My recent love affair with books has thrown up Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks, which i picked up in a second hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road for a couple of quid.
It's really, really difficult to clarify my thoughts on this book. There are so many passages that you want to note down, so many lines you want to underline, so many pages where you want to fold the corner and return to, that you have to keep taking breaks so as to savour what you've just read. A 20 minute bus journey is barely long enough, because the book deserves a significant investment of your time and you don't want to skimp.
There are lots of different aspects i could talk about. The love scenes, the exploration of themes of family and belonging, for instance.
The descriptions of the battles at the Somme and Ypres left me completely aghast, yet it was the meditations on the nature of the war that were most poignant. Stephen Wraysford's last diary entry, discovered over 50 years later by his granddaughter, is just one example of the powerful commentary on the unimaginable horrors of the first world war, and deserves highlighting properly here.
I have tried to resist the slide into this unreal world, but i lack the strength. I am tired. Now i am tired in my soul.
Many times i have lain down and i have longed for death. I feel unworthy. I feel guilty because i have survived,. Death will not come and i am cast adrift in a perpetual present.
I do not know what i have done to live in this existence. I do not know what any of us did to tilt the world into this unnatural orbit. We came here only for a few months.
No child of future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand.
When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them.
We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings.
We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.
It's hard to comprehend the level of violence that was witnessed in the first world war. The Battle of the Somme had three million participants over the course of the summer of 1916, one million of those participants died. That is simply mind-numbing and something our generation will probably never comprehend. Sitting in my garden and various parks over the last few weekends, enjoying spring and the thought of the upcoming summer, it's easy to forget we are a country at war. For most of us, daily life is summed up quite neatly by Stephen Wrayford's granddaughter:
As she made coffee in the kitchen and tried to spoon the frozen ice-cream from its carton without snapping the shaft off the spoon, Elizabeth was struck, not for the first time, by the thought that her life was entirely frivolous.
It was a rush of slither of trivial crises; of uncertain cashflow, small triumphs, occasional sex and too many cigarettes; of missed deadlines that turned out not to matter; of arguments, new clothes, bursts of altruism and sincere resolutions to address important things. Of all these and other experiences that made up her life, the most significant aspect was the one suggested by the words "turned out not to matter". Although she was happy enough with what she had become, it was this continued sense of the easy, the inessential nature of what she did, that most irritated her....in her generation there was no intensity.
Is she right? Are we without intensity? Do the big questions of life and death pass us by? Reading the above passage i was reminded of the journalist John Diamond, writing one of his last articles for the Observer before he died from throat cancer. Everyone knew he was not going to be around for much longer, so his editor asked him, assuming the dying know more about life than the rest of us, "what the hell is the point of it all?". His response is below, and again deserves a long quotation.
This is what it's all about. It's about reading a paper on a Sunday morning while you're thinking about whether you can be arsed to go to the neighbours' New Year's Eve party tonight. It's about getting angry with me for having different opinions from yours or not expressing the ones you have as well as you would have expressed them. It's about the breakfast you've just had and the dinner you're going to have. It's about the random acts of kindness which still, magically, preponderate over acts of incivility or nastiness. It's about rereading Great Expectations and about who's going to win the 3.30 at Haydock Park. It's about being able to watch old episodes of Frasier on satellite TV whenever we want, having the choice of three dozen breakfast cereals and seven brands of virgin olive oil at Sainsbury's. It's about loving and being loved, about doing the right thing, about one day being missed when we're gone.
And that's all it's about. It isn't about heaven and hell or the love of Christ or Allah or Yahveh because even if those things do exist, they don't have to exist for us to get on with it.
You can (and should) read the full article here.
So who is right? I love the trivialities and the inessentials, but I despair at the realisation that news of unjustified deaths in far away places barely registers anymore. How can the two be reconciled? I've struggled to work this out, and i don't think i will anytime soon, so I'm going to leave it there. Register my confusion and move on.
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