and Jonathan Noakes London: 21 August 2001

1. Could you tell us what was the germ of the idea for Birdsong?

It goes back to when I was a child at school, at the age of about eleven or twelve, the first time I really heard about the war. The schoolmaster who was teaching English also taught us pretty much everything else as well, and was a very knowledgeable man, we rather looked up to him. When it came to talking about the First World War, he was able to give us dates and facts, but he didn’t seem to put across what it was really like. He said things like ‘it was simply indescribable‘… ‘You don’t really want to know about it – we don’t want to think about it’. And I remember thinking at the time: that’s remarkable… and I just stored that at the back of my mind.

And at the same time, at the same school, on Remembrance Sunday some boy would read out the names of all the old boys of the school who died in these two wars, and one year it was my turn to do it. I remember being enormously struck by the sheer number of names – it just went on and on and on, and it was a very small school, only eighty boys, I think. There would have been fewer than that at the relevant time. The list just seemed to go on for ever. So those two things stuck in the back of my mind.

Many years later, I was writing my second novel The Girl at the Lion d’Or, which is set in 1936. It is about a young woman in a provincial town in France who had a trauma in child-hood, and because she was only about twenty at the time, and 1936 was a sort of given and I couldn’t change that, it meant that her childhood would have been in and around the First World War and the end of it. And it was a sort of Pandora’s box that I didn’t particularly want to open, because there was a lot of background of France in the ‘thirties and I didn’t really want to go back into that First World War because it seemed to big a subject. But eventually I concluded that I had to a bit, and so I read a book by Alistair Horne about Verdun, about the French experience of the First World War. I was immensely struck by the details, really, of the day-to-day life of the soldiers. And I took what I needed from it to use in The Girl at the Lion d’Or, but I thought… hmm, I want to know more about this.

Then in 1988, which was the seventh anniversary of the Armistice, a great flood of books came out about it, and I read quite a few of those. There was one in particular I came across called War Underground, which was the story of the tunnellers who tunnelled underneath no-man’s land. I’d no idea that this tunnelling had taken place, and it seemed to me a very suggestive thing that beneath this inferno there was an even deeper, smaller, more horrific – in some ways a more horrific – world.

One of the problems of writing a novel set in the First World War was that although I felt that many people are quite ignorant about it, people of my generation had rather my view: ‘Terrible thing, appalling thing, massive slaughters… whew… you know…’ but didn’t really want to know much more than that.

At the same time it was war that produced great literature – poetry particularly, but also memoirs and so on – and there were many people who were extremely well informed about it. So there was a paradox, and the only way I could see round it was by writing a book which dealt with it very head-on and it was always going to be a very head-on operatic sort of book. The only way I could get people over saying ‘Yes, yes, we know all this’ was to tell them something that they didn’t know. The tunnellers provided me with a way in, and once I’d got that I got loads of suggestive details that played in quite well to the themes that were developing in my mind.

Another given about writing a novel about the First World War was that I wanted to write about the area before it became known as the battlefield. I’ve always been rather fascinated by this idea that the Somme was once a river without this awful connotation – just as Hiroshima and Alschwitz were just ordinary places, before anything horrible happened there. So I had a pre-war beginning and I had the ‘something new’, as it were, that I was going to tell, and those were the key things. Then there were lots of other technical difficulties about how to get it going, and which battles to choose.

Those were the germs, and from those germs grew the main theme of the book. In the research I was doing, the thing that occurred to me again and again was the simple question of ‘Why didn’t anyone stop this?’ Why didn’t someone say, ‘Actually I can’t just hold this machine gun any longer and tap it gently from side to side and kill…ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty… tap it again… eighty, ninety… tap it again… a hundred, a hundred and twenty… I can’t do this’. But nobody did. There were mutinies, it’s true to say, in the armies, but there seemed to be no lengths to which human beings could not be driven. And that was the working title of the book, ‘How far can you go?’ Of course I wasn’t really going to call it that, but that was the idea.

1. Taking that idea of ‘how far can you go?’ – the novel seems to be pushing more and more towards the idea that the experience of war is meaningless, when human beings will go that far, push beyond all limits. Does the novel set out to assert the value of any redeeming features in human nature, to set against the meaninglessness of the experience of war?

Not really. I think that it’s the function of birdsong – which is something that occurs at various stages in the book, and which I came across endlessly in research – that even in the midst of this awful slaughter you suddenly found that there’d be a fox snuffling around, or you’d hear a lark singing, and it underlines natures utter indifference to human beings and what they do. But there’s also a sense that humanity is indifferent to itself because it simply continues anyway, and the birth that ends the book is, to some extent, a redemption, by naming the child who is born after the child who has died in the book. It is a gesture of redemption by one character in the book towards another who has died, but what’s really happened is that animate beings have bred as they will always breed, given any sort of circumstances, and there isn’t really meant to be any sort of tremendous message of hope, or anything more than just that.

1. God is only felt as an absence in the novel. Even those characters who start as believers lose their faith along the way. Those who put their trust in love feel betrayed by it. Is there a sense, do you think, in which our society has lost faith in God or in love, because of the First World War? Is there a lasting effect?

Well, maybe. I’m not enough of a historian to know. But it’s not quite right to say that God is felt only as an absence. In the case of Jack, the miner, his response is very logical, in that he firmly believes, and then he sees things that destroy his belief and he ends up disbelieving: as a reasonable man would. Also the chaplain whom he watches the first day of the battle of the Somme: he just tears off his cross – he can no longer believe this. That’s actually based on an eye-witness account. But Stephen, paradoxically, is perverse really. In some ways he becomes more spiritual as the book goes on. I wouldn’t say he becomes a believer in any sense, but the more incomprehensible and baffling it becomes more , the more curious he is about it. He wants to know how far you can go, and he becomes more open to the idea of some divine plan, although it’s never fully realised in his mind.

I do think that historically, certainly, the First World War saw the beginning of the end of a loss of belief in authority, and whether that is divine authority, or political or class authority, I don’t really know enough to say. But certainly you feel it now. It’s a continuing process, it’s changed since I was a child. I was born in 1953. There was still an automatically given respect towards the church, teachers, doctors, lawyers, the law, the courts and all that. This has eroded in my belief, faster in the last twenty years than in the previous twenty or thirty. But no one has given authority any more. There is no automatic respect for position. Each individual within a position has to earn respect by his or her actions, it seems to me. And obviously many of the structures contributed to their own downfall.

Traditionally the view is that the First World War was the watershed at which this whole process began. And you have to say that it was an inevitable thing, and I think in large measure a good thing: not to follow unquestioningly into death, for no purpose. Though again there are no counter-arguments that there was a purpose. I mean a Europe and a Middle East and a Russia dominated by the Kaiser would have been a less nice place to live through it wasn’t much of a place to live in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties anyway.

Certainly the people who fought in the Second World War were much more unillusioned and they went more knowingly, more sardonically, reluctantly, and more critically – I think – of the politicians who had failed them. But without that necessary kowtowing to authority.

1. You’re very interested in places. You’ve already talked about France: France before the war, France after the war – places that provide security, the idea of home. I think in particular of the red room which Isabelle promised Stephen would always be there, but in fact of course is bombed. And the fact that Stephen has no home, nor indeed does Isabelle, a home they could genuinely go to. What is the meaning of a sense of place to you?

It’s interesting that you use the word ‘home’. There’s another book I wrote, called The Fools Alphabet, which is entirely about this, actually it’s set in twenty-six different places. It’s like an A to Z – it begins with a place beginning with A and ends in a place beginning with Z – and it’s about what places mean in a man’s life, and the word ‘home’ doesn’t appear in the book until the very last word, so that’s very germane to what you’re saying.

Places are very much part of the initial throb of the idea for me. I couldn’t say, ‘I’ll write a story or a book whose themes are this, this and this, and whose characters are going to be this, this and this. I might set it in Australia, or I might set it in London, or it might be in Paraguay, I’m not quite sure yet’. That never happens to me. Paraguay, or Australia, or wherever, is absolutely part of the initial throb of the whole thing, and it becomes a main character in the book. I don’t quite know why this is, it’s just that that’s how it comes to me, and in a sense it’s not really in my hands.

I am very fascinated by houses in particular. I find houses really really get me going. I was a bit stuck in Charlotte Gray. And I went to see some friends of mine who were on holiday – we were living in France at the time – and as soon as I went into their house, which was rather old, slightly decrepit manor, it all kick-started again. This was the house in which Charlotte could go and lodge, and work as a cleaner. I just spent the whole afternoon in a sort of daze, wondering around this place. It wasn’t merely that I tried to capture the atmosphere of that house, but the house itself suggested incidents which might happen inside it. I suppose, for me, that is the real function of place. I have no compunction at all about taking houses out of real life and putting them in books, almost unchanged.

Whereas with characters, I don’t do that at all. I feel that would be a really bad practice, and wouldn’t work. For the simple reason that if you create a completely credible world, which I would go to great pains to do, in a rather builderish, structural way – if you then take someone from another world (i.e. our world), and put them in there, they don’t work. In the same way that in our world, if you suddenly tell a lie, it generally doesn’t work: people sniff you out. So it’s really bad practice to take people from real life. Of course I will take the odd verbal tic, or I’ll take the colour of someone’s eyes or something, but that’s about it. I’m quite unusual in this, I believe.

But the same is not true with places. In The Girl at the Lion d’Or the main house there is absolutely from real life. In Charlotte Gray likewise. In the house with the red room is taken from life. I’d never been inside the room at the time I was writing. I have subsequently been inside, and it’s actually remarkably like… (chuckles). Actually the gentleman who owns it is a very proper, superior merchant type, I would say, and he was extremely shocked by the book, and took a lot of teasing, and people suggested, ‘your granny was a bit fast.’ And he kept showing me around and saying, ‘As you can see, it’s really not at all like it is in your book.’ And I’m saying, ‘No, no, not at all.’ When it was absolutely the spitting image… it was slightly smaller, and there weren’t as many corridors. But I knew that I’d enlarged it.

But back to the idea of home. I suppose there is a recurrent idea of a lost home, isn’t there? And that, I suppose, must be something quite deep inside me, but I am not quite sure what it is. But I’m very fascinated by those parts of my life which are just outside my power to recall. In other words, both the years before I became able to recall continuously – so one till five, whatever it might be. And also things I feel I’ve half-forgotten, or half-dreamed, I’m not quite sure about, but I wish were still there, and I’ve somehow lost, and can’t quite recover. But the sense that they do still exist – and this also ties into the question of time – the fact that everything passes, doesn’t mean to say that nothing lasts. And this is touched on in Birdsong when Stephen is reunited with Isabelle, and he’s able to convince himself that although, in some temporal sense, their love affair is over because they’re physically separated, if feeling has existed at one time, the physical separation and the movement of time don’t mean to say that the feeling is extinct. It’s put terribly plainly and violently in the book I’m reading at the moment, which is the Human Stain by Philip Roth, and it goes something like ‘Because nothing lasts, nothing changes… Because nothing lasts, everything remains.’