Fires Which Burned Brightly by Sebastian Faulks: How Jane Austen and a fascination with mental illness led to the writing of Birdsong
By YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM
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Fires Which Burned Brightly is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Arriving at his new boarding prep school, Elstree in Berkshire, 12 days after his eighth birthday in 1961, Sebastian Faulks was prepared for the place to feel a bit old-fashioned – not part of the emerging Swinging Sixties. But he was not prepared for the fact that, as he puts it in his fabulously well-written memoir, ‘The door has slammed on the new decade,’ and he was ‘back not just in the Fifties but something more like the 1850s.’
Faulks evokes the bewilderment of being cast into that Victorian place, so very unlike home. ‘A hopeful, credulous little boy is being unpicked and discontinued.’ ‘There was the clear assumption, from the start, that your much-loved parents had somehow got it all wrong for the first eight years of your life and you now needed to be broken and remade.’
Out of that harshness came an extraordinarily well-educated young man. He won a scholarship to Wellington, where he was so impressed by Jane Austen and Dickens that he decided to become a novelist – but had no idea how to go about it. ‘The careers master, who had spent his own life at the school, boy and man, generally advised Sandhurst or local government.’
There’s a mouth-watering wryness about Faulks’s prose, a delicious mixture of hilarity and poignancy, and an impressive economy. The opening chapter, which covers the first eight years before Elstree, captures his daydreaming 1950s early childhood of day-long playing in the garden. He and his elder brother Edward formed their teddy bears into cricket teams.
After those two opening chapters, it becomes a collection of essays on various aspects of his adult life, such as getting drunk at Cambridge; his fascination with the subject of mental illness and schizophrenia; working as literary editor on The Independent, during which he met his wife; dreaming up and researching his bestselling WWI novel Birdsong; and the jet-lagged, mini-bar-raiding, melancholy life of an author on a long, lonely book tour in the USA.
Proud: The best moment of Faulks's life was when Birdsong was used to honour the men who died during the Battle of the Somme
The best moment of his life was when his words were read aloud by Prince William on the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme: a battle that haunts Faulks’s dreams, as he has read hundreds of letters from young men in the trenches, writing to their families on the eve of that battle that ‘we’re going to put on a great show’.
Hearing the tribute to those men, it felt as if the thousands who were killed on day one of that catastrophic battle ‘had been honoured at last’.
Daily Mail
