Chris Hoover: When I read the back of Birdsong, I thought, great, a novel about love and war, it's like Hemingway. I hate Hemingway. But as I skimmed it, I noticed the whole romanticism of your writing. For those who haven't read you, who were some of your inspirations, how would you describe yourself as a writer, your style of writing?
Sebastian Faulks:
I am a romantic writer.
I suppose the models for this book are quite old-fashioned. The first part is written in sort of long phrases, to imitate a sort of highly formal and stifling atmosphere. The writers I'm thinking of are people like Flaubert, Proust, Zola to some extent.
Erin Graham: During the reading you spoke briefly about a room you occupy in a friend's house where you do most of your writing. Would you elaborate on that a bit, how you get yourself ready to write?
S.F.: I am quite superstitious about writing. I use this old typewriter that I bought when I was 18, and I am very fascinated by places. Before Birdsong, I spent a lot of time on the battlefield of the Somme.
I had a little jam jar in the car and I filled it with earth from what was actually the front line, from the exact spot where history had taken place. I used to keep this little jam jar on the table next to me as I was writing.
E: Are your characters modeled after people you've known or encountered in real life?
S.F.: Usually no. But the character of Berard in this book is taken from life. I was staying in a bed and breakfast and this great, fat businessman from Alsace was patronizing the farmer's wife greatly. 'Oh, your little farm is very charming, madam.' Then halfway through dinner he said in a way as though he were being shy and embarrassed, but wasn't at all, 'Madam I am about to do something and you may think me very foolish, and I really shouldn't do it.' His wife was beaming, telling him to go on, and then he launched into this song and sang for this poor farmer's wife. She was so incredibly embarrassed and so was I, we didn't know where to look. And I sat there thinking 'You bastard!'
E: The character of Jeanne seemed, to me, a sort of surprise main player in the development of the book. Unlike the other more concrete characters, Jeanne is a shadowy, hovering presence in the novel; the book would be hobbled without her.
S.F.: When I planned the book, Jeanne wasn't envisaged to have such a large part in it. Once I realized what a part she was trying to play, what a part she could play, and that she was going to solve quite a lot of problems for me, I thought I should recast this and make it clear from the beginning that she is actually a big player. I thought, that isn't necessarily the way things happen in life. Things come out of left field, people creep up on you, this is the way life unfolds. I have a great affection for Jeanne. I didn't mold her, she just sort of came alive.
E: How did you come up with the idea for Birdsong? I envisioned you rummaging around your attic, coming upon an old tin full of scraps and letters, and suddenly there was a spark, which kind of grew from there.
S.F.: Actually, I felt it had been sort of gnawing at me all my life.The main point of the book was to try to understand WWI, to try to relive it in some way, to explain it to myself and to other people. It was just a question of trying to find a way in, really.You have the idea of what you want to write, but it's as if sometimes the doors are locked all around it.
E: The water gardens you described as though everything was so lush it was brought to decay. So close after was the war and everything was barren and brown. The irony was heightened by the fact that Stephen could compare the Amiens of his young adulthood with the Amiens scarred by war.
S.F.: The water garden scene was very important for me when I was trying to find a way into this book. I decided earlier that I wanted the love affair to take place before the war, but in the same area that was to later become kind of notorious in our history.
I couldn't find a place along there that Stephen could plausibly have worked. I was going to have him work in a little village on what was literally the front line, but why would a guy go work on a little farm producing beets?
And then I went to Amiens and I discovered the textile industry there, and there was a huge textile industry in Britain; something was beginning to happen.
Amiens is a horrible place today, and its historic part has been almost completely destroyed; the only thing they are really proud of today are their water gardens.
So, I took a boat there, and I was feeling very disconsolate and rather depressed. As I was going along in these water gardens I noticed that the side of the canal itself was held up by these wooden boardings, called revetements-exactly what held up the trenches. The canals were in fact really like trenches, and that's when the book suddenly opened up.
As I walked to my car, the entire book sort of fell into my lap, the whole thing, right down to the words in which some of the scenes were written.
C & E: We noticed at the review that the back row was full of Birdsong groupies, like those Bridges of Madison County book groups. Have you encountered many of them?
S.F.: I think there is a bit of that. I mean it sold nearly half a million copies in England, a lot in such a small country. And I know a lot of it is through reading groups. But no, I haven't met any, thank God.
In many of the letters I've received, you can tell that they haven't always quite got the point or that they aren't terribly well written, but the raw human response is tremendously encouraging and moving.
C: We read this facetious article you wrote, full of pop culture references, and we wanted to test your pop culture knowledge.
Which is your favorite Spice Girl?
The one with the blue knickers?
S.F.: I like the one with the stud through her tongue.
E: Scary Spice, sorry closet Spice Girls fan.
S.F.: They have a lot of other names back in England, Common Spice, Dyky Spice, um...
E: Old Spice.
S.F.: Exactly. I have a deeply facetious and vulgar side to me. My family is always very distressed that I write these terribly sad books. My mum would like me to write something that is not set abroad and something with a few laughs.
C: Blur vs. Oasis, who's better?
This is a trick question. If you get it wrong, I'll lose all respect for you.
S.F.: I spent most of my teens and twenties listening to pop music. I loved everything that was new and listened to it all day long, you know drunk, sober, stoned. Then one day, a record came on, I can't remember who, but it went something like 'I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar...'. And a guy said to me 'Hey man, this is really great.' I said, 'This is complete sh*t,' and I never listened to pop music again. If you played either I'd be very hard pressed to tell the difference between them.
I listened to Blur in a shop and thought this is such crap.
It's kind of a barking, London monotone. When The Clash did that in '76 that was fun, but that was twenty years ago.
C: Oh, wrong answer. Gotta stop the tape.
S.F.: But isn't the right answer Pulp, anyway?
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.