Plot
While most of the novel concentrates on Stephen's life in France before and during the war, the novel also focuses on the life of Stephen's granddaughter, Elizabeth, and her attempts to find out more about her grandfather's experiences in World War I. The story is split into seven sections which cover three different time periods.
Birdsong has an episodic structure which moves between three different periods of time before, during and after the war. This is similar in many ways to the structure Faulks would adopt in his later novel The Long White Winter.
Throughout the novel there are echoes of several war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen (1918)
Read more about this topic: Birdsong (novel)
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