h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Posted Last Week by lj1980s

As ever Intern made me think about this book and where it should be posted. I could have equally posted it in romance and that wouldn't have been wrong because Birdsong is both a love story and a story of surviving the trenches in the WWI.

I borrowed this from a friend's bookshelf earlier in the week, thinking I'd heard mention of it and that I didn't fancy the next book I had pencilled in for myself. I was expecting the hard, gritty part about trench-warfare, the appalling waste of life and the incredible psychological trauma suffered by those experiencing it.

However, what I wasn't expecting was the tender and sexy love affair that frames the drama and gives it an historical depth and context that is carried throughout the book and allows the reader to both experience that occurring at the time and also to experience retrospect.

The main character Stephen is the young man visiting a family in Amiens in 1910, he's been orphaned and "championed" by a man who sees in him the charitable need to provide an education for a young man, but no understanding of fatherly love required to complete his charge's devotion to him. He stays in the house of a textile factory owner who is married to a woman much younger than himself, whom he does not treat as he should. Stephen is filled with love for her and is driven to possession, all of which takes place it feels in a slow motion orgy (easy boys!!) of touches, brushes, legs and arms before finally being consummated.

As is always the way with these things - and being a straight-forward type of gal it drives me mad - communication fails and the lovers manage to part through not understanding fully each other's motives and behaviour (how annoying is that - just like Pride and Prejudice!! Just talk to her!!!!)

After the lovers part, the next thing you see is a very different, older Stephen who has through his total lack of fear (for this read a total lack of care for his own fate), has been promoted to officer status although his men don't love him, because he can't love them - he feels nothing.

It is the contact from home, and the coping strategies of trench-warfare that the main part of the book encompasses. The fear and the numbness and the damage done to the humanity of the protagonists that stands out with enough blood and gore to keep Adrian happy, enough history and love for me - in lots of ways a very tender book for a man to have written, and that is very much to his credit - framing it as he does around the war story.

This isn't quite as long as I thought it would be and its a bit too hot to carry on, but hopefully as more people have read it (and i know Intern already has and has chapter 2 on book-mark too!!), people will add more to it.

Hope I posted in the right place intern - move it if you think it should be somewhere else

LJX