Love and Death on the Western Front

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Stephen (Eddie Redmayne) finds it all quiet on the Western Front

Tonight the BBC will screen its adaptation of Birdsong. But can it better the original novel? Donal O'Donoghue picks his 4 on Friday reads

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson, Vintage)

Birdsong, first published in 1993, was the fourth novel form Sebastian Faulks. The journalist-turned-novelist has since written six further novels but this thumping love story, set largely during the First World War, remains his best-loved book and biggest seller.

A film of Birdsong has been in development for more than fourteen years with various directors attached including Paul Greengrass, Sam Mendes and Peter Weir. But it was another Faulks book Charlotte Gray (1998) which made it onto the screen first in 2001 (good book, ho-hum movie).

Now Birdsong finally arrives as a two part drama to BBC One for broadcast on January 22 and January 29. The two leads are the very handsome pair of Eddie Redmayne and Clémence Poésy, who star as the passionate young lovers Stephen and Isabelle, the screenplay is by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, Shame) and advance word is that it is a gripping and faithful adaptation of the book. But it will have its work cut out to better the novel that was number 13 in a 2003 BBC poll to pick the favourite UK novel of all time.

Birdsong tells the love story of Stephen and Isabelle who first meet in France in 1910. He is English and she is very French, very beautiful and very married. But her husband is a brutish man and she falls into a passionate affair with Stephen, a relationship that Faulks details in graphic strokes akin to D H Lawrence. The couple eventually run away together, Isabelle becomes pregnant and then, without explanation, leaves Stephen.

The next time we meet him it's 1916 and Stephen is back in France fighting on the Western Front. The following year, in 1917, he meets Isabelle again for the first time since she left him. Their love story is not resurrected but it kicks off something even deeper and more profound.

Birdsong is a passionate love story that spans three generations. Stephen, his daughter with Isabelle, and her daughter Elizabeth - it is Elizabeth who finds her grandfather's diary in an attic.
The prose is vivid, moving from the early romance of Stephen and Isabelle to the much darker stories set in the trenches of the Western Front. There is an utterly unforgettable description of the battle of the Somme that is bloody and brutal charting the horrors of war. Faulks himself said of Birdsong. 'It is a book about sons. Ten million of them killed for no reason. And the grief of twenty million parents.'

Birdsong has been favourably compared with the best of Ernest Hemingway and perhaps the classic novel of the First World War, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Incidentally the American publishers, Little, Brown, told Faulks that they could not publish Birdsong unless he cut out the war sections and relocated them to a more modern conflict. But Faulks was not for turning and rightly so. The horror of the Great War is the backbone of this powerful and moving book.

2. Under the Avalanche by Ann McCabe (Shackleton Publishing)

The second book is also a love story - or stories - of sorts. It also spans three generation, it is also all about secrets and hidden passions, and it also features a diary.

It is set in County Wicklow and spans the years from the 1940s to the 1980s. It is the story of three women: Gertrude, her daughter Elizabeth and her daughter Catherine. All have their own secrets and their own secret loves and their own shame.

Under the Avalanche is the first book of Ann McCabe, an award-winning filmmaker, who has crafted a debut novel that tells the tale of three generations spanning the 1940s to the 1980s.
It begins near the end-point with Catherine recalling the story that haunted her childhood and the valley in which she grew up: the family buried by an avalanche and the ghostly, new-born child that still wanders the hills.

The novel is constructed as a mix of narrative and diary. It is like Birdsong a complicated structure - the story shifts back and forward in time - and between the three principal characters' stories but for me the strongest is the first we really meet, Gertrude.

She marries for money and status, abandoning the love of her life, and ultimately pays the price for this. Her daughter, Elizabeth, rebels against her.

Under the Avalanche is an ambitious story of love, loss and ultimately redemption. There are echoes of John McGahern and William Trevor, masters of this turf, but it never reaches those heights and nor would one expected a first-time novelist to do so.
Does it work? I'm not entirely convinced. In a way the story of Gertrude, for me the most real and vivid of the three women, is an entertaining one.

This book has been 10 or so years in the writing and was for a long time under the bed until McCabe's book club and others motivated her to publish it.

It was inspired by the tragedy of the Kerry Babies case of 1984, which McCabe herself worked on for the RTÉ current affairs programme, Today Tonight.

There was also a real avalanche, Ireland's only one probably. It happened in 1867 deep in Wicklow and buried a family of cottagers and sheep farmers and a new born baby.