Wolfy : http://wolfy.blog50.com/

Il m'arrive d'écrire des critiques de romans pour le site www.shvoong.com . Celle-ci est en anglais. Je vous en fait part en espérant que cette langue sera comprise par une majorité de lecteurs de Blog50. Le roman en question s'appelle Les Chemins de feu en français. L'auteur : un géant de la littérature anglaise contemporaine : Sebastian Faulks.

“The English Proust” some people call him. I don’t know about that but Sebastian Faulks is indeed worthy of Proust’s level of fame.

Like most of his novels, Birdsong takes place in France.

1910. Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman on what we would now call “work experience” is spending a few months in a textile factory in Amiens, in northern France. The CEO is a certain Mr Azaire.
Stephen is lavishly accommodated at Mr Azaire’s house and soon falls in love with Isabelle, the man’s wife. His love is returned, which is not surprising as Azaire is an insensitive, brutal sort of husband.
Stephen and Isabelle run away together. Isabelle becomes pregnant, undergoes a fairly rapid change of heart and goes back to her husband.

1914. Stephen is by then a British lieutenant in a tunnelling regiment. The idea is to reach the German lines underground and blow them up. The Germans are at it as well, of course, and it all ends up in a deadly, oppressing and claustrophobic game of cat and mouse in dank and dark warrens.

The tunnel diggers are not exempt from participating in those useless attacks during which thousands of men die trying to recapture 200 yards of land. The horrors of trench warfare are hauntingly described. For instance, Stephen watches helplessly as his Captain, caught in barbed wires, gets hit by several machine gun bullets until his head disintegrates altogether, leaving only a bloody hole between the shoulders. One incident among many. It did remind me of Henri Barbusse’s Clarté. Stephen acquires the reputation of a fearless and daring fighter but we, the readers, know that it’s only because his mind is going numb.

Half way through the war, and while on leave, Stephen meets Jeanne, Isabelle’s sister. They have an affair and, after the war, they will eventually marry. He learns that Isabelle has fallen in love with a German soldier during the occupation of Amiens and has somehow managed to follow him back to Germany.

After losing many of his friends and comrades in arms, Stephen is almost buried alive in a tunnel following an explosion. He is rescued by a German search party on November 11, 1918. Sobbing, Stephen and his young German-Jewish rescuer (the irony of his faith is not lost on the reader) fall into each other’s arms. The guns are silent. You can hear birdsongs again.

The style is incredibly subtle and, at the same time extremely powerful. The final episode, when Stephen is almost certain that he is going to die buried alive in the tunnel is almost unbearable. All the while, Isabelle is never far away from his thoughts. As he tells his dying companion : “It isn’t that I love her, though I do. I will always love her. It isn’t that I miss her or that I am jealous of her German lover. There was something in what happened between us that made me able to hear other things in the world. It was as though I went through a door and beyond it there were sounds and signals from some further existence. They’re impossible to understand, but since I’ve heard them, I can’t deny them. Even here.”

It’s been said of Mozart’s music : “The silence that follows is also his”. I felt the same after the last page of this authentic masterpiece.