I first came across Sebastian Faulks in a hotel in Singapore, in 2001, when I was nursing a fever and watching BBC all day long. Faulks appeared in Hard Talk to talk about his recently famous book, Birdsong. I quite enjoyed the interview and told myself I'd at least keep the book at the back of my mind. Never bought it until Christmas last year where it was on sale for about ten bucks (RM). Moral of the story: Don't watch interviews with authors you've never heard unless you want the name of their most popular books lodged into your head, waiting for the appropriate time to create more spending.

I thought the first 200 words of the book were deadwood boring. But by the time I've hit the two thousandth (or so), I'm telling myself whoah there's something extremely real, and gripping, and emotionally scary, and almost magnetic about this story.

Somehow I was hooked at the start. Not by any magical realism (there wasn't any). Not by the postmodern reality-within-"reality" quasi-meanings and stuff (no need to 'figure anything out' here). It's just the way Faulks takes you into the minds of the characters. It's like you've become Stephen Wraysford, the key character around which the book revolves. From his passion and pain as a lover to that as a soldier, and back again. First a personal/family crisis (born of love or lust it's hard to confirm), moving to a national disaster. It's an awkward switch of scenes - from a soap opera-like romance to something akin to Saving Private Ryan - but Lit fans may enjoy it. Quite deliberate, so says Faulks (if you have the version with his commentary) who was experimenting with different styles of writing, although it's nothing as direct and contrasting as, say, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.

And smack (or boom) in the center: The Battle of the Somme.

Faulks paints a grotesquely vivid picture of the morning of 1st July 1916, where thousands of British solders (slowly) marched their way into German bullets. The arrogance, ignorance and downright incompetence of British military leadership being the key factor in the sacrificing of her sons for a few hundred yards of trenchland.

Faulks proves himself to be quite a literary Mel Gibson once the violence begins. There's a scene about how a captain gets shot near the barbed wire and falls onto it, only for the Germans to shoot his head off bit by bit as target practice until there's nothing but a red stump across his shoulders. Also gasp-inducing was the casualties from trench explosives, when British miners turned ad-hoc soldiers played hide-and-seek(-the-bomb) with their German counterparts. This was far from the basic Crime thriller sensationalism. This was history at its worst and, some might say, most required remembering.

But the book wasn't all easy-going. I found it hard to follow fully the narrative in the mines. Couldn't imagine very well the crawling, the breathing, the low ceilings, who's ahead of who, and so on. So if you're bothered by even imaginary claustrophobia, this book may not turn out very well for you. Also, I think Faulks packed in too many characters towards the mid-point of the book, such that it was tough keeping track. Perhaps authors should remember that a good portion of their readers do their reading after a hard day's work - it doesn't help if they have to keep flipping back to pg.145 to confirm that it's Jack, and not John, whose character is saying something important on pg. 190.

Still, it's depressing how much (and worse) of what Faulks depicted actually happened. And if the main aim of the book was to transport the reader almost a century back to the Great War, and reinject significance and memories of the (mainly British and French, in that order) losses therein, I think no other work does it better (how many WWI novels do we get nowadays, let alone those that are of prize-winning calibre?)

If you're a Lit person, Birdsong's probably a should-read. If you're a Lit fan AND a war buff (and you don't mind an almost humourless but occasionally poignant British-style narrative), what are you waitng for? Another Faulks interview?