That trip introduced me to men who had actually fought there. I met about six of them and talked to them about their experiences. Here we were in the actual field; and they were the same men. Over there, by that tree, was where his friend had died. As a fiction writer you are essentially telling lies and making things up; but if you are setting them in an historical reality you need to feel you have the authority to do so. This visit helped to give me confidence β though I still viewed the enterprise with trepidation.
I also thought readers would need time to decompress from the intensity of the trenches. When they began to work for me was when I saw that Elizabeth could actually speak to Gray and Brennan. It was like raising the dead. One of the themes of the book is redemption. My aim was in some way to redeem the pity of what these men went through by paying loving attention to it all these years later. Her raising the dead like this is symbolic of what I and the reader are doing for the entire generation of men.
However, I accept that for some readers the modern sections were distracting. Things have changed so much and there is much more interest in and knowledge of that period now than there was when I began more than 20 years ago. I would do it differently now. I think above all I was trying to suggest in the birds singing as the bombardment continued the sense in which the natural world was utterly indifferent to the stupidity and cruelty of human beings.
Perhaps it is this indifference that Stephen has sensed as a child and has made him afraid of them. This ties in to a minor religious theme of the book. Are humans chosen by God or just another random species thrown up by natural selection β only more numerous and destructive than other primates? The birds offer a jeering commentary on the human beings β human, as Philip Roth put it, in the worst sense of the word. They are certainly not meant to suggest that life goes on and all will be fine in the morning.
Just the opposite. I set out to make him flawed, maybe not instantly attractive, cold and so on. I began by avoiding the stereotype of the cheery private, pack up yet troubles type β or the blue-eyed officer hero. So, how and why would he get through? Tenacity, curiosity.
