Love and war may be huge themes, but Sebastian Faulks approaches them from a microscopic perspective. He detects love in the minute movements of a woman's fingers; in a man's manner of crawling through trenches, he captures fear and torment. Faulks...
[more]Love and war may be huge themes, but Sebastian Faulks approaches them from a microscopic perspective. He detects love in the minute movements of a woman's fingers; in a man's manner of crawling through trenches, he captures fear and torment. Faulks is involved in a romance with detail, charging every object and every gesture with emotion and significance. In his hands, description ceases to be topical or comprehensive and becomes physical and intuitive. Like Balzac and Flaubert, he is an adept at the art of selecting those salient features of reality in which emotions are concentrated.
Faulks is best known for his "French trilogy," three books that describe life and love between the two World Wars. The first, "Girl at the Lion d'Or," takes place during peacetime and tells the story of a young waitress' affair with a married lawyer. Both characters bear scars from their experiences during World War I, scars which doom their relationship. Faulks dwells on the small particulars of their interaction, but only with "Birdsong," the second book of the trilogy, does his talent for detail come to full fruition.
"Birdsong" traces three generations of an English family across the decades of the Wars. It begins with the travails of young Stephen Wraysford, who, upon moving in with a family in southern France, promptly falls madly in love with his married hostess. The two of them flee, but Stephen's mistress is incapable of making a commitment and eventually leaves him. In a violently abrupt transition, the next moment of the novel shows Stephen fighting in the trenches in World War I. From the torment of the affair to the brutality of the war, it is as if the characters' emotions, too large to comprehend, can find expression only in the physicality of objects and gestures. With a telephoto lens Faulks captures a world animated by obtuse, unbearable passions.
In the final novel of the trilogy, "Charlotte Gray," Faulks once again takes up the theme of love in the time of war. While portraying the troubles of his protagonist Charlotte, Faulks also paints a horrifying picture of France under the rule of Nazi Germany. The novel traces the vicissitudes of evil and compassion in a time of utter desperation. With the same haunting attention to detail Faulks creates a dark, involuted world, a world devoid of reason and seemingly without hope.
But hope persists throughout Faulks' work. In the end, he is a humanist. His characters seem always capable of transcending the lamentable conditions in which they find themselves. With the same passion that draws them down into the horrific detail of their embattled world, they rise, without the help of reason, and affirm their implacably tormented lives.
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